Sheet 03 — Flight sim joystick

Custom flight sim joystick.

A joystick, throttle and button panel for PC flight simulators, designed and built solo over a few months in 2020. Every part is 3D printed and every wire is hand soldered.

The brief I set myself was cost: anyone with a printer and some soldering practice should be able to build one. That ruled out machined gimbals and off-the-shelf joystick hardware, so the motion sensing had to come from magnets and hall-effect sensors instead.

Role: Solo — design and build
Date: November 2020
Sensing: Linear hall effect
Logic: Arduino Micro

The finished orange joystick and button panel on a desk in front of a monitor running a flight simulator.

View A — General arrangement Scale 1:2

The assembled joystick and base with its loom of coloured wires still hanging out of the base. — The stick, throttle and button panel share one base. Everything above the base plate is printed.

SCALE 1:2

Details A — G

CAD assembly of the joystick, showing the stick, gimbal housing and button panel. — A — The whole assembly modelled before anything was printed. Print orientation and support were design constraints from the first sketch.

The joystick body partway through printing on an FDM printer bed. — B — Printed in PLA on an FDM machine. Parts were split so each one prints flat, without supports on a visible face.

The printed gimbal with two hall-effect sensors and their wiring. — C — Two linear hall-effect sensors read a magnet each, one for pitch and one for roll. No pots to wear out and nothing to machine.

Inside the joystick base: a microswitch, terminal wiring and printed structure. — D — The base carries the gimbal, the switch wiring and the strain relief. Screw bosses are printed in rather than tapped.

The joystick grip showing two thumb buttons, a trigger and a small hat switch. — E — The grip carries two buttons, a trigger, and a small thumb joystick for looking around the cockpit.

The button panel beside the joystick on a workbench. — F — The panel mixes momentary and persistent switches with a rotary encoder, for the controls a sim needs on a detent rather than a press.

An Arduino Micro on a breadboard with the joystick loom soldered into it. — G — An Arduino Micro presents the whole thing to the PC as a USB game controller. The firmware leans on an existing joystick library.

The internal wiring loom of the joystick base, colour coded by function. — Wiring is colour-coded by function, which is the only thing that makes a loom this size serviceable after the fact.

Next — Astrophotography

Planets, nebulae and star trails, and the 3D printed accessories that make the imaging easier.

Sheet 04 →