Hi all,

I would like to ask this question to the Yoko/Yoko+ owners as I am currently considering to purchase the Yoko+.

My question is regarding the long-term effectiveness of the bungee coords. What is your experience with their performance? Do they return the yoke to the same position every time, even after months and years of everyday usage?

Also, I saw the review of Austin Mayer for the Yoko+ where he was mentioning a higher friction on the elevator shaft than ideal. He mentioned that the yoke wouldn't settle to the exact same position neceassarily. 

What is your experience, Yoko/Yoko+ users? Your feedback would be very helpful. 

Edited February 25, 20206 yr by ComSimPilot

54 minutes ago, ComSimPilot said:

Also, I saw the review of Austin Mayer for the Yoko+ where he was mentioning a higher friction on the elevator shaft than ideal. He mentioned that the yoke wouldn't settle to the exact same position neceassarily

I can't imagine what he was talking about, the Yoko is very smooth. I've had a Yoko for three and a half years and it performs as well as it did on day one.

hello Mark,

I very much appreciated your videos with the professional testing of the Honeycomb. What about producing some numbers for the Yoko?

E.g. in order to quantify the question of the thread starter, could you push the yoke in one direction then very slowly release it and measure the signal in rest position. Then the same in the other direction.
Possible?

48 minutes ago, oemlegoem said:

What about producing some numbers for the Yoko?

E.g. in order to quantify the question of the thread starter, could you push the yoke in one direction then very slowly release it and measure the signal in rest position. Then the same in the other direction.

Perhaps I will have a go, as someone else asked about dead zones on the Yoko when I posted my latest Honeycomb video. From the OP's point of view I'm not sure it's the right question. It seems to me that unless the bungees are very badly deteriorated they will still be quite elastic and hence the yoke will centre somewhere, and probably quite precisely. It may be that the centre point moves slightly over time, in which case it shold just be a question of recalibrating.

A rubber band has hysteresis (https://www.thepocketlab.com/educators/lesson/hysteresis-rubber-bands). This alone will cause the return position to be different for each direction. Of course, you will not see the effect of hysteresis alone, but the combined effect of the rubber band hysteresis and the friction in the travel mechanism.
Anyway, I think it would be interesting to see how it is for the Yoko.

Edit:
For the yoke that I am developing (https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/561167-flyhirundo-yoke-introduction/), using metal springs, the result is that the neutral position lies in the range of 0.7 - 0.8% of the total pitch range. This was tested by pushing the yoke to maximum pitch down and then releasing very, very slowly. Then repeated in pitch up direction.  

Edited February 25, 20206 yr by oemlegoem

2 hours ago, oemlegoem said:

A rubber band has hysteresis (https://www.thepocketlab.com/educators/lesson/hysteresis-rubber-bands). This alone will cause the return position to be different for each direction.

Good grief, things are never as straightforward as we think! On the other hand, if the mechanism uses pairs of opposing bungees for the spring forces, then these effects would balance out? As far as I can tell, the Yoko, Honeycomb and PFC yokes all do some version of this.

The Yoko and other yokes have the bungees on top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmEItqPloPA&t=112s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg2-zL5-XBI

But it does not matter. The green bungees in your sketch will not push back when the red bungees fail to return to their original position after stretching.

What about it Mark. Some testing to satisfy curiosity?

19 minutes ago, oemlegoem said:

The Yoko and other yokes have the bungees on top.
...
The green bungees in your sketch will not push back when the red bungees fail to return to their original position after stretching.

Yes, well I did say "some version". Anyway, I think I see now it doesn't work, two wrongs don't add up to right 😩 

I will plug the Yoko back in and try some numbers. I won't do the same as I did for the Honeycomb because I can only film at 60fps. That isn't really enough to capture the movement, as the Yoko has sixteen times the resolution of the Honeycomb.

On 2/26/2020 at 7:53 AM, oemlegoem said:

What about it Mark. Some testing to satisfy curiosity?

Well, I plugged the Yoko back in and have made a few observations:

(1) The Yoko (original) evidently doesn't have a 12-bit controller like the Yoko Plus,  it appears to have a 10-bit controller (as shown in DIView with raw data turned on). I also noticed it uses less than half of that range, returning values between about 300 and 700. I'm not sure why this would be, but it means it really only calibrates to about 9 bits. Given the Yoko's 120-degree travel in the roll axis, it should resolve the rotation down to about 0.3 degrees (so about twice the Honeycomb's resolution).

(2) It has no detectable dead zones in the centre of either axis, so it doesn't seem to have any onboard calibration feature like the Honeycomb appears to.

(3) A consequence of (2) is that it doesn't return to centre exactly, so you need to set a null zone in software. In DIView I found that a 3% null zone was sufficient to return it centre in either axis when you simply let the yoke go, although you can make it come to rest slightly outside that null zone if you try to do it deliberately. In the roll axis 3% is a little under 4 degrees, which is comparable with what I measured in the Honeycomb yoke's calibrated dead zone.

(4) I also noticed that the reported value is jittery throughout the range - in other words, whether you leave the yoke centred or try to hold it at a specific point the value jitters. I don't know if this means the pots are showing wear or if this is natural behaviour, but the Honeycomb doesn't seem to do it. I am not convinced it is wear because it happens throughout the range and it appears to be a uniform jitter, with no evidence of larger spikes.

(5) The Yoko still feels so much better than the Honeycomb!

So I guess if you were in the market for a Yoko you'd probably want to go the extra for the Yoko Plus.