Wild Boar RC Stick Switch

Andrej sent me two of his latest creation, Wild Boar RC Stick Switches. There’s been some fuzz about these on forums for a while and due how I keep my fingers on stick and because I fly heli’s and rarely can take my fingers from sticks I was following the discussions with interest. This have also been the reason I did not feel comfortable with other available switches. So, let’s see what the fuzz is about!

Wild Boar RC Stick Switch

What you get is a small bag with the switch and small paper with some info on:

Opening the two screws takes the stick apart and we get to see the the actual switches and wiring:

Craftmanship is spot on, parts fit together perfectly, material seems to be of high quality and there is no binding or any similar issues with the actual switches. Looks quite promising at this point!

Attached info-paper tells that some tape should be put to the half with the switches just in case to prevent possible shorts. So I took a small piece of kapton tape and used that:

We’re ready, let’s open the transmitter, once again!

Installation (DC-24)

As we know the stick shaft in Jeti transmitter is hollow and this with the ready solder-pads  for swirch-wiring makes installation a quick and easy job. Just next to both gimbals is a small PCB with 3 solder-pads (red squares in picture below)

So next step is to put the Wild Boar on place threading the wires through gimbal:

You can adjust the height quite a lot, I like short sticks so mine went to lowest possible position. These are just a tad longer than my original, very short sticks so I was quite happy with them.

Also the rotation is freely adjustable, I have my right one turned “in” just a bit and left straight up. This is of course very depending on how you hold the sticks when flying.

Going back to inside of transmitter let’s have a look on the solder-pads. Pads are ready to use from factory, there are brown, red and orange wires already going to transmitter system board:

So it’s easy to solder sticks wires to gimbal pcb. Stick wiring is following: White is common, Blue is bottom button and Red is top button. Corresponding colors in my DC-24 are Orange, Red and Brown.

End result could look like this:

And with both on place it’s ready to put the back cover back on:

Looking at the wire and the quality I do not expect any issues with something eating the wire to bare metal, if you have the “fasten everything like concrete!”-obsession take into account that stick needs to move freely.

Got switches?

I do! A lot of them, finally!

Setup in transmitter

Going to switch setup in system menu  let’s us select switch mode to last two switches. They have been disabled until now so I set them both up as 3-point switch. In idle the switch value is 0, pressing top-bottom value is 100 and pressing bottom button value is -100. Rest is up to my imagination!

How do they feel?

They’re as perfect in my opinion as they can be. Good quality material (7075 T6 treated aluminium), clean and good machining creating good touch with great grip. Also for me as a “half-thumber” I like the top being sharp enough so thumbers should be satisfied and for pinchers the top is not too sharp. So excellent compromise on that. The feeling of the actual switches is really great. There is a clear clicky feeling and I think this is very important for the feedback to user. No binding at all, all four buttons feel exactly the same so this gives a small hint on quality. Verdict at this point? Absolutely approved, great work, easy to install and great quality!

Height is 28mm total, diameter is 10mm. The actual switches are 2.2 x 3.9mm, that sounds small but is really good and easy to press.

Available from?

Stick are available to a price of 59.90€ and up for one switch at least from Digitech-aerosports (NL), Hepf (AT), JettstreamUK (UK), Mibomodeli (SI) and Topmodel SAS (FR). Of course also from Andrej Jemec via mail.