Should I use 100K pots for brake and gas pedal?

[unclet]

Try to learn....so please help:

I purchased a virtua racing gas/brake pedal assembly and I am planning on connecting it to the gameport.  The gas pedal has to be pressed farther (ex: 4") than the brake pedal does (ex: 1") just a like car I guess.   Based on reading some stuff about potentiometers and gameports, it seems I should remove the 5K pots from each of the pedals and replace them with 100K pots.   My question is since the brake pedal does not have to be pushed as far down the gas pedal does, then should this influence me on to which type of pots to buy?  Should the brake and gas pedals have the same exact 100K pot, or should the pots they both use be different in some way.....

[PoDunkMoFo]

A couple of ideas that may be of some help.  If you are connecting it to the gameport directly then they need to be 100k non-audio.  When you go to calibrate the device in windows you will push it as far as you can a couple of times and windows will then use that reading to define min/max.  If you look on some higher end electronics sites you will notice that pots come in different mechanical angles ie;180 90...etc this lets you use a pot that say only rotates 90 degrees show the same value as a pot that rotates 180 degrees.

I don't know if that makes any sense to you.  It is also possible to use spur gears such as in a star wars yoke to get the turn rate to pot turn ratio that you want.

I think the windows calibration route would be the simplest.

[unclet]

Yeah I was going to get two 100K linear taper potentiometers from Radio shack.  I was just not certain as to which mechanical angles I should purchase since the brake and gas pedals have different range of motion.

It is good to learn I could calibrate them using Windows but I would think I would want to purchase the best-fit mechanical angles so the response of each potentiometer pedal would be best.   I would think I would want a 180degree 100K pot for the gas and maybe a 90degree 100K pot for the brake pedal (since this has less range of motion than the gas pedal)

What pots and mechanical angle do most people use for a gas pedal vs a brake pedal?

[neuromancer]

90 degrees would go from straight up and down, to on the floor. I expect most pedals probably only rotate through 15 to 20 degrees.

That's no doubt why Starwars yokes do the reduction -- to get better precision by mechanically scaling a small range of motion onto a large range of potentiometer travel.

Bob