Jump to content

Need help from electronic wizard.


Cutter

Recommended Posts

Hm, you have any education in using electrical things?

Normaly there must be any connectors. So it's your job now, to get out the "pin-usage. Afer that, you must programm for example a microcontroller that makes the communicatinon between the usb-port and the electrics.

I always wanted to realise such a project, but I was missing the leopard 2 steering unit :-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Cutter, you'll have to also check whether the system actually uses potentiometers. If it doesn't then you'll have to convert it to ue them. If it does use them then you'll have to check the impedence. A pc is expecting 100kΩ if I remember correctly. If there are pots in it (which I doubt ) then you'll have to either replace them with 100kΩ pots or add some resistance to it to make the pots equivalent to that value. You may find that the easiest avenue would be to buy a computer steering wheel and strip the electronics out of that for your cadillac.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You may find that the easiest avenue would be to buy a computer steering wheel and strip the electronics out of that for your cadillac.

What about a flight yoke? Would the axis be similar?

Personally, I would find a cadillac a setback without having additional buttons on it. Right now I have about 30-40 buttons available with my controller setup. If you have to take one hand off the cadillac to use the keyboard, doesn't that defeat the purpose?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

As far as I've been told by guys who made such a conversion before you, the Leo 1 control handle delivers a voltage signal output from -5 to +5V for each axis. The joystick port on a PC will accept the range from 0V to +5V. So you would either need to build a signal converter or to gut the handle and replace its electronics with that of a standard game controller kit. Electronics shops offer them for comparatively little money.

Chances are, this handle's original spare part price is higher than your car's value, by the way - 18,000.- EUR.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Chances are, this handle's original spare part price is higher than your car's value, by the way - 18,000.- EUR.

I'm just wondering what makes this that expensive? The material or the production costs? The know-how couldn't be so expensive for this equipment for sure - this isn't space travelling after all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Several factors

  1. Low production numbers. About 4,000 Leopard 1s have ever been built, in batches of a few hundred each year at best.
    Even if you'd mass-produce all 4,000 in one go (which is not a good idea, not the least because in 1965 nobody knew just how many of these would be needed) you'd still have to store the parts of the assembled handles until they will get mounted. Storage binds capital (=captial cost) as well as requires space which you need to rent.
  2. Since the annual production is rarely to exceed a few hundred copies per year you need a production method that is cost-minimal for batches of that size. Plastic extrusion, what you're using these days for commercial joysticks, requires significant investment for the extrusion matrix and other machinery. And you can't use plastic because of the associated fire hazard, so it must be iron or aluminium with powder coating.
  3. Electronics. They're analog stuff. And they're supposed to operate reliably in a wide range of environmental variables - humidity, from -40° to +50° - and they're supposed to last for decades in an environment where you normally don't put your stereo system. So you need to pick components that are small enough to fit into the housing, that are sturdy enough to survive condensation/moisture, to work good enough to allow crew operation/combat in -40° as well as in humid and dry heat.

So, not only you need hand-picked electronic components with special water sealing, you also need hand assembly, and all the engineering hours to develop the whole thing can only be distributed on a small batch of copies. Finally, you want the manufacturer to actually produce them, and to produce them for the duration of the entire product life. So it must be somewhat lucrative.

There's basically two ways how the Bundeswehr (and probably other armies, too) procure materiel - by call for tender, or by "cost plus" procurement. Call for tender requires that there are at least three independent suppliers interested to deliver the stuff. With these small numbers that is not likely. Or you go and ask a company if they're willing to do it for a guaranteed margin (reimburse all costs and then add a small profit margin). In Germany that "allowed profit" is 4%.

Cost plus doesn't create an incentive to go at lengths to keep your costs low.

There is not real market for this equipment, so it's difficult to assess a "proper" price. It's a buyer's oligopoly meeting a supplier's monopoly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's the story with just about all military hardware. Low production volume with no chance of achieving economies of scale. The F-22 is a good case in point with each plane running at $100 million + each. And the cost of spare parts can be enormous. I used to work for a manufacturer that was the sole source of spares for the mechanical cockpit instrumention for the C-130 - before they were all retrofitted with the glass cockpit. The parts were sold at catalog with the price being marked up an additional 15% to 50% every year.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

First thing you need to do is produce or acquire a wiring diagram for the handles before you can do anything else.

One note about potentiometers... make sure you get a linear taper pot and not an audio taper one. It will affect how the stick movement is translated into the sim and you won't get the desired results with audio pots.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Thanks for all your help guys, im having it rebuild as we speak by a good friedn of mine who is some sort of erh........well.....he knows that kind of stuff, and he has done some measureing and stuff and said it is no problem, so hopefully soon i can post some pics of it plugged in my computer. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...