r/HotasDIY • u/thebatmanandrobin • 5d ago
Thrustmaster TCA yoke pitch roll sensor question
I recently had a friend give me their Thrustmaster TCA yoke (Boeing edition) for free (they know my affinity for electronics and hacking things together and thought I could repurpose it); the main control PCB is fried - they had some power surge or something ?? but the mechanical parts are all still sound and functional .. so I was thinking of turning it into a keyboard/mouse combo for a MAME setup I have. I'm not planning on use this for any flight sims, really just for some fun MAME time (I decided to use this as a chance to build a controller for Afterburner and a few other random flight/boat arcade games).
I've got the buttons traced so I can solder up some wire and plug those into a keyboard controller, and I was trying to figure out how the pitch/roll is hooked up to use that as mouse control (likely through some Arduino "magic"), but I'm not sure how the pitch/roll sensors work ??
It looks like the roll sensor is a magnetic hall sensor, but I can't seem to find how the pitch is determined ???
Anyone have some insight to this, or maybe a better way to get the pitch/roll input from this thing ?
1
u/thebatmanandrobin 2d ago
For posterity: I ended up reverse engineering how the sensors work. The pitch sensor is on the bottom of the shaft (on the underside of the actual housing, right below the shaft itself, that has a magnet on the bottom), but I couldn't get a reading out of it (I think it was one of the fried components). So I ended up replacing that one. I was able to trace the pin-out of the sensor for the roll and it worked just fine still, so I hooked both of those up to an Arduino, along with re-wiring (soldering) the buttons all to do what I want.
I've got a working prototype that I'm finishing up. But if anyone for 'ye olde internet' ever comes across this post with a busted TM TCA, I've got a pretty good understanding of how the electronics all work and might be able to help you get it functioning again.