i finally put a few hours into my joystick of doom. 12-bit, mil-spec (supposedly) antique (from who knows what) cast aluminum frictioned gimbals (main, with the handle from a dead ms sidewinder, and secondary with a finger grip thingie on it), makeshift wooden enclosure made with scraps pulled out of the dumpster. i still need more wood to finish the base though, and need some buttons and switches from radio shack, then its just all wiring. i have the 12 bit usb joystick controller board, though im not sure whether it supported 6 or 8 axes (so far im using four unless i add some trim knobs to the base) but it can do 36 buttons.
wait, you're making your own joystick?
yip
ive got several of these gimbal sets in various states of functionality. i took 2 of them apart so that i could get into the bering compartment, to clean and re-lubricate. unfortunately in order to get the thing apart i had to destroy several of the brass bushings that allow smooth rotation of the gearing system. i have an idea of how to re-arrange the parts so that the gimbals drive the gearing again, but its going to require some re-machining of the parts (il have to dremel through a beefy 3/16" of steel). i had to dremel out a large number of screws because they were frozen with decades of corrosion, so i will need to drill and re-tap the holes. i think ive figured out how to pull the bushings without breaking them so i might just have to polish them up and re-use them. of course i dont have the tools for this job, so for now i just grabbed my 2 best units and im basing my stick off of those.
you may notice the 2 potentiometers per axis. these sticks were used in an analog control system. there were several 12v magnets which could be activated by pressing the toggle button which was installed on top of the stick, these would break the main potentiometers in place, and moving the stick would only turn the vernier pots. i asume when this happened that the signal from the main pots were passed into a second voltage divider (the verneir pots) to give fine adjustment to whatever these things controlled.
i need more wood to finish the base, theres not enough clearance right now to allow proper operation. il be checking dumpsters and if that fails il see if my sister has any left over lumber from building her house. a good size peice of pine board would do just fine. id like to have a complete enclosure, but a partial enclosure would be good enough to get the wiring started. once i decide on a complete array of controls for the panel and get the holes drilled i thing il use wood fill to make it smooth, round off the corners stain it and give it a good polyurethane macro finish. but thats in the long term. i might just settle for the redneck look. i also want a better grip on the main stick. might widdle something or perhaps just design it in a modeling program and have it 3d printed.
the guy i bought the gimbal systems from said they were military surplus, and they are so well built that they pass as mil-spec, though i suspect these came out of construction or farming machinery, because of the dirt ive cleaned out of some of them. some of the handles were painted caterpillar orange, so i suspect construction machinery. some of the units had some circuit boards attached to them, with resistors the size of my pinky. so i figure these things date back to the 60s or 70s. if anything it makes you think that they dont build things as well as they used to. all the screws and other hardware, and hole pattern on the top are in imperial units nothing is metric, so id assume these were made in the usa. this is a damn good example of what we loose when we ship all our production overseas.
