Kickstarter: Affordable Force Feedback Yoke

[NZ255 309]

Looks interesting, might be something the community could get behind.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/irisdynamics/affordable-force-feedback-flight-sim-control-yoke

 

Nick

[Ron Attwood 3,464]

If I was 20 years younger I would have stuck $100 in the kitty. That sure looked marvellous to me! Affordable? Mmm. not sure to whom. It'd probably come out at 20 bucks more than a CH yoke. :biggrin:

[timmonst 2]

Very impressive.  IMHO This device will make it to market even if the designer can't raise the capital to manufacture the device himself. 

[LeeL 272]

$75000.....?

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

 

[wpballard 0]

If you've never flown a real force feedback system (not a toy) - it's pretty amazing. Once you've experienced it everything else you touch just seems downright awful. I would take a force feedback Yoke alone over an entire full motion sim without it. 

 

At this years AOPA convention in Fort Worth I was able to fly both the Redbird sims (which I also have time in for my instrument training) and the Precision Flight Controls sim. The PFC sim experience just destroyed the Redbird and it was because of the force feedback in the yoke and the tactile experience overall. 

 

I asked the PFC representative how much just the Yoke would cost that was in that sim (the model shown here ) and he stated he has $6,000 in parts alone just in the yoke's force feedback mechanism. So the price point this project is promising is a strong value. And they're doing it right using an architecture that will be open and highly extensible.   

 

I'm fairly new on the forums - but I do wish the community would step up and help out. $75k is nothing to start a business or launch a product if you've ever done it. I'm sure they could spend $10 in legal fees alone without blinking. 

 

May is a long time to wait, and the Christmas holiday season is a sorry time to hit me up for more money, but I'll be putting my card down for $500 early production unit. I hope others do the same. Here's the link in case you missed it. And for the record I'm not affiliated with the effort in any way. 

[Pmcfadden 0]

Hey all,

Doing the rounds with all the fourms (I'm one of the developers on this project.) If anyone has any questions Id be more than happy to answer them here or on the KS page.

 

We need to find roughly 60 more people in the next 5 days interested in placing a pre order for this unit in order for it to move ahead. If theres anyone you think may be interested in this but doesn't frequent forums all that often please feel free to pass the news along.

 

Also if your interested in reading a bit more about the origins of the project I recently did an interview over at FlightSim.com

http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?14475-Interview-With-Patrick-McFadden-Iris-Dynamics

 

all the best

-pat

[gizmosellsbunnys 106]

Price will be over $1000 it wont be profitable and $700 dollar range is what i aim for to break even on something like this as profit will be hard to squeeze. 3d printer technology in 10 years could see cessna yoke knock off with force feed back selling for $300 dollars and rubbers for $200. Will be buying drone simulator anyways.

[Pmcfadden 0]

Price will be over $1000 it wont be profitable and $700 dollar range is what i aim for to break even on something like this as profit will be hard to squeeze. 3d printer technology in 10 years could see cessna yoke knock off with force feed back selling for $300 dollars and rubbers for $200. Will be buying drone simulator anyways.

Hi Gizmo,

 

Your actually pretty close, the POST Kickstarter price will be $800+  (considering comparable non FFB yokes from GoFlight/PFC start in that range.) Our materials, components, and assembally costs are roughly $400/unit (at the moment). So once you factor in tooling, certification, packaging, programing, QA, reserves for RMAs, overhead, etc you are totally right the Kickstarter pricing of $550 is actually well below costs. That being said its a good way to quickly raise funds and validate demand for the unit.

 

As for 3D printing, at the moment it isn't viable for production quantities as it takes far too long and the resin is far too expensive. That being said it IS awsome for prototyping and mold making! Our yoke handle mold positives will be printed on an SLA machine.

[Andydigital 93]

I'm not convinced that the roll motor is going to be any better than any existing force feedback yoke, I'm mostly concerned with the noise of this roll stepper motor then of course the smoothness and resolution of the feedback iteself, you don't cover the subject in much detail at all on your website. All the videos I've seen of other force feedback yokes sound like a broken printer and I do not want that on my desktop. Living in an apartment block I wouldn't like to be the person living in the apartment below me with that noise going on either.

[Pmcfadden 0]

I'm not convinced that the roll motor is going to be any better than any existing force feedback yoke, I'm mostly concerned with the noise of this roll stepper motor then of course the smoothness and resolution of the feedback iteself, you don't cover the subject in much detail at all on your website. All the videos I've seen of other force feedback yokes sound like a broken printer and I do not want that on my desktop. Living in an apartment block I wouldn't like to be the person living in the apartment below me with that noise going on either.

 

Hi Andy, good question!

 

We investigated 3 main ways to do CL on a rotating shaft:

 

Servo - cheep, silent, but very low torque so you must run it through a gearing system (which means you will get "cogging" or "bumps" as you roll it over)

 

Steppers - cheep but you need more complex electronics, they DO make noise (some more than others) but they are very high torque for their package so a direct drive is possible. They are still considered to have "cogging" but only when free wheeling and even at that it is much much less than a traditional servo.

 

Ring Motor-Big bucks (bulk rate which was quoted to us when we looked at them for this project was $450/unit), smooth as butter and stupid amounts of torque. They are used in biomedical robots and the like.

 

 

 

The cheapest force feedback yoke that we are aware of (retails for ~$2000) uses a geared servo. While servos are much more silent the reliance on gears means its a major point of failure. Additionally the cogging on this specific unit when its in freewheel mode is not something which you could get away with in a commercial environment (you might be able to get away with it in a consumer product, but I would have a hard time believe a government inspector would let it pass certification for a commercial simulation system.)

 

As you mentioned ultimately we went with a stepper in this design as it kept inside the price range we were shooting for, but also kept us away from having gears which could be stripped etc. It DOES make some noise, however seeing as its just a NEMA 17 (very small) it's negligible even when the unit isn’t in a case (here are some Nema 17s running)

. The Stepper is mounted to a UHMW bracket (with a foam liner to absorb vibration) and is then fully enclosed in a 15 gauge (0.0571”) aluminum enclosure. Although I’m sure the noise from the stepper would be detectable it’s  substantially less than the cooling fans on the PSU and the case. It most certainly will not be able to do this:

 As for smoothness and force resolution, we actually came up with an interesting way of dealing with that issue (as steppers are not usually meant to be used in a "variable" torque application.)

We are using a fairly abnormal design when it comes to power handling on the stepper. We are using of all things a PWM to supply the power side of the stepper controller. Because we already have shaft roll tracking from the optical sensor we don't really care if the stepper "misses" steps (as we don't need to count them.) This means that we can provide not only variable speed (from step frequency) but also variable torque by changing PWM timings! Now as stated this is NOT how most steppers are operated (or any that we are aware of.) but it does seem to do a pretty good job with giving us variable torque!

We are currently using a 12 bit PWM controller, which gives us 4096 steps between 0% power and 100% power. Now of course this is not a fully linear frequency to force curve but to illustrate the mathematical resolution on this device at a max rated torque of 48N/cm that equates to an individual step torque of 0.011N/CM or 0.0000854 Foot/Lbs

 

Hope that answeres your question!

 

-pat

[Andydigital 93]

Hi Pat,

 

It does to a certain degree, thank you very much for the very detailed reply. But do you have any video showing your yokes roll motor in action? I didn't see anything on the Kickstarter page. Also I'm not likely to have $600 in the next 4 days either, but in the new year I should. I really do wish your project all the best as it does look like something serious simmers like myself have wanted for many years.

[Pmcfadden 0]

Hi Pat,

 

It does to a certain degree, thank you very much for the very detailed reply. But do you have any video showing your yokes roll motor in action? I didn't see anything on the Kickstarter page. Also I'm not likely to have $600 in the next 4 days either, but in the new year I should. I really do wish your project all the best as it does look like something serious simmers like myself have wanted for many years.

 

Hey Andy sorry for the delay, the last 2 days have been a little nuts as we've brought in more than $20,000 in that same time frame!  Right now were sitting at just a hair under $60,000, which means we only need to find ~25 more backers and were a go!

 

Anyway to answer your question regarding the roll actuator, so far we've only built a singular power control board with an integrated stepper controller (the rest of the prototype control boards are only pitch). We sent the singular 2 axis unit off a few weeks ago (with a PSU, Pi, actuator, and stepper)  to get the ball rolling on CE/FCC/CSA certifications. Because were dealing with some very abnormal magnetic/EMF stuff we've been told we wont be allowed to self certify so everything has to go through an independent lab. Because were still in the design stages (and looking at a tight schedule) the decision was to send it off and see what findings are made before any final design decisions are set in stone. VS having 100 1/2 built units and then find out we need to beef up shielding, include a second bank of fly back diodes, include secondary shielding for the Pi & Teensy etc.

 

AND alas I didn't bother to get a video of the stepper turning about before it was sent off. For full disclosure however I should note that the singular 2 axis system that we've built was NOT using a polyurethane belt (as production units will), it was just using a simple V belt. Additionally when testing force inputs with the proto we were just feeding it raw information IE it wasn't pulling data from the simulation environment and translating that to a roll response. And additionally to that when we were testing it it was not attached to a yoke, it was going through a load cell.

 

All that being said steppers are pretty common items, and the software involved to deal with them already exists in a variety of forms. If its a make it or break it for you Id be happy to get a mockup together and filmed for you before the campaign ends!

 

Anyway, never the less, still 2 days and only 25 more yokes to go!

[computer2cockpit 0]

PMCfaden:

 

I'm really hoping that you will raise the funds. you have a great project, and it is clear that it is on the way to production. not just a good idea, but good project.

 

I'm hoping that after you finish your campaign we can share few emails to exchange some experience, mostly about crowdfunding part. We are not there yet, but we plan to crowdfund our project(computer2cockpit) by the mid 2014.

 

So best of luck,

 

Regards

[Waterman981 2]

You made it!  Congrats!

 

While I wasn't able to "order" one at a discounted price (due to the holiday), it is definitely something that will go on my list.  Time to start saving my pennies! ;-)

[Pmcfadden 0]

$77,859!!!!!

Well all, looks like with 21 hrs left we just made target! Thanks again for all the support and assistance everyone. This would not be possible without you guys!
Also for reference we have 23 units left at $600. Sale price after they go into production is projected to be at a minimum $800.


Cockpit2computer: It has been a very interesting experience over the past 30 days, I would be more than happy to share my insights, go ahead and drop me a line whenever is convenient id be happy to help in any way I can!

-pat


Hey thanks Waterman! We do apologize about the timing on the project, it was originally supposed to be run in early Nov, however we ended up encountering delays with the patent side of things. When we were finally given a green light to go public we were already almost through Nov (and if before Christmas was a bad idea, after would have been even worse.)