Throttles and pots

[Guest]

I've seen some great posting recently on throttles and how to create resistance. I'm in the design phase of my throttles and I'm wondering if there are any good articles out there that deal with pot range of movement and alignment with throttle travel.In otherwords, when my throttles are pulled back to idle, I want my pots to be aligned at approx zero, and when throttles are full, likewise pots are maxed. Seems to me it's going to be tricky to figure out the exact range of motion and gearing to get them to work.Any of you folks that are already beyond this, if you'd be kind enough to share some wisdom it would be much appreciated.thx.Kevin

[Guest]

I am not sure why you would want to do this since any space left over will be compensated for in the calibration. the best thing to do is to build the yoke, and find out the angle it travels. then get a potmeter that gets closest to that angle.

[rcbarend 37]

Hi Kevin,It's really not that difficult to calculate the gears.It's not really relevant that you use the full 270 degrees rotation of a normal potmeter. The related resistance swing however, can be important especially when you connect the pots through a USB convertor (since these uses A/D conversion). Try to get a resistance swing of appr. 0 - 100 Kohm, either by using the full rotation of a 100 Kohm pot, or (if you don't use the whole 270 degrees rotation) a higher pot value.About the transmission:Don't use the whole 270 degrees rotation range of a potmeter, but limit it to max. 240 degrees (since the beginning and end of a potmeter resistance taper usually have a small dead zone, or are not lineair there).Now, as suggested above, make you throttle construction first and than calculated the gears you need. Suppose the rotation of the throttle levers is 60 degrees, this means that you should use gears: 240/60 = 4:1 ratio.Cheers, Rob

[Guest]

Thanks Rob, that clears it up.Kevin

[npbosch 0]

KevinYes they are right, in fact it doesn't matter. But for precision it is the best to use as much of the potrange as possible.I used linear sliding potmeters. I connected them to the levers (spoilers, trust, flaps and trim) via a iron rod. By adjusting the hight were the rod was fixed to the lever (distance from the axis on which the lever turns) I could influence the travel of the pot and use as much as possible.I hope you understand whate I mean.You can see pictures with details on my sitehttp://home.wanadoo.nl/norbert.bosch

[Guest]

Kevin,If you use Epic, it doesnt matter. Epic will read what throws you have available it will then assign a min and max based on what you have available.Mike