New “scale” Bell-412 collective head cover

I continued experimenting with white paint marker and acetone and made a “scale” version of a top panel for a 412-style head requested by a friend. In my humble opinion, it looks great, white paint adds some “aging”, and it looks more like it was taken off from a real helicopter. It differs from the original slightly, but has a disctinctly recognizable look overall!

A better XTrident 412 support

It’s been a long time since I added the XTrident 412 startup and shutdown support (for some weird reason it doesn’t have key assignments for starter and idle stop buttons) by request of my friends and I’ve been pretty much concentrating on polishing the hardware lately. I never liked that script, as it was pretty glitchy and written in an anal way, and it may have possibly been eating up some hard – earned FPS. But finally, I’ve gotten some time to read the docs and came up with a much cleaner script, that just adds a few entries to XPlane’s controls menu. It works perfectly and does not disable starter and idle stop switches from sending joystick button presses, unlike the old one, so you can use them when flying something else, and that’s cool =)

An old compatibility mode is now deprecated and will probably be removed (for being anal!) from the firmware. Please let me know if you guys need an option of sending keyboard presses with head switches (you can always do it with software like Joystick Gremlin btw).

To the new script, install FlyWithLua plugin, and put the script under XPlane11\Resources\plugins\FlyWithLua\Scripts folder. Start the sim, and you will find new key assignments for XTrident 412 under Simchair MKIII/412 tab. However, you will notice that there are 3 keys for each switch: left, right, and middle positions. That’s where 412 head’s special switch modes come in handy!

You can either get the latest master controller firmware from GitHub, or make the following changes in switches configuration for the 412 head:

  1. Remove button numbers from ab412_coll_head_idle_stop_buttons[] and ab412_coll_head_starter_buttons[] arrays:

    byte ab412_coll_head_idle_stop_buttons[] = {};
    byte ab412_coll_head_starter_buttons[] = {};

  2. Remove these buttons from ab412_sw_mode_button_switches[] array as well:

    byte ab412_sw_mode_button_switches[] = {1,2,17};

  3. Add these buttons to ab412_sw_mode_selector_button_switches[] array:

    byte ab412_sw_mode_selector_button_switches[] = {9,11,13};
  4. Reflash the firmware.

Twin trottle collective improvements

While building the twin lever, I’ve decided to change the design of the throttle 1 frame p2 part to make throttle grips tension equal. The part now has a detent in it, that can also add some rigidness to the lever. If you’re building the twin lever, definitely use the new part! All updates are already on GitHub! I will be adding a similar part for the single throttle collective shortly.

Also made some fixes to AB412 head mods and software (added support for an extra mode switch)

Here’s how the latest version of the lever looks:

The new frame connector allows for backlash-free operation and easy mounting

This AB412 head version features two rotary side pots and a mode switch

Software idle stop positions are colored in black

The lever feels quite rigid, I like it!