List of Force Feedback hardware

TL;DR, my short but informed experience with the Moza AY210:

Good device overall, with two caveats: noticeable friction in pitch, and truly bad default profiles. Using a fine-tuned profile makes a great difference.

Hardware Trim isn’t really usable, for relying on the spring effect which is nonsensical for a GA aircraft for various reasons.

Software Trim (aka Trim Following) seems to work nicely, but requires editing the flight model (and, as far as I can tell, giving up on a properly working autopilot).

Hello everyone,

Following up on my previous post: I went ahead and bought the Moza AY210. After a few flights, here are my findings, hopefully useful to others considering it.

For context, I’m a real-life pilot and I previously built my own yoke from scratch (not real FFB but with proper trim handling). So trim behaviour is something I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about.

1. Trim

For most serious simmers, trim is the main reason to look at FFB in the first place. So let me start with some background:

a) In a real aircraft, if you hold the yoke in a fixed position (say, against pressure) and then trim, the elevator doesn’t move (because you’re holding it), but the pressure on the yoke goes away, since you’re reducing the aerodynamic load on the elevator. That’s the behaviour we want from an FFB device.

b) MSFS doesn’t work that way, because it only supports conventional devices whose centre position is fixed. When you trim, the sim emulates an effect on the elevator so that the yoke can return to centre as the trim is operated. Completely unrealistic, but it’s the only workable solution without FFB.

c) Now with an FFB device with MSFS, there are two ways to remove the pressure without moving the yoke:

Leave the sim’s trim ratio untouched and handle everything in the hardware.

Use the sim’s trim ratio as an input to the hardware — but in that case the workaround above has to be cancelled out, which can be done by altering ELEVATOR_TRIM_LIMIT in the flight model.

What Moza Cockpit does:

From my testing, both approaches are available:

Hardware trim mode implements solution 1: it offsets the neutral point without touching the sim’s trim. The catch is that it requires the spring effect to be enabled, which is itself thoroughly unrealistic, that’s not how a light aircraft behaves. The “neutral point” depends on many parameters (trim, but also airflow and more). On the ground, for instance, the controls are completely free apart from the…