A few weeks ago I grabbed a Futaba buddy box to use with FMS. I tried assembling Vitaly's circuit for the PIC interface, but I just couldn't get it working. I considered building my own circuit with a PIC16F628, MAX232 and other components (which I am a bit more familiar with), but I figured I'd give Ken Hewitt's kit a try - at only 15 bucks shipped, it was slightly less than the parts that I had already gotten from Radio Shack.
The kit arrived the other day, and I was pleased to find that absolutely everything needed was included, right down to the cable, strain reliefs and even a small white styrene end plate to finish off the plastic housing nicely. The tiny little PCB was professionally etched and silkscreened with component locations, and I must compliment Ken on finding a 6-pin DIN connector that is much better than the ones I had ordered from Digi-Key (a large electronics supplier here in the states).
The kit didn't include any instructions, but I found them immediately as a zipped Word file on Ken's webpage. Soldering the components onto the board went quickly, and the hardest part of assembly was simply squeezing the strain relief through the hole in the styrene end plate! After finishing assembly, I hooked it up to my Futaba buddy box (had to hook it up to a power supply, as the biuddy box came with no batteries), loaded FMS, set the interface settings to work with a serial PIC at 9600bps, and calibrated my sticks. After determining which channels needed inverting, I was off and crashing spectacularly in no time! (Oh well, I've got all winter to become proficient).
So for anybody considering Ken's interface kit, I highly recommend getting it. If you're a total beginner with electronics, you may want to learn a little first (assembling the kit does require you to know how to read resistor color codes, what a zener diode looks like, etc.), but most of the people here would probably have minimal difficulty with the kit. At only ฟ shipped for the kit, I can't imagine that Ken is making any money on it whatsoever (unless he's paying far less for his PCBs than I am), so many thanks to him for offering this to FMS users!