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Building a landing gear lever with a real handle, 737 style published november 13, 2020 updated december 3, 2020 The landing gear lever mentioned below is made around a real 737 lever. All parts were made from scratch by me including the front panel. The annunciators were also made from scratch. Each annunciator contains 3 high power LEDs in the correct color. A requirement for the construction was that the original handle also had to remain original, in other words no holes may be drilled or modified in any way.
When looking at the photos you will see that a large wheel is mounted on the handle, this weel belongs to the landing gear and I will build everything on this wheel. On top of this wheel I placed an acrylic wheel with cams that are going to operate the micro switches. At the bottom of this wheel is a lever with spring that lets you feel the steps between the 3 positions when you operate the lever. Everything was mounted on a 3 mm thick PVC panel. The electronic parts include an Arduino Mega2560 and a led extension board that will light up the annunciators. The led extension board is also connected to the Arduino. We need this because Arduino ports cannot drive 3 leds from 1 port. This lever will have to work with XPLane 11 so we chose Air Manager as the interface. Here a script was written containing the 3 micro switches and the 6 annunciators. This script ensures proper operation of the lever.
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To drive the annunciators and the microswitches I use an Arduino Mega2560 and the leds are driven with a LED extension board which is also connected to the Arduino Mega. The scripts are now available for Air Manager or Arduino via XPL Direct. All details in the download Both files in the download for 10,00 euro
Take a look at the video