Thrustmaster Top Gun to USB

[SqwkHappy]

 A little history:

 

  From time to time I hit up the local good wills and buy all the decent looking joysticks they have lying around, so I have a small collection of them, mostly Logitech. (haha).

 

  On my last outing I found a Thrustmaster Top Gun gameport joystick and the stiffness impressed me, and so did the $3.00 price tag. So I brought it home thinking if I couldn't find a gameport sound card, I could take it a part and see how it works.

 

  I never found a sound card with a gameport so I gave up and took it apart. As I opened it up I saw that the pots were your standard electronics grade pots you find on most audio things, like electric instrument volume and tone pots and the exact kind of pots you can pick up at an electronics store cheap and easy. So replacement would be no problem when I wore them out. Now I was interested....

 

  I noticed there was room in the joystick for ... "stuff", then realized I could take the circuit board out of an old logitech wingman and hook it up to the pots and buttons on the top gun and thus convert it to USB. There's plenty of room to stash the board in there so I went with it. The wingman has decent range, 0-1023 on it's axis controllers so it's not bad.

 

  I'm ok at electronics but without schematics I basically did the ol' plug a wire here and plug a wire there until everything worked the way I wanted it to.

 

  Once I got the pots working I thought, well, Why not extend the stick as well? And then I realized I would be able to have buttons for once. My last custom stick had no hand grip buttons.

 

 So long story slightly less long, here's the Top Gun converted to USB and extended. It feels REALLY great in flight. Only an Occulus Rift and a DreamFlyer would make me feel more connected.

 

[Bando]

Looks good.

[Sokol1]

Good job, is really easy update old gameport joystick, specially with cheap Arduino boards. 

 

 

As I opened it up I saw that the pots were your standard electronics grade pots you find on most audio things, like electric instrument volume and tone pots and the exact kind of pots you can pick up at an electronics store cheap and easy. So replacement would be no problem when I wore them out. Now I was interested....

 

The bad news: pot' used in joystick are not the commercial audio pot  - logarithmic type general with 270 degrees of electrical travel.

Joystick pot looks identical, but are linear type with 30-60 of electrical travel.

Very difficult to find to buy - looks they are made for industry under order, as "have no use" in normal market.

 

But now we have HALL sensor and similar to replace pot's.

 

  From time to time I hit up the local good wills and buy all the decent looking joysticks they have lying around, so I have a small collection of them

 

 

Me too: Tm Top Gun + WCS throttle, Tm F22PRO+TQS throttle, Suncon F-15 (4 or 5)+SFS throttle, CH Force FX (Win95 era dinosaur), CH Flightstick, Combatstick, Fighterstick... and some Saitek   

[SqwkHappy]

 

Me too: Tm Top Gun + WCS throttle, Tm F22PRO+TQS throttle, Suncon F-15 (4 or 5)+SFS throttle, CH Force FX (Win95 era dinosaur), CH Flightstick, Combatstick, Fighterstick...

 

   Pardon me, *Drools*.. Sorry about that.