"Universal' Pit

Ok, so I'm looking into building a pretty standard pit that would be a cross between a modern commercial jet cockpit and that of the rafale. The instruments would all be shown on three different screens, one for the attitude indicator, ASI and altitude (Similar to whats found in a 747), one for crew alert system (Showing aletrs, engine power and so on.. ) and one last screen for the weather radar/radar. I guess for this to work, I would have to make a custom firmware that would interpret the data from the flight simulator (probably fsx or x-plane) and display it on these three screens. The three screens appearance would therefore not change depending on the aircraft used. I guess that these three screens could all be powered by a slave PC, using several cheap graphics card in SLi, which would recieve data from the Master PC running the simulation through a simple client/server ethernet interface.

I'm still unsure of how i would proceed to rig up the switches and buttons, but I guess I could hook them up to the slave PC via usb... The goal is to have almost all usefull features such as lights de-icing, autopilot, gear, trim, flaps, spoilers as physical switches/buttons. Maybe I could otherwise simply use a PS/2 controller and rig the buttons up to that...

As for the flight controls, seeing as I'll be using a Suncom SFS throttle and Suncom talon stick (The goal of my project is too make this CHEAP but nice, I already have old screens and graphics cards and almost everything I'd need except for the switches and the panels I'd need) it would make sense to hook up them up to the slave PC as well....

I know I would probably be better off using some kind of system like EPIC, but I can't seem to find the price of such a system and one that has the capabilities that I would need for my instruments..

Thanks for your help!

Building a working pit is never cheap. But you may want to check out Opencockpits web site. Their stuff is designed for MSFS and probably cheaper than you will find on most other sites that sell custom FS products.

I'm actually planning on doing it all myself, I'll probably cut the panels out of wood (easier and cheaper) and just paint it over, or glue some sort of foil to give it a metal-ish feel and appearance.

If you have some electronics and programming knowledge, you should try doing the interfacing yourself.

It's alot of fun. I cannot recommend Opencockpits' interfacing electronics. Easy to get started with and therefore the only option for some people, but full of bugs and small annoying things.

I don't have that much knowledge about electronics, but I know the basics (Well what you learn up to 11th grade in France) so I won't be making my own controllers and such, but rather using old PS/2 controllers. I know a bit of programming and am fairly at ease with Visual Basic, I guess the interface will be more of a learn as I get along kind of thing. The interface seems complicated but dooable, on the other side I think that i might have problems with the slave and master PC idea...

For pushbuttons you would be great with a joystick-controller. You could also read data from the joystick from a custom program and implement more advanced things like on-off-switches. If you are going to use FSX, I think FSUIPC can do that for you. Then you would be fine with a simple joystick-controller that has support for lots of buttons.

I guess I could use a joystick controller, the problem is finding one that can support all the buttons I need, usually they have shift keys or different modes to be able to use all the programmable keys, and that would make thinks a lot more complicated. And for pushbuttons and switches it would also be very simple e.g. letter x held down=on, letter x not held down=off. For functionality that require switches with more than two modes I could just use several keys, as in letter x=flaps 1, letter y=flaps 5 and so on...

Plus I already have keyboard controllers, and I think the wiring would be a lot simpler, but maybe that's just me ;D

Thanks for answer, I'll definitely look into it though!

For pushbuttons you would be great with a joystick-controller. You could also read data from the joystick from a custom program and implement more advanced things like on-off-switches. If you are going to use FSX, I think FSUIPC can do that for you. Then you would be fine with a simple joystick-controller that has support for lots of buttons.

FSUIPC can do some pretty cool stuff. I doubt it will be a limiting factor in implementing what RthuR wants to do.

Universal pit?

What about a Touch Screen/Panel?

Then you have HOTASAS :D

(Hands On Trottle And Stick And Screen)

Haha sounds like a great idea :D But i guess I want to try and make at least a couple buttons (For my own pride) and then I'll buy a touch screen :D

I have bougth a touchscreen last year, because not enough place and time to build a real pit... but still want to do some buttons anyway...

so I agree and confirm Rthur !

Haha sounds like a great idea :D But i guess I want to try and make at least a couple buttons (For my own pride) and then I'll buy a touch screen :D

Then all you need is a joystick controller and FSUIPC :) You could even slaughter an old joystick if you don't need like 20 switches or more. I have made my own joystick card with support for 240 buttons.

Wow. I definitely don't need that much, started making some switches today and I've got to say it doesn't seem to hard, might actually be able to reach my goal! Just got FSUIPC so i can start tinkering around with it, since I'm relatively new to this I think I'm going to try with a commercial joystick first (Probably a Suncom Talon with SFS throttle or the Logitech G940) and then see how things go :D

Might not even need a touch panel!

hum hum...

anyway... touchpanel is great in conjuction with hotas

I also downloaded a voice command software package that works realy well. converts voice to keyboard command.

VTAS (Voice, throttle and stick) just like the Typhoon