Hi there everyone, hope those at FTFF are having a good time!
I didn't know if to post this in this section or in the flight simulator one, as it concerns both... if his monkeyfullness deems this better in the other section, so be it heheheh
I was getting fed up of having the simulator cable hanging from my transmitter every time I wanted to use it with the simulator. My transmitter has the option of connecting for a simulator via the trainer port or via USB, both of which are not very comfortable to have for a pincher, and in general I'm not a lover of having wires everywhere anyway. The trainer port dongle I have is one of those cheap $5 ones you can get off the internet from almost anywhere, and eventhough the computer just detects it as a generic joystick, it works well with PhoenixRC 4.0 with a joystick patch I have.
So there i was, thinking "if this dongle connects to the trainer port, the trainer port outputs PPM, and I even have to set it up as PPM out in the protocol menu of my transmitter (Deviation on Devo 7E), then I see no reason it shouldn't work with a PPM out receiver...". So I opened up the dongle and removed the original 2 wire cable from it which is PPM in and GND, then took a servo pigtail and connected the central red wire to the +5V pin directly on the USB port, the brown (on a Futaba cable it would be black) GND wire to the direct USB GND pin, and the yellow (on a Futaba cable it would be white) signal wire to the PPM in point on the circuit where the original cable of the dongle used to be. Then just close up the dongle with the pigtail hanging out.
Then came the receiver part... I had the insides of a broken Orange R615X DSMX 6 channel receiver, which had the traces of a couple of the channels damaged. The PPM out of this receiver is the bind port, so I just fixed that trace, removed one of the 2 antennas as I didn't need range at all (not when sitting a couple of feet away), bound the receiver to the transmitter on a previously created model (for this I had to make a cable that fed battery positive to the middle pin, and negative to both the negative and signal pins at the same time, as I didn't have anywhere else to plug the battery into whilst the bind plug was being used... basically an all in one battery feed and bind plug), then once it was bound, just test it out on the dongle.
I set all the switches on the model I created on the transmitter to have all 6 channels available, then just set dual rates separately within the model so as not to use a channel on the simulator just for this, set the transmitting power nice and low as I don't need range, 3mW so as to not use much battery, then plugged the dongle into the computer, and the receiver lit up to show it was both receiving power and was connected with the transmitter. Then just open up the joystick configuration window in Windows and I saw how all 6 channels were working perfectly. So it was just a case of calibrating in that window, then starting up the simulator, to find everything working absolutely perfect!!
Once I saw everything was working great, just make a couple of slits in the dongle case to put a ziptie through so brace the receiver directly to the dongle so as to leave it nice and clean and compact.
This seems to work with any receiver that has PPM out, so if you use it with a receiver with more than 6 channels you should get all of them available. Total cost of the build, well that was $5 for a cheap dongle, and the OrangeRX receiver I got when it was on offer for $5, so it cost me $10 in total, but receivers are nice and cheap even when not on offer, so it's a nice cheap alternative to having a wired simulator.
I didn't know if to post this in this section or in the flight simulator one, as it concerns both... if his monkeyfullness deems this better in the other section, so be it heheheh
I was getting fed up of having the simulator cable hanging from my transmitter every time I wanted to use it with the simulator. My transmitter has the option of connecting for a simulator via the trainer port or via USB, both of which are not very comfortable to have for a pincher, and in general I'm not a lover of having wires everywhere anyway. The trainer port dongle I have is one of those cheap $5 ones you can get off the internet from almost anywhere, and eventhough the computer just detects it as a generic joystick, it works well with PhoenixRC 4.0 with a joystick patch I have.
So there i was, thinking "if this dongle connects to the trainer port, the trainer port outputs PPM, and I even have to set it up as PPM out in the protocol menu of my transmitter (Deviation on Devo 7E), then I see no reason it shouldn't work with a PPM out receiver...". So I opened up the dongle and removed the original 2 wire cable from it which is PPM in and GND, then took a servo pigtail and connected the central red wire to the +5V pin directly on the USB port, the brown (on a Futaba cable it would be black) GND wire to the direct USB GND pin, and the yellow (on a Futaba cable it would be white) signal wire to the PPM in point on the circuit where the original cable of the dongle used to be. Then just close up the dongle with the pigtail hanging out.
Then came the receiver part... I had the insides of a broken Orange R615X DSMX 6 channel receiver, which had the traces of a couple of the channels damaged. The PPM out of this receiver is the bind port, so I just fixed that trace, removed one of the 2 antennas as I didn't need range at all (not when sitting a couple of feet away), bound the receiver to the transmitter on a previously created model (for this I had to make a cable that fed battery positive to the middle pin, and negative to both the negative and signal pins at the same time, as I didn't have anywhere else to plug the battery into whilst the bind plug was being used... basically an all in one battery feed and bind plug), then once it was bound, just test it out on the dongle.
I set all the switches on the model I created on the transmitter to have all 6 channels available, then just set dual rates separately within the model so as not to use a channel on the simulator just for this, set the transmitting power nice and low as I don't need range, 3mW so as to not use much battery, then plugged the dongle into the computer, and the receiver lit up to show it was both receiving power and was connected with the transmitter. Then just open up the joystick configuration window in Windows and I saw how all 6 channels were working perfectly. So it was just a case of calibrating in that window, then starting up the simulator, to find everything working absolutely perfect!!
Once I saw everything was working great, just make a couple of slits in the dongle case to put a ziptie through so brace the receiver directly to the dongle so as to leave it nice and clean and compact.
This seems to work with any receiver that has PPM out, so if you use it with a receiver with more than 6 channels you should get all of them available. Total cost of the build, well that was $5 for a cheap dongle, and the OrangeRX receiver I got when it was on offer for $5, so it cost me $10 in total, but receivers are nice and cheap even when not on offer, so it's a nice cheap alternative to having a wired simulator.