Beko Pharm

Thrustmaster rudder pedal repair

I repaired my old Thrustmaster rudder pedals. That’s the one I upgraded using an Arduino Pro Micro before (PeerTube, YouTube) to get rid of their old D-Sub connector so this device is really old and probably belongs into a museum. I doubt I’d get any replacement parts for this from the vendor nowadays.

Their sliding beds are made of some sort of plastic and this started to become brittle over the years. When I noticed that one side was coming apart I found several more hair fractures so I had to stop playing with the pedals for a while.

Yesterday I went with one of the sliding beds to the Swablab, our local maker space, and considered cutting and milling new parts of wood, when a fellow maker suggested to use some leftover HPL pieces for the job.

This was far less complicated compared to what I had in mind and I went for it. After a few minutes in the workshop I ended up with two new sliding beds that I mounted today. Worked like a charm.

I went with Liquid Moly LM47 for some lube, simply because I have a tube of that around from working on the car. That’s grease for stuff like bearings and probably overkill for the job.

Couldn’t be happier. The pedals are back into service and feel even better than before (probably thanks to the new grease) and I avoided once more going for expensive modern replacements. I’m also probably the only one with rudder pedals with wood aesthetic now 🤓

https://beko.famkos.net/2026/04/16/thrustmaster-rudder-pedal-repair/ #DIY #flightsim #homeCockpit #simpit #Swablab #Thrustmaster

VFD segment displays in HTML/CSS for my SimPit

So I dunno if you know what a #VFD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display) is but I’m a sucker for these – at least virtually.

Games like #RebelGalaxyOutlaw perfected the look and this is where I want to go with my #Arwes HUD app for my #EliteDangerous / #X4Foundations home cockpit too.

The segment displays are heavily inspired by #AugmentedUI project (https://augmented-ui.com/) where I’ll borrow some more elements. Learned the neat fake scan lines from there too. And yes the 8 segment display works by shifting bits under the hood 🤓 This isn’t really needed for an app but I have plans to add some real segment displays eventually (I do have a whole box full with these!) so I wanted to know how to implement this anyway.

Video from an earlier stage in the development demos the scan line effect.

The bars are configured with parameters in size, count, percent, colours and thresholds 😁 I also added a random chance of 5% to shift the hue a little bit because just as in real life nothing is perfect.

And yes they are fully themed so switching the colour theme also affects the virtual VFDs.

I’m also going to replace the older horizontal bars, that look way too boring in comparison.

It’s still very early but I hope to get some rad animations going too. See https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2022/retro-digital-dashboards to get an idea in which direction this is going 🤓

See the dedicated project page https://SimPit.dev for more details on this #Macross #VF1 inspired #cockpit panel.

https://beko.famkos.net/2025/05/04/vfd-segment-displays-in-html-css-for-my-simpit/ #arwes #augmentedUi #cockpit #EliteDangerous #homeCockpit #macross #RebelGalaxyOutlaw #simpit #VF1 #VFD #x4foundations

Blocksizes in the wild Who bought a bunch of used Seagate Constellation SAS drives and didn’t check for their block-size of 520 not supported by the old hardware raid controller? Yes, me. Who got a dirty cheap LSI SAS 9200-8E controller with pass-through just to fix that? Yes, also me. That’ll take a while 🤪