Today I decided to look into a more elegant solution to the problem of accurately determining the angle of my rudder pedals, previously I had solved this problem with a mechanical solution that converted the specific degrees of rotation of the rudder pedal cross arm to the 270° rotation of the potentiometer I’m using. This mechanical solution involved a timing belt and two 3D printed toothed wheels of the correct ratio.
There’s supposed to be some pictures here, but WordPress is currently broken for me 🙁
While this solution did work, it was not a particularly elegant solution and made calibration difficult as well as ran the risk of damaging the pot or causing the calibration to drift if the axis was forcibly pushed past it’s limits, which is very likely with a foot operated device!
The electrical solution I came up with was to use an Op Amp to map the output range of the sensor to the larger range of the Analog to Digital Converter so that I could use the limited motion of the potentiometer directly coupled to the rudder pedal cross arm and still get the full 0-5v range I was looking for to get the maximum precision from my ADC.
In my research for this solution I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I’m not an engineer of any description, nor do I possess a particularly strong grasp of mathematics or electronics theory, and so I frequently have to look things up, which is difficult when you don’t know how to phrase your question!
I stumbled my way across this thread on the electronics Stack Exchange: where the original poster was looking to do something similar to myself and it provided a link to a Texas Instruments reference document on calculating the gain and offset of an Op Amp: Designing Gain and Offset in Thirty Seconds.
After parsing the formulas I entered them into a spreadsheet and began testing my results with TinkerCAD circuits, an excellent tool for testing circuits without blowing up any real world components! The circuit I came up with, with the help of the spreadsheet was this.
Please note that if you attempt to use the spreadsheet and it gives you crazy values, it may be that I made an error in the formulas, I have only tested the Positive m and Negative b function, as that is the one that is pertinent here. If you find any bugs and make a fix, please let me know so I can update the sheet!
This effectively reproduces the the scenario of a pot with limited range and swings the values between roughly 0 and 5v, which in this case was just a set of arbitrary values that I decided to use for testing the spreadsheet. I had to tweak the value of R1 in order to get the range I wanted, which is described in the TI reference.
So to sum it up, if you have a sensor that outputs a non-ideal range of voltages you can use an Op Amp to map that to a usable range and you can use TI’s helpful “Designing Gain and Offset in Thirty Seconds” to get you there, though the title is a little optimistic unless you already know what you’re doing!