GRG's Miscellany

Here it is, immortalised with my atrocious photography skills! It's made mostly out of some old tongue-and-groove flooring samples, with some 4mm and 6mm ply in places.  What with the heavy-duty bearings and being screwed together, it's actually a really robust little thing! I decided to have a composite axle so I could fit the button wires down the centre. So I cut two long, thin beams of ply so they could fit through the very centre of the bearings.  Then I cut small sections out of the edges so that when pushed away from each other, they would lock into the bearings (i.e. not slide through them).  The other blocks you can see are holding the two long pieces apart so they can't fall out. I swapped out the middle block with a spring mechanism.  I cut two bits of ply that I could slide onto the beams from opposite sides.  Then I inserted a section of bamboo skewer between those bits to hook the springs onto.  As you can see, I used screws to secure the othe...

Yesterday I had extreme difficulty in doing air-to-air refueling in DCS World. The obvious reason for that would be that it is an extremely difficult thing to do and I am just not good enough yet. Not being happy admitting my own lack of ability, I decided to blame my homemade joystick. To be fair, my joystick was built by a numpty (me), so there could easily have been something screwy with it. When researching more expensive potentiometers, I discovered that 'linear' potentiometers do not necessarily give a linear response to changes in angle.  It depends on potentiometer model, temperature, and all sorts of other things. Seeing as the potentiometers I used were the cheapest I could possibly find, their quality is questionable at best.  So I figured I'd have to measure the response curve, then hard-code a calibration fudge. I was genuinely surprised with the results: There is a beautiful linear section for part of the response, but the bit from 55-75 degrees is just shock...

Final mammoth post about an epic journey... TLDR: I dun maed a joystick out of wood and Stuff. The Abridged Backstory: I've been planning this for literally years .  The tools and materials available to me have expanded over that time.  My original plan was to make it out of cardboard using a Stanley knife and PVA.  Nobody was convinced that was going to work. This one is mostly built out of hobbyist plywood and dowels using a scrollsaw, power drill, Stanley knife and scalpel. The Base Frame: I have talked about the base frame in a previous post . A brief side note: My 3D printer is a relatively cheap setup from ALDI .  Software set up was a breeze on a Windows laptop.  I chose to print patterns from SD card rather than laptop (laptop hibernate aborted models halfway through).  I needed to cleanup prints with a scalpel afterwards, but has worked fine so far with no obvious signs of wear. How I'd do it differently in future: I'd try...