Good Hardware links

Fri, 03/21/2008 - 06:31 — jdbeau

Hagstrom Electronics - if you are happy with glass displays for output, but need buttons, switches and knobs, get the KE-USB-108. It provides a method for toggle switches being turned on and off, rotary encoder decoder boards (for your knobs). The only problem with this approach is if you may want to turn LEDs on and off. It is the simplest solution I have found.

Winford Engineering - provides DB-25 breadboard adapters and db-25 cables. This makes long cable runs much neater..just hook your sim interface to one of the adapters, connect a db-25 cable, then when you build your panel, use another db-25 breadboard adapter to break out the wires going to the panel's box. When breaking the sim down, for instance to move it, then you simply disconnect the cable and take the cockpit apart.

Hispanels - Great supplier of F-16 panels, and these folks will make custom panels based upon your design for 0.20 euros per square centimeter.
More to come later.

EarthLCD - you can buy the $maller $ized $creens here...although they are really proud of their $tuff.
JimB

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Mon, 05/12/2008 - 20:40 — jdbeau

More better stuff

I am half a decade late on this one, but I found Falcon 4.0 Allied Force (Love it), and Free Falcon, Red Falcon, BMS, etc.... I am looking into building a cockpit for that, as the missions are fun and challenging.
I have finally started and am well on my way in fabricating the panels. I have a copy of the freeware InkScape, which is a free Corel Draw type of utility, and am laying out my panels with it. Where I have holes, I put a red circle of the required size, and the circle has a crosshair in the very middle. This aids greatly in drilling the holes...I have also found that white translucent plexiglas does not shatter and crack like the .08 clear plexiglas. So I am now using the white stuff. I plan to build at least two cockpits (I bought too much junk, and have enough left over for the second). My first is an F-16 to run Falcon 4, while the second is the first cockpit I had planned, an aircraft with the Garmin 1000 PFD/MFD. I bought three 10.4 inch open monitors from Eartth LCD, and now that I have found a good monitor for the MFD's in the Viper, have two of them not otherwise being used. In the Viper, I will use one of them displaying the steam gauge instruments in the center console, and have found some 7.2 inch monitors that attach to an XBOX for $35.00 each on e-bay. While these are RCA video and not SVGA, I am hoping that they will be adequate for the Viper's MFD's and HUD.

I am looking around to try to find how to get the DED text and the LED values out of Falcon, so that I can light up my cockpit whenever something happens....If someone knows how to get the values out, please enlighten me.

OH, BTW, The THIRD cockpit I am working on is an F-35. All that thing is is a 22 inch wide screen monitor and a few switches....it will be the easiest of the simulators to make. I plan to hack a keyboard for the switches...and the how-to can be found on Hans Krohn's website.

I found, on one of the websites, that "Lightning" has built an MFD exporter. Hopefully it is not just that, but is a video exporter that will work with any game..... It can output to another monitor on the same computer, or can run on additional satellite computers in addition to your FS computer, and display the exported pictures on that....
Hopefully, I can capture the center instruments from Falcon and/or MSFS, and display them on my center console based MFD (10.4 inches in a portrait mode).

And I did buy a pantograph engraving machine, but unfortunately I did not read the e-bay info well enough as it is a diamond drag engraver---fine for scratching on metal, not so good for cutting a wide line in plastic....I need to mount a dremel on it. I had planned to use it to make my panels.

Eventually, I will get a CNC machine. My wife and her brother have a house in Tennessee that we need to sell, and when the money comes, small CNC machine, here I come. My brother in law wants me to start a business making panels and simulators for sale, instead of being a database programmer. I tend to agree.

I also did find a good source for F-16 panels, as well as any panel you can design. the website is http://www.hispanels.com. To have them make panels for you, you simply submit a PDF of the design, and they will bring it into their CNC machine and make the panel for you. The cost is 0.20 euros per sqaure CM. They also have most of the main panels for the F-16, the ones that will sit right in front of your face, like the ICP.

While I am making a lot of my own panels, the ICP and the landing gear panels will be purchased from them, as I will have to stare at them constantly...and do not want to see my lack of manual dextarity (SP?) staring me in the face. Those can be bought....The ICP is about 40 euros, and the gear is 50 or so. With the engraved buttons, 40 euros is not too much to pay for an ICP.
Enough rambling. I will post more on my progress later...I am being slow due to funding (I am going to have to buy a cabin to put the sim in, I do not have room in the house..4 adults in a two bedroom house with the junk from three households....just no room indoors.....I can get a cabin delivered and set up for about $5K,. we have one already and will buy me a second one as soon as the house sells. But then I am also going to buy a commercially built cockpit and CNC built panels from Aimsworth or someone like that.

Now, that is enough rambling.

Jim Beauchamp
Hazel Green, Alabama

Tue, 05/13/2008 - 13:58 — jdbeau

Making strides

I am continuing to work on my pit(s). I have received the three monitors that I am going to use in the F-16 pit. I found 7.2 inch monitors in an XBox video display on e-Bay for $35.00, so I bought three of them. While they are wide format screens, I can hide a portion of the screen behind the simulator's firewall. They will make a more appropriately sized MFD than the 10.4 inch displays.

Now, I figured out that I am going to need a fourth one, because I have forgotten about the radar/threat screen above the left MFD. (I do not know what that screen is called, but threats are identified and placed on the screen. I am going to need a display for that one.

I am planning to use Lightning's MFD exporter, and am hoping it will pick off ANY section of the screen and send it to another computer or monitor. If it works for screen sections other than the MFD, then it should also be able to export the DED and the ADI-HSI and other gauges on the console. I could,. I suppose, order another 5" screen from EarthLCD, and in doing so, maintain a symetrical cockpit.

The other thing that has happened, is I have purchased some polyester paper, and covered two panels with it. It was supposed to be used in an inkjet rather than a laser printer. The laser printer at work does not give a good toner covering, and I worry about the polyester heating up and melting in the laser. The problems I have wiith using the inkjet is the price of the ink. The vendor was sued sucessfully because it records a drop in ink in all colors even if you are only printing black and white. I think I received about $40 from the class action suit. Basically it says that it will throw out full color cartrages if you use up the black ink only.

The polyester did not look as good as I had hoped. It looks like I am going to forego the backlit panels, and just paint the panels black, then attach strips of the polyester with the wording on it, like I have my navcom.

I did design a new panel for my civilian cockpit. This cockpit is based around the 10.4 inch screens in the Garmin 1000. Rather than a large radio stack, I have placed five sets of frequency and volume knobs below a 4 line 20 character LCD. Below those two knobs are five A/B switches that will choose which side of each radio is active.

I have also decided to purchase several of the panels pre fabricated by Hispanels.com in Spain. The ones I buy will be those that go on the dashboard and the auxiliary panels, as these will be the ones I am staring at when flying the sim. I can have my more amaturish panels besides or behind me, which are used infrequently.

Oh, I found a program called "Inkscape" that does what Corel Draw does, but is free. It will create an output to a cutting plotter, as well as allow you to draw pictures with exact measurements. This is how I am fabricating the polyester panel lettering.

While the cockpit will not be backlit, it will at least work. Eventually, I can replace all of the panels with purchased ones, and it will look better over time.

I now need to find a cheap supplier of rotary switches and single pole double throw switches (large)

Jim BeauchampHazel Green, Alabama