[Nuke]

its tradition for me to disect my old hardware fore usefull parts, so ive seen the inside of pretty much every controller i had all the way back to the nes. while my stick is still fully functional i still desired a looksee. i opened up the bases of my x52 and discovered some pretty intresting things. first i opened the stick side, i wanted to get a look at the gimbal mechanism and the sensors it uses. oddly to my supprise, where i expected to see a couple of potentiometers, i saw a pair of hall effect sensors. i had expected pots cause thats what the x 36 had. anyway theese sensors were set in fixed positions. a pair of super magnets were mounted on a slider with a rack and pinion based system with the pinion driven off the gimbal axes.  there was considerable play in the system which explains the deadzone issues.

on the throttle side there was a pot instead of a hall sensor. i was rather disapointed. i didnt open the grip cause i pretty much knew what was there, pots, buttons, a trackpoint, dull stuff.  now between both units theres tonnes of empty space in the bases. this allows plenty of room for mods to the controler. also the several boards which were in the controller were very modular in design, everything was neatly arranged in little miniplugs, meaning very little soldering is nessicary to remove the boards. the largest circuit board in the controller is the lcd board, which isnt much bigger than the lcd and buttons. with such mod potentials, i serched for some hardware mods. my results were nil. anyway id love to do something like a sensor upgrade, the possibilities are limitless. wouldnt mind making them wireless. what about a color touch screen? makes me want an electrical engineering degree

[miskat]

Wouldn't really need an EE degree as such, just a minimal understanding of binary, electronics, of of exactly what the hell is what in there.  The last of all that seems like the most difficult part.  Upgrading the sensors shouldn't be difficult at all, depending on exactly what kind of signal the existing sensors send.  Sticking to same sensors would be a good idea to keep the values in the same range.  I could see how "modding" the stick to remove that deadzone problem you spoke of would be very useful, and should be fairly simple (though I would have to know exactly how those particular sensors worked.)

But a touchscreen?  lol  For what?  Would be spiffy as hell, sure, but....  =P

[jr2]

But a touchscreen?  lol  For what?  Would be spiffy as hell, sure, but....  =P

Em, of course,


...Just for the    effect.

[MarkN]

For a touchscreen, what if it used something equivalent to Vista's sideshow system, so that effectivle you could have a different selection of buttons for each game you play. Of course, if you just play Freespace, a bunch of microswitches would be more reliable.

[Nuke]

the touch screen would probibly just draw off of a bitmap or jpeg streamed to the panel from a host application. then return the touch coords to the app. all the processing would take place on the host app. you could make static displayes with just an image with buttons represented on it. touching those areas would represent commands. a better use would be to have realtime graphics streamed to it at about 5-10 frames a second. for things like the mfds in orbitrer.

[Nuke]

oh heres some high res vivisection photos for anyone whos intrested. forgive my ****ty photography. my camera's autofocus doesnt work at short range and lacks a manual focus.

seems that the stick unit is entirely passive, couldnt find a single microchip anywhere. i couldnt get the handle open though. i sorta wanted to keep the stick functional so rip and tear wasnt an option. the 4 resisters on the main board probibly are used to multiplex the signals down to just 7 wires for the throttle unit to process. its also gotta get power for the leds and a diferent line for the blinki led in hat 1 (to indicate that you can brouse the file system for profiles with it when button i on the throttle is pressed). so only 4 of those lines actually relay 3 axes, 2 hats and about 16 buttons. pretty impressive. i bet there using matrix multiplexing to get it all to work.

the throttle side is more complex as it has the lcd board. i didnt try to remove any of theese boards to see the underside cause i didnt want to damage them. also like the stick i didnt get the grip open. most sticks ive seen only put sensos in the handles anyway, leaving the circuitry in the base. judging form the size of the wire bundles coming from stick and throttle grips i presume this assumption is correct. the lcd board and the main board seemed tob e connected by a bus which i could see between the boards and the curcuitry on the back of the board is essentially for the backlighting. i didnt take it out cause i didnt want to damage the unit. i will investagate further when i can afford a replacement for the stick.