The Skytation Aviator Yoke with Interchangeable Handles

[StarComic824651]

I commend your approach to the yoke, and I hope you succeed. May I suggest that you also offer this yoke as a total kit ( that needs to be assembled) in order to: remain competitive while shipping more units per day ( thus justifying your bulk purchases).

You can sell the kits to many advanced users like me offer cad or stl files for broken or defective parts as the only guarantee. I would also sell your controller board if it’s a custom one.

You’ll soon find that your labor is the biggest constraint, and 3d printing is not 100% repeatable, which makes bulk manufacturing hit and miss. Often, I decide to print the same part on multiple printers for fear that one printer will fail. Printing on different printers, however, produce less than perfectly identical parts.

Your pricing is fair, but I can assure you that it will barely cover your time spent, electricity, taxes,( don’t tell your home insurance that you’re manufacturing using machinery that can catch on fire), make sure you have good ventilation( if pets or children roam around while you’re printing). Because I wanted redundancy, I had many printers running, but refused to run them at night because of my family. I also did it in the garage so that ventilation was not an issue.
No issue if, as you say, you’re not paying the mortgage with it. Nevertheless, good business practice is to decide how much your hourly time is worth and price your product accordingly.

Please, don’t take this wrong. I did exactly what you’re doing, except that I was much older than you and no longer had a job. I was retired and had all my bills, including college for the kids, paid for. I didn’t care if didn’t cost my time since I was not interested in maximizing my income.

[Skytation]

I appreciate your feedback 100%, thank you! In terms of a kit, this crossed my mind, almost doing a similar thing as Prusa does with their 3D printers. The main reason I didn’t choose to go that route: support time. I agree many advanced users such as yourself would have no issue with assembling a kit, calibrating it, etc, however a large chunk of users would have issues with that, and that would require support time from me. Needing to deal with support issues when it comes to a customer fully assembling a unit, in my opinion, will take WAY more of my time than just assembling and shipping fully completed units myself.

You are correct in terms of 3D printer accuracy. In my experience there really is no way to mitigate that aside from using the best/most reliable and precise printers you can. That’s why I chose to go with Bambu printers because in my testing they were producing the best results time after time. The other thing I tried to steer clear of was not making any mission critical parts that require extreme precision out of plastic, or extremely small. I knew that’s where I would pull my hair out knowing that what came off the printer each time wouldn’t be exactly the same as the one before it.

I’ve built probably 15-20 units between prototypes and test units for others, and all passed the test in terms of doing the job this yoke is meant to do. Of course there were print failures along the way, plenty of cussing and all that, but in the end I was able to end up with a design and process that will allow me to have the printers and my suppliers doing the biggest chunk of the work providing me parts that are finished and ready to go. As I said in the video, when I designed these I knew they had to be able to go together quickly, and that’s what I feel like I ended up with. None of my parts coming off the printers require any post processing whatsoever, aside from removing some support here or there.

In terms of my prices… I can promise you they more than cover everything you stated. I didn’t just blindly set those prices, I added up my cost of materials, down to every screw and gram of plastic, I factored in electricity and failed prints when making calculations on how much the printed parts cost, and then finally I added in a “labor” cost based on how long I spend starting/removing prints from the printer, assembly, etc. I gave myself a rate of $20/hr when doing that calculation, I feel like I’m worth that The one thing I didn’t factor in was the amount of time I’ve spent over the last year designing this thing (the R&D cost if you will). I know that is substantial, but in terms of monetary value it was simply just my time, and a few prototyping materials I guess.

But when all that was said and done, I had my “official” cost of goods sold, which I then subtracted out payment processing fees from the website, and then finally withheld a profit tax percentage I know I’ll need to pay, and that left me with my final overall margin. I priced the units accordingly to where I was happy with the margin remaining.

[Skytation]

Website has been updated with new stock and has a new look, and I’ve created an Etsy shop as well if that’s more your flavor. Website is https://skytation.store and Etsy is https://skytation.etsy.com. Here’s a small photo dump with some updated pics, lots more specs/info on the website.

[GiggyCarrot6583]

I really agree with this. The market is missing a GA central stick to use with the large number of GA planes including Diamond DA40 and so many other non yoke airplanes and there is nothing available if you wont compromise and get a military looking right hand stick

[hobanagerik]

I wanted a force feedback left hand bit of wood with only a button or two on it. No one caters to that market, it seems.

[Skytation]

I’ll do you one better if you want the TRUE Diamond experience… the second base unit I’m working on (project name “Aviator Pro”) is going to be a floor mounted base that will allow for stick use (Diamond, Extra 300, bush planes, etc) as well as pendular motion use (airliner, Citation, etc). It will utilize the same handle mounting functionality as the Aviator push/pull base, so all handles can be used interchangeably between the two bases. Obviously grips used on the floor mounted base such as the Diamond, Extra 300, etc would only work on that base, but I mean if you wanted to take the 172 style yoke handle currently developed for the Aviator push/pull base and put it on the Aviator Pro pendular base you could.

I’m about to post a new video on my YouTube channel showing the new strategy moving forward with these projects. Right now I produce fully finished/completed units, but the plan is to move towards DIY kit options. Since a lot of the parts on these units come from 3D printers, I want to offer the option to people to print their own parts (have full control over the color they want, filament type, etc), and then I will provide a kit containing all the other necessary components cut to size and ready to go (aluminum extrusion, bearings, hardware, PCBs, etc). The biggest thing this will allow for is the ability for me to lower the price. I’m a one man show doing this all in my basement, and so if I can remove the 3D printing/assembly part of it I can knock the price down which I think will make it a lot more desirable to more people. I really see this with the handles… if someone wants to take my handle design and print it themselves, the only thing they’ll need from me will be the buttons/HAT switches, shift register PCBs, and the cables. That’ll will drop the cost of a handle drastically, but then also allow the person to finish it however they want. Right now I have my printers set to add a texture on my handles as seen in the pictures, but if for example someone wants to paint their handle, or leather wrap it, or rubber dip/coat it… that would all be an option. They’ll have the STL file that would come with the handle kit, and then they can print and finish it however they want, then just install the buttons/switches/PCBs and cables from my kit so it all works flawlessly with the base units and they’re good to go.

Ultimately what I’m going for here is a semi-open source strategy for these yokes that will hopefully make them widely accessible to a lot of people (forgot to mention going to a kit option as opposed to shipping fully finished units means smaller shipping boxes which means I can do international shipping that won’t be ridiculously priced). I know there’s plenty of videos and stuff out there of people who have done their own yokes and provide details about parts and all that, but what I think has been missing is a fully fleshed out kit that has been procured and put together along with fully comprehensive build videos for someone to easily follow. Also having my custom PCBs means no one has to worry about arduino’s, learning custom coding, or any of that. It’s just simple assembly and plug-n-play.

Lastly, the best part of all of this… The FFB integration. FFB and writing software/code for all of that is way out of my league and the reason (along with cost) I simply went with bungees as the tension mechanism for these base units. However, I know FFB is at the top of a lot of people’s lists, and so that’s why I’m going to be incorporating the option for it into these base units. VPForce (TelemFFB) is an open source FFB solution created by a very smart simmer named Walmis. He originally created it for his FFB joystick named the “Rhino”, but it has widely been used by others to modify rudder pedals and other peripherals. I have been talking with Walmis and my plan is to incorporate his motors/boards into my base unit designs so that if someone wants they can easily convert them to FFB. They would simply just purchase the motors and boards from him and easily install into my base units, then utilizing his software get everything dialed in. My kit prices would stay the same regardless of whether you choose bungee or FFB since both options will be designed into the base units, so the only cost you would incur in upgrading to FFB would be the motors/boards from VPForce.

More details about this will be in the video I hope to post soon, but I saw your comment and wanted to let you know a solution for what you’re wanting is on the way! Things like yokes and throttles should be more modular like this and allow simmers the ability to customize to their heart’s content, and so that’s what I’m trying to develop here.

[GiggyCarrot6583]

The Diamond experience you write about got my attention but floor mount, DIY and everything else perhaps not so much. I am at a regular desk in a smallish room, in a small apartment with limited time to fly. I am not going to have room for this. All I ever really need (and many others from what I have read on forums over the last year) is a basic stick that could be mounted to one of the regular bases like the WardBRD and such. Bonus if it looked like the DA40 but absolutely not nessesary as long as it does not look like something from Top Gun.

Look forward to the video anyway as I might not have understood fully the concept you are going for.