Thrustmaster t3pa pedal Load Cell Mod

Based on some forum posts, blogs and this Youtube Video I made a load cell pedal mod.

However all these guides suggested to use this load cell amplifier and it was too expensive for me and I haven’t found any guides with anything cheaper, so I thought I will experiment with cheaper basic op-amps (because I think lc amplifier mentioned before is basically an op-amp).

Of course those guides do not require any soldering, well I had to do quite a bit, and required some other tools, that I already had because of my electronics hobby.

I will mostly cover how to connect AD623 op-amp instead of Load Cell amplifier, everything else can be found in other guides.

Parts I used:

• 20kg Load Cell (only)
• AD623 op-amp Out of Stock
• AD623 op-amp
• Some wires.
• 3pin male connector.

Connecting load cell to op-amp:

• Red wire -> VS+
• Green -> IN+
• White -> IN-
• Black -> GND

You might need to change Green to IN- and White to IN+ because not all loadcells are the same.

Connecting to t3pa (you have to confirm these yourself with multimeter):

• GND -> Connector Red wire
• OUT -> Yellow wire
• VS+ -> Black wire

for some reason my t3pa didn’t follow wire coloring. So check yours with multimeter before plugging it in.

This is connector I made:

So Red -> v3.3, Black -> GND, and Yellow -> OUT, however Thrustmasters connector to potentiometer was Black -> v3.3, Yellow -> Sense/Out, and RED -> GND in my case, again check with multimeter.

Also there are REF and GND pads on op-amp solder them together. You also need to connect GND to VS-, but since we connected REF with GND we can just solder VS- and REF pins together:

Last thing is to connect load cell to t3pa open Thrustmaster control panel and adjust potentiometer on op-amp until it reads load cell correctly from 0 to 100%.

Result:

Update:

Eliminated Deadzone and increased travel by adding some nuts:

Update:

Since previous op-amp out of stock added link to a new one thanks to fellow sim racers. This pinout should work with this other op-amp (didn’t test myself)