Good lord, we have lamps now?!
I would have been happy with just having actual steering.
I need to buy a flight stick, but I'm having trouble finding what I want. What are the pot values for a 360 gamepad? I might wire up a custom built one to a hack and that way I would have rumble. Force-feedback sticks have all but vanished and I really don't want to deal with 15 year old sticks. I can use the yoke for most stuff in a pinch though.
Modern gamepads including xbox360 pads use 10k pots, but they're limited deflection (they cover their resistance range over say 90-120 degrees of physical movement). Off the shelf pots are morel like 270-280 degrees.
You can calibrate it out in emulators, but it won't work for a lot of games. A lot of modern controllers don't offer calibration in windows anymore. 5k (or half voltage) is center.
I have a cyber sled control panel (dual analog trigger-sticks) that I swapped 10k pots into and wired to a gamepad.
It works OK in MAME. Since it's only using a small portion of the travel of the pots, sometimes it feels like it's taking big steps rather than being smooth analog.
In retrospect, I should have just used the stock 5k arcade pots with an Ultimarc APAC or similar interface.
Old joysticks are 100k and were wired directly to the gameport. No electronics inside the stick.
You can wire up 100k pots to a $7 USB gameport adapter and it will show up as a generic joystick (no rumble).
The PC version of the happ arcade stick used 100k limited deflection pots that cost like $25 each + Happ's high shipping.
I forked over $40 to buy one in hopes of using the numbers on it to find a generic supplier for them.
I found the manufacturer, but the part number was a generic "built to customer request" number.
So to summarize, joysticks use limited deflection pots that cover their total range over a much shorter distance...and you can't buy them anywhere for a reasonable price.
One of my 3D printer goals is to make parts to convert an arcade quality joystick to analog using either tiny thumbstick pots or gearing to get around the deflection issue.
It probably won't come anytime soon though.