A Custom Control Lever for Helicopter Flight Sims

A keyboard, along with a mouse and even a joystick, provides an incredibly versatile controls arrangement, allowing one to input text in a Word document, manipulate spreadsheets, and play everything from FPS shooters, to RTS strategy games, to flight sims. On the flip side, stock devices aren’t optimized for any one purpose, which is especially evident when trying to control a simulated helicopter.

In this e14 presents project, hacker/flight simulator aficionado Kaleb Clark shows how he built a collective lever for handling the pitch of a simulated helicopter’s blades. This, in turn, controls the thrust of the sim-aircraft, and thus its up-and-down movement.

The build is powered by an Arduino Micro, with an ATmega32U4 chip that takes care of computer interface as an HID input. It also adds an MCP23017 I2C GPIO that enables it sense not only an encoder to tell the lever angle via a gear setup, but a number of auxiliary buttons, switches, and even a second encoder embedded into the end as as well. These extra controls can be programmed as needed depending on the sim.

Clark shows how it works toward the end of the video above, which looks amazing compared to simply using a joystick/mouse/keyboards. He notes that this setup feels natural and makes a huge difference when flying. More resources and a parts list are available on the project page.