DIY collective control lever for a helicopter flight sim

Kaleb Clark really enjoys flight simulators, but when attempting to fly a helicopter, a normal keyboard or even a joystick isn’t quite optimal for controlling its vertical movement. Real helicopters use a lever assembly called a collective to adjust downward thrust, and he decided to build his own with an Arduino Micro and GPIO expander.

To read the main lever action, he’s using a gear and encoder setup, which allows him to lift and descent in a much more natural way than afforded normal computer controls. There’s also has a bunch of buttons attached that can be programmed for various actions as needed. 

– Werbung –

Game interface is taken care of by the Micro’s ATmega32U4 chip, giving it HID functionality as an auxiliary input device.