As a Honeycomb bravo user, one of the biggest frustrations I have with the quadrant is the trim wheel.
As most of you know it’s basically a button press solution that can oft be hit and miss and varies wildly from aircraft to aircraft. Some aircraft trim out just fine and others, I can spend the entire flight fighting the wheel to trim out effectively.
I’ve seen various solutions proposed including addons like authentikit etc. What solutions have you guys found and would recommend as the simplest and most effective.
I do have registered copies of FSUIPC, SPADNEXT, AAO and Goflight Interface tool so any solutions that incorporate these would be warmly welcomed and gratefully received. Hardware solutions too would be very welcome.
I’m hoping this thread might help not just myself but, others who are currently dealing with this issue or come across it in the future.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice. It is very much appreciated.
Sim Hanger on YT has excellent video on the HC and it’s trim wheel issues. In my experience, I had HC Bravo, and got rid of it, as it’s too much work and too big for my space.
The OC did describe exactly how sim handles the action of TW, but the key to success is to move is slowly, and it will catch all the on/off better. You can watch the dial move in a plane like 747 just to see how it works. I found it more frustrating, so sold mine and got Virpil CM-3 Throttle and coded one of the buttons on the Throttle 2 To handle trim, works way better.
As aside, if you have the instruments setup for them to show outside plane like “trim, flaps, etc.” I think the readouts are wrong. If I set TO trim per FMS to 5.96 and look at readout on screen it is not the same number. So I watch it for - or + but follow the horizon indicator in cockpit as better gauge on if level or not.
I can’t help you with the Bravo specific problem, but if your trim keeps getting close but not exactly where you want it, you can make throttle adjustments to try to dial it in. Trim is setting level flight for a specific speed, so you can compensate by adjusting speed by other means.
Thank you for response. I do that as a matter of course (re throttle reduction). I just find that with some aircraft any adjustment to the trim wheel is either not recognised initially or is recognised too much. Often you end up compensating as you think your trim input has not been registered so when you roll it again it kind of stacks with previous roll leading to excessive over trimming (kind of hard to explain but I’m sure others have had to deal with similar issue).
I think I might have watched Sim Hangars video a while back regarding trim wheel. I will check it out again. The virpil looks like a nice bit of kit but, doesn’t have quite the same level of versatility as the HC Bravo.
I’m thinking about mapping the trim wheel to the x-touch mini rotary encoder for the time being until I can find a better solution.
I’ll have a deeper look into it. Hopefully, it’s not too time consuming to get some sort of workaround going with Spad or that someone has already done the heavy lifting (I hope). Thank you for response.
Also see if HC has new update to their software, as that might make it work better, and not have to have another “piece of something else” to make this stuff work. I do not use any add-on software products to use my controls and program in how I want buttons to work. VIrpil does store configuration for devices on the unit itself, not on MSFS, so MSFS sees it, but has no profile for it in DB. I then set them the way I want them to work. FWIW-I do try to make MSFS-XP-FSX all use the same buttons/switches as far as possible so do not have to think on which button works what.