Mmmkay well I've been a busy beaver. My Virpil base has finally made it to CLEARED! US Customs and I am ready. My F22 USB conversion is dead, long live my new F22 stick grip. I have the adapter now for the Combatstick grip, as can clearly be seen, but I haven't wired it up to the shift register yet. Been working on my X35 instead, which is now at "minimum viable product" status and is pictured in situ next to my TWCS, which is my primary throttle. The X35 replaces an X52 I've been using as a prop control for warbirds. The rotaries are great for radiator controls in IL-2 and the X52 worked well enough, but the LCD and LEDs are silly, and I wanted something nicer, and now I have it.
So regarding the internals, I actually had a second shift register kit I bought from rel4y, but that one I boffed even worse than the one I uploaded the picture of a few posts back. I accidentally ripped out a ground pin from one of the register ICs, and thought it was a goner. But at rel4y's recommendation, I hacked into the IC with an x-acto knife, located the pin's nubbin and soldered it back on to the PCB with a very short wire. It works, though still not at 100% capacity; I have 23 inputs. One input, on a different IC from the one I damaged, oddly just would not work at all. I even tried connecting a button directly to the associated pin on the IC, but it was a no-go. So, I counted my blessings and thoroughly entombed the whole board in hot glue before anything else can go wrong with it.
Things I've done to the stock X-35: - Put a crapton of JB Weld fillets inside and outside the vertical shaft for the throttle grip. This significantly improves the torsional rigidity, which was wanting in the stock throttle - Shaved down the grip on the near side to give more room to reach for controls on the base. I filled in the hole with polydoh, and then because the finishability of polydoh is crap, I painted over it with Testor's enamel paint. It doesn't look completely terrible. - Three APEM (CH Products parent company) industrial quality two way rockers which are a pretty good deal on fleabay right now. One is mounted in the grip in the cavity left after removing the rudder, the other two are in the base, which I mainly intend to use for individual throttle control / startup / shutdown on twin engined jets in DCS. Especially with these two rockers, I think this setup will be totally adequate for twin engined flight. Certainly, I think it's better suited for managing a military twin than a single split-throttle is for managing a warbird in the "left throttle for prop, right throttle for throttle" tradition. - Two additional rotaries in the base. I needed at least one more to replace the slider I've lost on the X52 and used for mixture, and now I'm +1 on that. - One latching switch (an FLCS download switch actually) in the back corner of the base. The impetus is to have something I can assign to the aileron limiter switch on the DCS F-5 module, that I can just turn on and leave on. I'm sure I'll find other uses for it.
I've still got enough pins on the arduino to do a 5x3 button matrix, so I might add more later, but this is good enough for now. Just wanted to thank mega mozg, rel4y, and everyone else whose posted experiences helped me get these projects done.
