CH FlightStick USB Mod Help/Worklog

[Corporal Awesome]

So the Robotics team was throwing out some old junk one day and I happened to notice the old FlightStick they had was the same model I saw at Goodwill the other day. "Really?" one guy said, "You can have it then." The only problem is that there is no connector on the end, so it's practically useless.

What's a man to do?
Well, not being a regular guy, I decided I could put a USB connector on it and write a program to make it useful.

Now on to the hard part about it.
As I said, there's no connector. Actually, there's two cables with no connector. Someone labeled one with "Horiz." and the other with "F/B". Each has a red, green, and black cable, syncing perfectly with USB wire colors. Inside, however, there is one or two problems. In addition to the regular ones for the joystick, there are three wires with red, white, and blue colors hooked up to the buttons on top. Also, it appears the Throttle wheel was hooked up to another joystick-like axis, but there's no connection. Obviously, this had been tampered with.

Therein lies my problem. I know I can hook up the Ground and Power lines to each other, but what about the data? Can the blue, white, and green all be hooked up to each other as well? (The white may be hooked up to the other data line, but I'm not sure). Help would be much appreciated.

Pics for reference: (sorry for fuzziness, my camera hates being close to things)


The full view.


The insides. If you can make them out, all the wires are visible. The throttle wheel is on the right side.

Thanks, I appreciate your help and will post more as I keep going.

[bicostp]

You need some sort of controller board to make it work with USB; just connecting a USB cable to the potentiometers won't work, and could potentially fry your computer's USB controller if you apply power to the wrong wires.

If you start off with a cheap controller that has at least one analog stick, you could wire its controller board to the joystick's workings and make it functional. The pots on the joystick might have a different range than the ones on the USB controller, but the calibration system built into Windows should be able to compensate. (Alternately you could rig the joystick up to use the controller's pots.)

[Corporal Awesome]

Thanks, bicostp!

That also further justifies my impulse to add more buttons to it, so I might as well just add some in from the controller itself.

What controllers would you suggest? A cheap-o Logitech gamepad, perhaps?