As a sister project to the DIY FFB Flight Yoke I've been looking at the design of a set of generic force feedback rudder pedals.

The design is shown on the right. The pedals would have a force output of approximately 23 kgf (50 lbs) and a movement of approximately 150 mm.

An interesting task in this design was to achieve the fairly large gearing ratio required between the brushless motor shaft and the foot pedals without using an expensive gearbox. To do this I've used a toothed belt driving a torque wheel segment; the ratio of the segment radius to the motor shaft pulley radius lifts the drive torque by about 16:1. Further uplift is obtained by the positioning of the connecting rods.

The foot pedals are in steel, and the wide stable base structure is timber - so lots of scope for securing the pedals to the simulator cockpit structure.

The design also allows for the future addition of toe brakes, and for mechanical linking between pedal sets in a dual control setup.

The pedals will use the same smooth brushless motor drive used for the FFB yoke and will pick up the rudder output channel from the BFF CL Software.

I'll post more details when I have them.

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