Throttle controller with trim wheel?

Are there any decent controllers out there that have a trim wheel? Only seeing these on the new honeycomb one. Don’t understand why it’s not a more popular accessory - I find trimming with joystick buttons a real fiddle.

The Honeycomb Bravo is pretty much your best bet at the moment. There is a (now discontinued) Saitek trim wheel accessory, which is just the wheel and nothing else. There is also the Saitek Multi Panel, which has a small and a rather clumsy plasticky trim wheel.

The Logitech trim wheel on the multi panel may be plastic, but it works very well.

Do we have trim axis in MSFS? I have a Logitech X56 that has analog knobs on the throttle… Which I can assign to anything. If trim axis exist in the sim, then you can just bind it to the knobs. I know I use it for my brake axis.

Yes we do, except that mapping a physical potentiometer (axis) to the trim axis is quite finicky when used alongside the autopilot. As the AP takes control of the axis, it resets to whatever position you left the physical knob/lever when you engaged the AP.

The best trim wheel implementations are based on up/down button presses instead of direct axis mappings. For example, the Honeycomb Bravo wheel is not an axis, but it sends pulses of up/down signals to the sim as you rotate the wheel. That way it will not get confused when you use the autopilot.

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Ahh… that makes sense… I always use autopilot and never really to use any trim myself. So I never bound mine.

But then again, even on a physical potentiometer, usually they have virtual buttons at both ends. a + and a -. So if you assign the potentiometer to use trim up to use the + virtual buttons, and the trim down to use the - virtual buttons at the other end, the one in the middle would be neutral so it won’t be in conflict with the autopilot.

But then again, you’ll be using a digital binary function to adjust the trim anyway, so having a trim wheel or not is irrelevant, isn’t it? Since you can bind it to any other binary buttons either on the keyboard, joystick, or hotas.

I’ve never thought of it that way, but in theory you can map an axis that has virtual buttons at each end to trim, but it would be very clumsy to use.

Until we get a motorized trim wheel which actually syncs up with the AP trim (as in real life), I’d steer clear of axis based trim controllers. Most aircraft actually have button trim on the yoke anyway, so using a digital trim instead of an analog axis is not such an immersion breaker anyway.

I think those motorised controls are reserved for professional full flight simulator sets… Like Avion Level D. And if it is for a home simulator set, it would be expensive hardware to buy, and not to mention the cost of adding that function in the sim itself for a small group of niche virtual pilots that’s already in a niche market for the whole simulator anyway.

That’s true. Although looking at how many thousands upon thousands of euros I’ve already spent on my flight sim gear, I’m not to judge anyone who spends silly amounts of money for these kind of gadgets :sweat_smile:

There are some keyboards with such kind of media volume control wheel, could one maybe bind the trim to that wheel?

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That should work if you can reprogram the volume wheel to send two keyboard commands instead.

So with a software like reWASD it should maube work.

Now I am just lacking a keyboard with volume wheel…

I use the Flight Velocity trim wheel. Work well but on some planes the trim wheel response more then others. Flight Velocity coming out with a second version of it and and you could just the tension on the wheel now. I pre-order it a few weeks ago.

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Juxpax,
Best explanation for my difficulty to bind the trim wheel in my Bravo to MFS2020.
How do I bind the trim wheel in MFS2020?