Atrixium
commented
3 years ago For what you're looking to do, my method is probably overkill, but the same techniques would apply for a simpler circuit, although if you had enough inputs on your microcontroller you wouldn't even need the shift registers. For me the shift registers were necessary because of the number of buttons I was dealing with and my desire to use a cheap, smaller micro that I already had on hand.
As you figured out, this was all because I had some older games that only recognized one joystick at a time, so I figured I'd mash them all together into one and solve that problem, it definitely would have been much easier to just make 3 separate USB devices!
Now as for rewiring, I didn't really have to do any for the throttle itself, I just figured out what buttons referred to what wire and wired them into my board, the switches in the grip all have their commons tied together and then signal wires are broken off from each one and run down as a ribbon cable past the throttle pot,so the wiring is actually pretty straightforward. In the Throttle Wiring file I actually have the colour code that I found in mine, yours might be the same, so that could save some effort! I did rewire the throttle pot to read out a proper analog value that the Arduino could read though, just as I did with the joystick, it was just a simple matter of setting it up so the wiper went to the analog in and then I have 5V and Gnd on either side, the pot was in surprisingly good condition for it's age, but if it needs replacing, it's a standard, off-the-shelf pot.
If you don't want to go as far as ripping out the mainboard in the WCS MkII, you might be able to just tap into the wiring where it is on the board, there's some complex circuitry they put in there to handle all those buttons on the old gameport system, so I'm not sure exactly what the effect would be, at minimum you'll probably have to un-solder the switch wires. I don't recall off-hand if the stock board had a shift register to handle all the switches or not, I do remember there being a lot of glue logic chips in there though and rather than reverse engineer it, I just ripped it all out and started fresh.
If you do decide to go the shift register route, it's way easier than it looks, I just hooked the shift registers up in a daisy chain, wired them to the SPI lines on the Arduino and used the SPI library to clock in the shift register data as fast as possible, one Byte at a time and then aggregated the two bytes into one 16 bit variable with each bit representing a button; once you have that, a bit of bit-masking gets you the switch status and the whole thing only takes a couple milliseconds.
For your setup, after conversion to USB, I'd be tempted to add a USB hub into all that empty space in the WCS Mk2 so your other peripherals could plug into it and you only have one wire going to the PC!
Hopefully that answered your questions, but if not, shoot back and we'll work it out!
warrenernst
Hi, it's Warren from YouTube. This seems like the best/only communication method here so...
I've just downloaded and installed Eagle and checked out the Schematic and Board files, none of which made any sense to me (WHY is he still keeping the 15-Pin gameport?) until I opened and read the ODT file and learned that the plan is to make the WCS the "brains," with the stick connecting to it via the gameport and the pedals via a 6-pin DIN connector. This would allow all three devices to connect to the computer via a single USB cable. This made good sense because a lot of older games can only accept input from one device, AND the Top Gun stick is a "dumb" analog joystick device, so why not?
My use case in 2021 is different. I already have a modern standalone pedal set which can connect via USB directly. My preferred joystick is either the vintage Thrustmaster FLCS or F-22, both of which already have shift registers built-in, so all one needs to convert one of these "smart" sticks is an Arduino micro programmed to use the shift registers and then the 5 wires from the stick connect directly, and then the two pots for the axes get wired in directly too, adding a third line to each pot. The original PCBs in the base of these sticks get discarded.
Ideally, I'm hoping to use my preferred WCS Mk II as a third standalone USB device, and even more ideally, I was hoping to NOT have to rewire all the buttons and switches on the throttle, but maybe that's just not possible? I initially thought your PCB was merely taking the existing wiring down the shaft of the throttle, connecting them somewhat neatly into the shift registers, and then THAT signal was getting processed by the Arduino micro.
Yes, this would mean my flight gear would use 3 USB connections, but modern PC games don't have any problem with mixing 3 devices into one HOTAS, AND I could more easily mix and match things over time.
Sooooo, with all that said, I guess my first question has to do with rewiring the throttle to take advantage of your shift register circuit. I assume now that it was necessary?
Or more broadly, do you see all this work you did making your WCS a "smart base" for the stick and throttle applicable to my goals? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
-Thanks