To get this out of the way to start, I have been in desperate need of a project. I'm an embedded engineer by education with a fair bit of hobbyist experience in mechanical design and modelling. Something I see quite often are "control boxes", because it's easy to 3D print a box and hook some switches up to an Arduino with a HID sketch running. Now that more professional products are emerging, such as the b-explorer, I didn't really want to go down that road. I'm a "HOKAS" player, and for years I've been trying to find a way to get my left hand off the keyboard in a way that is more intuitive than a left handed joystick. A joystick doesn't have an intuitive mapping to translation, because the twist axis for up and down makes no sense. I'm sure you can get used to it, but I don't like it. There's also those 3D mice, but they don't provide any buttons or switches so I'd have to keep taking my hand off the controller to hit keyboard buttons anyway. I had an epiphany a few days ago that a control stick in the style of the "collective" in a helicopter could have a direct mapping to translation and make a really fun and unique project. Up and down motion on the lever would provide up and down thrust, and a thumbstick would control forward/back and left/right thrust. Such a stick would sit at seat level, attached to the chair or some support, on the left side. I've seen a few very simple implementations of this by helicopter sim players, but they have it easy because the lever only goes from horizontal to up, with a friction stop to keep it from dropping down. In order for this control scheme to work for up and down I need a sprung gimbal with a solid center detente. Here is my first pass at a mechanical design, and I plan to continue posting pictures in this thread as I progress in the project. The control box at the end is barren right now because I wanted to prototype this with just the movement control before I went crazy on switches. I definitely plan to add a few, including a slider on the right for throttle and a bicycle-style lever on the bottom for spacebrake.