Arduino Force Feedback Yoke for Xplane 11

This is a project i started, to bring back Force Feedback controllers to the world of flight sims. It is a mechanical assembly, consisting of easily available parts found on aliexpress.com or in your local hardware store, as well as 3D printed parts. It is designed to work with the Cessna wheel i designed some time ago (you can find it here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3535612 )

The mechanical portion of the project: a platform moving on 4 linear bearings, and two linear shafts. The rotary movement is achieved by a 30 mm aluminum shaft held by two bearings. Then to achive FFB on the linear platofrm, a rack with a pinion on a 24V engine is used (still not added, the mount for the engine is under development), while FFB on the rotary movement is achieved by a set of gears (that ramp up the torque 4 times). The gear that is on the shaft of the rotary engine has two sides, the second of witch is a step up gearbox for the rotary encoder (a similar solution with an encoder is going to be added for the linear motion).

The project uses Arduino to comunicate with the XPlane 11 software. An arduino Leonardo with joystick.h library is used to act as a controller for the PC, then an Arduino Uno with ArduSimX of XPlane 11 is used to recieve the data responsible for the Force Feedback effect, the uno takes the data, calculates the pwm signal which is then send to two DC motor drivers. I'm still thinking what kind of power supply will handle theese two motors.

The set of parts (without bolts and nuts for now, and the linear FFB assembly):

• 300 x 550 x 20 mm baseplate for mounting all the components
• 4 linear shaft mounts (20mm)
• 2, 500mm long, 20mm linear shafts
• set of 4 3d printed cases for linear bearings
• 4 linear bearings
• a 200 x 200 x 10 mm mainplate for the rotary assembly
• 2 3D printed bearing mounts
• 2 61906 bearings
• 600mm long aluminum shaft
• 2 24V DC motors (5x16mm shaft, diameter: 42mm, length: 66.5 mm )
• Arduino Leonardo
• Arduino Uno
• two bts7960 motor drivers
• two rotary encoder, 400 lines (found on aliexpress)
• 3D printed gears

List of things to do:

• design the linear motion mechanism
• design an enclosure to fit the electronics and the power supply
• lay out the drawings for the assembly of the controller
• make a video in Inventor of how the assembly will take place

I hope you like the project, if you have any comments or sugestions please let me know in the comments or in a private messages, i'd love to recive some feedback from you guys ;)