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Version 2 Launched

I’m very pleased to announce that Version 2 of the Spitfire MkIX flight stick is now available. If you watched my videos you’ll see that the first one had both fire button wires joined within the body of the stick so that either one would produce the same result. This was a technical issue as I didn’t have a spare wire in the lead connecting the stick to the hub. After doing tests though, despite the advice technical advice of the maker of the circuit board I found it was quite safe to have the roll axis share a ground wire with another axis. This gave me the spare I needed and then I just needed to modify the button engineering to allow it depress in the centre and activate both the machine guns and cannons at the same time. I hope you enjoy it!

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AuthentiKit launches today

Today we released the first AuthentiKit product, the Spitfire MkIX Starter Kit A. What better than the iconic Spitfire to launch this endeavour?

The goal is ambitious – nothing less than to engage the skilled and generous freeware community to develop and share flight controls for all the aircraft we simmers love to fly. We have a freeware movement for aircraft models so why not hardware too – as long as its super easy to assemble and just plugs in and works without needing an electronics engineering degree!.

There are some highly skilled aircraft designers out there but until now it has been far too difficult for most of them to also take on the complications of the electronics and hardware engineering. That is where I hope to bridge the gap with a set of ready made components that can be dropped into a design without soldering or any other engineering challenges. All the designer needs to do is create the case and shape the levers, wheels or knobs then place my components as needed. I realise this will take a little work to communicate and show how this can be done, hence my plan to kickstart the journey with a set of controls I have designed myself.

This picture was taken at Boultbee Flight Academy at Goodwood England where I took my prototype many months ago to see how it compared to the real thing.