Transducers are expensive. These are well refined potentiometers attached to your throttle lever, sidestick, flaps lever or spoiler/speedbrake. Transducers usually come with more than one potentiometer – this is for redundancy and to ensure the values in all the potentiometer read the same; any error would have severe catastrophic consequence.

Transducer unit attached to rods. Source: Quora – How does the control joystick in Airbus aircraft work?

Transducers have high resale value – on the aircraft tear-down market they can go for thousands of dollars.

Fortunately the pedestal when received had the transducers already attached to the throttle lever arms. Wiring to an interface board such as a Leo Bodnar is as simple as plugging into the cannon plugs on the pedestal.

The magic plastic transducer box

4 potentiometers are connected up to each throttle lever

If your part does not have the transducers a home made solution is in order. The simulator’s genuine sidesticks and flaps panel did not have transducers so it was necessary to create a substitute. With some creativity, it is possible to create a device to communicate with your I/O board. The device simply translates physical movements to an electrical signal for the computer, and the flight simulator to read.

With some tips from Simon a solution for the sidesticks nil transducers was made. Sliding potentiometers, nuts, bolts, washers, Ikea spare parts and a handy glue gun were facilitated to create a functioning sliding mechanism.

Two (one for each sidestick) PTA4543-2015DP-B103 Bourns sliding potentiometers (45MM, linear) were used to translate Y axis (elevator) on the sidestick.

Two PTA6043-2015DP-B103 Bourns potentiometer, 10k (60 MM, linear) were used to translate X (aileron) on the sidestick.