OpenHarrier

I figured I am overdue for another update on the OpenHarrier project. So without further ado…

Community Growth

The growth of our community, based on the Facebook Group numbers, has largely stagnated. We’re a around 645 these days. This is not entirely surprising to me given that I haven’t really been posting much progress lately outside of our Facebook Group, and we had a few drop off. Interest in DCS in general continues to drop off in my opinion, and is way down from where things were a few years ago. I tend to get an uptick in new members joining whenever I post something with some new cool thing to show off, but I haven’t had anything worthy of that recently, so haven’t really done much posting of any kind.

Canopy Mirrors

One thing that I did get done was finishing the redesign of the 3D printed canopy mirrors. These are relative easy to make and only require a few 3D printed parts, a 3mm bolt and nut, 4 small screws and nuts, and a 2mm piece of acrylic mirror material that you can cut on a bandsaw. The mirrors have a 3D printed ball joint that allows 360 rotation and about 30 degrees of articulation in any direction.

There are couple of tradeoffs compared to the real mirrors. First, the real mirrors have convex lenses. The mirror materials I’m using are flat mirrors. In order to have convex mirrors, I would need to switch to an entirely different manufacturing process requiring a lot more steps and expense, so for now, I’ve decided to forgo this detail – but I may attempt to tackle it again in the future.

Annunciator panel

I’ve done a bunch of work designing the circuit and the PCB that will light all of the annunciators on the annunciator panel using a single Arduino Micro and a single multiplexing chip that allows for dimming of the indicator lights. I’ve built a test circuit on a breadboard to demo the control of each individual LED.

In progress work on the PCB:

Unfortunately, I will probably not end up ordering the first PCB’s until next year because of various constraints on money and time.

Potentiometer with detents

I spent a crazy amount of time iterating and prototyping on a detent mechanism that allows us to turn a cheap potentiometer into a multi-position switch with satisfying “clicks” on each position. I probably ate up 2 weeks just experimenting with different designs and ended up shelving this project for now, but plan to come back to it at some point in the near future. It’s a workable concept – I proved that with the work that I did. However, I ran into complications when trying to apply it to the RWR/EXP/ECM panel which required unusually long shafts in order to have the clearance necessary for the mechanical detent mechanism. I ruined a lot of 3d printed parts trying to get there, mostly having to do with issues with the 3d printed threads and torsion resulting from long shafts. I have some other ideas to kick around in the future, but they will have to wait.

More knobs

On the plus side, I did design some more knobs needed for the cockpit. These are designed in 3 parts so that they can be 3D printed in different materials allowing them to be combined to create a knob that supports lighting. These do need a little bit more work to address 3D printing tolerances. I believe I’ve greatly improved my knob creation workflow in FreeCAD, resulting in much better knob accuracy.

That’s it for now…

I think that’s about it for now. I did start working on the left wall model for supporting the exterior light switch and seat adjust switch. More updates on that later. See you next time!