5 years ago while visiting logitech labs I saw a poster of a kitten hanging on a tree branch, which prompted me to masturbate into their drinking fountain. The resulting genetic poisoning caused logitech to become retarded, and now all the joysticks they make are fucked up. Instead of putting the throttle on the side like they used to, now it is impossible to buy a joystick without the throttle being stuck in the center of the stick where your arm is blocking it. The only way around this is to shell out $120 for a professional flight simulator throttle stick combo, which is bullshit. I had to find a solution to this Elbonian tragedy.



Afroman's Ghetto Throttle Stick

In this mod, I will use an old tape player that I found as an external throttle slider that I can easily reach with my left hand.

Here is what the joystick looked on the inside. With any analog control joystick you will find potentiometers acting as voltage dividers. The outer sides of the pot are supplied with power, and the center becomes a voltage proportional to the amount of throttle. e.g. 0V = zero throttle, 2.5V is medium throttle, 5V is full throttle. For this particular joystick, the green wire was where the throttle signal was expected. If you replace the joystick's pot with an external pot, you will be able to have an external throttle control.
 

Here is the old tape player I found. I wanted to use the volume control slider pot as a replacement for the joystick's throttle. I opened it up and was greeted by a huge pile of crap. It looked the mess of wires that were in Arnold's jeep in Commando when Arius' goons sabotaged it. 
 

A nice surprise was that the tape player was full of 3 wire ribbon cables, so I didn't have to hold any schoolgirls hostage in exchange for cat5.


3 bowls of dope and 2 chainsaw blades later, I had cut through the mess of crap and soldered the wires to the volume slider pot.
 

I got weirdass results when I tried to use the original throttle pot's power wires, so instead I just tapped off 0V and 5V directly from the USB connection. As always with USB, black is 0V, red is 5V.



Results:


An interesting surprise was that since it was a volume pot, the throttle control was now logarithmic, which is very handy for slow flying bombing runs.

Too bad noone plays Battlefield 2 anymore.