Tom Stanton’s Joystick Setup Will Take Your Flight Sim Experience to New Heights
Tom Stanton goes over how to make a full featured flight control stick with an Arduino and aluminum extrusion.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is the latest iteration in this long-running series, and quite possibly the best consumer flight sim available. Unfortunately for most desktop pilots, the interface is either a keyboard and mouse, or a joystick sitting on a desktop that doesn’t emulate an actual airplane’s interface quite perfectly.
To get a few steps closer to an actual cockpit, Tom Stanton created a flight stick out of aluminum extrusion, which sits on the ground and features a throttle and foot pedal controls. The main stick is elevated to his hand’s position via an extrusion arrangement with a bend in it to miss the chair. It's anchored to the base with a 3D-printed pivot assembly, and uses springs to pull it back to center. A magnet and Hall effect sensor are used to determine rotation in its two axes, and a similar setup with ball joint linkages is used for the foot pedals. A throttle and switch/button assembly is elevated as well, providing what has to be a very immersive flight experience.
These controls interface with the computer using an Arduino Micro, and while it’s a fairly straightforward application of this joystick library, Stanton notes that you should really label your wires to keep from getting things mixed up. Print data is available on Thingiverse, and code is on GitHub. Although it looks like a very doable build, he does note that it’ll set you back £212 or about $275 in USD. Still, it’s a relative bargain compared to owning your own airplane!