Bill Galbraith writes: > A brief review: Helicopter controls (longitudinal cyclic, lateral cyclic, > collective, and pedals) will all be trimmed at different locations for > different conditions of airspeed, altitude, weight, center of gravity, and > pilot weight.
I think Andy Ross's comment probably showed me why, even though I've gotten pretty darned good with the helicopters in FlightGear, I'm having trouble keeping the airport in sight while hovering in X-Plane. The joystick I built has no centering (based on a conversation I read somewhere about smaller helicopters than you're modeling), and I'll bet that X-Plane is floating the joystick model to keep trim center at joystick center, and FlightGear isn't. Thus on my non-centering joystick I'm able to track trim center on FlightGear, but on X-Plane when I try to do that I'm chasing something that it's trying to move around. > One can envision a screw driven by a stepper motor, with a V > attached to block on the screw, held on with an electromagnet. I was actually thinking that you could drive the spring attachments with a stepper motor connected directly either with friction or a toothed track, and have the trim release button just remove power from the stepper motors (or, if the friction of the unpowered steppers is too high, lift them so they disengage), so that the spring attachments can slide freely. Yeah, not something you can do for a $100 joystick, unless you just so happen to have a couple of beefy stepper motors and a controller lying around [grin]. Once again I'm finding that I need to go explore a real aircraft... Thanks! _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list Flightgear-users@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
