Honeycomb Bravo Trim Wheel doesn't track interior cockpit elevator Trim Wheel

When I turn the external Honeycomb Elevator trim wheel 1/2 a turn, the interior cockpit modeled trim wheel should also turn 1/2 a turn in the same direction and at roughly the same rate. Since maybe SU6, this test fails.

1 Like

Asobo have had to dial down the effectiveness of rudder trim long ago as there were huge number of people with trimming issues.

This can never really match IMHO for more than one single aircraft.
The wheel on the Bravo does not have forward or rearward stop. So it can literally be anywhere when you enter the simulated cockpit.
But a Cessna may have 3 turns from stop to stop and a Piper may have 5. So which one should Asobo use ??

Additionally you set trim visually once…that is during the pre-takeoff checklist. After that you trim by feel and not by wheel-position. At least that is how I did it in my roughly 2000h in various singles and twins. :wink:

1 Like

What they should do is map the rotation to the actual trim range for the aircraft simulated. But:

  1. they probably don’t have that info in the plane model
  2. if they did, the honeycomb bravo’s wheel wouldn’t have enough precision to dial in level flight
  3. they’d have to separate the trim buttons from up/down on the bravo trim wheel to keep both methods working at expected increments

Personally I’ve set up a custom config using spad.next where moving the wheel up or down changes the trim by a specific amount in radians; the amount I’ve used is a compromise between precision and speed with a bias to precision, and works well enough in most planes for me but it’s not “realistic”. shrug

Note that the Bravo wheel doesn’t have a “position”; it only counts rotation increments up or down.

OK, I read all the comments. So why does the Honeycomb Bravo Trim wheel in X-Plane’s 172 work normally. Move the Bravo Trim wheel and the X-Plane 172 cockpit model of the trim wheel moves normally in the same direction and at roughly the same rate. I don’t accept Asbos/Honeycomb’s explanation or any other excuse that I’ve read so far. If you can fix the problem with SPADNext or FSUIPC, why can’t Asobo or Honeycomb include that code.

3 Likes

The problem can’t be resolved with something like spad.next without cheating to make it unrealistic (either too slow, or too fast, or some combination of alternating speeds).

It’s been a while since I tried X-Plane with the Bravo, but I don’t think it can get around the fact that there’s about a 5 degrees between virtual button presses, making it very imprecise if used at its natural roll speed.

Are you sure that it both accurately matches the rotation speed and precision of the real Cessna trim wheel in X-Plane?

UPDATE: I tried it; it takes 20 rotations of the wheel to get from neutral to pitch full down in X-Plane. Is that accurate?

This old thread on another forum says:

“I looked in a 1959 172 at lunch…the trim was on the floorwith the indicator also…3 turns down 360 from Takeoff. 2 turnsfrom take off for Up…I made an over explination to sean about the trim wheel…A turn is about 1/3-1/2 not 360 on the wheel…”

So this indicates that X-Plane’s configuration is way wrong too, if it’s stretching out 3 full 360 turns into 20 360-degree turns!

The honeycomb wheel only pushes a button when you turn it, it is not an analog control, so there is no way there will ever be a one to one mapping.

Looks similar is not equal to is the same.

Well you can accept what you want :slight_smile: or not…it doesn’t change the facts. It’s kinda like that thing with the flat earth :wink:
You can setup the trim wheel to correspond exactly to 1 aircraft. But then it will still not match exactly any other aircraft. And that is absolutely no different in X-plane.
If it happens to be a match in the C-172 then it will be wrong in the other x-plane aircraft. Unless you have a special config for the Bravo for every aircraft. Either within the Honeycomb software, not sure if that is possible, in FSUIPC (should be possible to tweak the reaction to the impulses generated by the wheel) or SPADNext (never tried that software)

Once again the wheel is not an absolute position encoder. It is an impulse generator. As I said before it doesn’t have a position or limits…it simply creates countable pulses down or up or no-movement.
And that is no different than if you use a toggle switch on the yoke and the repeat rate in FS.

Hi!

I have bought the Honeycomb Bravo and yes, the trim wheel is unusable as is without modification.

With SpadNext, I have set the step of the trim position for each impulsion of the trim controller. Now, each impulsion increment or decrement the trim position of 0.002 radians and now my Honeycomb trim wheel works like a charm, not too fast, not too slow.

I think the same procedure is possible with FSUIPC also.

Good Day!

Thank you Nicolas, If i can’t persuade Asobo to give us a “sensitivity” control slider (which controls # of key presses that are sent for a given rotation of the Honeycomb Bravo Trim wheel) I’ll have to break down and install SPADnext. As it is, my trim wheel is broken.

Kind of true, you don’t trim by looking at the wheel position. You do it by feel, but part of that means that you roughly have it in muscle memory by how many degrees you have to adjust the trim for a given situation. If you make a swift hand motion on the wheel by say 10 degrees in real life but you have to spin around the in-sim trim wheel two full rotations, this is not a good simulation of reality.

I use spad.next to at least approximately have the in-sim and IRL angles match, at least for the plane I fly IRL (Warrior). The problem with that unfortunately is that you lose precession because of Bravo design limitations.

Absolutely agree. back in the day of FS9 and FSX I tuned the simulated FS aircraft to fly as close as possible to our Archer and later Saratoga using different tools and lots of trial and error :slight_smile:

Because I used both airplanes during my IFR training especially the power settings and speeds needed to match in order to use FS to train local approaches etc.

And both the Archer and the Saratoga had elevator trim on the yoke but I always preferred the wheel because I knew for most configuration changes how much you had to move the wheel to be roughly where you wanted to be.

In the end however small adjustments you simply make by judging the “weight” of the controls in you hand and then let the airplane settle.

I too have this problem in MSFS 2020, just downloaded new in July 2022, but did not encounter a similar problem in X-Plane 11 using the C172SP.

While doing the Flight Training Tutorials, or just free flying, with the 152, I can’t get the Bravo trim wheel to move the 152’s trim wheel correctly, the 152s moves very very slowly compared to the Bravo; all of the bindings (Trim-Up/ Trim-Down) are set correctly to the button numbers.
I’ve had to resort to using buttons on the Alpha yoke as a band-aid approach to the problem, but don’t like the work-around - it’s not natural as the 152 doesn’t have these buttons on the yoke.

IMHO, For as long as this problem has been reported, with no in-house MSFS patch made to a new download, or placed in an auto-update, I see it as embarrassing for MSFS that other third parties must do their work for them, and their customers must jump through hoops to correct this long standing issue. This is like dealing with the government, slow and bureaucratic.
Very disappointed with this product so far… IMHO