New HD installed

Finally i bought I replacement for my broken hard disk. I have bought a 320Gb Western Digital and reinstalled windows XP with some some software.
I still have no idea what was in that hard disk but for sure I have lost the light panel. I should have a backup in one of my memory stick.
Fortunately my photos are in the second hard disk and are safe (I have already done a new backup on a DVD).

I had a few minutes to continue working on the cutting of the panel. The idea of marking with a black pen the part to remove seems good but still not perfect.
I think I should remove the protection from the surface before coloring otherwise while using the dremel the transparent protection moves and it is difficult to have a clear picture of the border lines to cut out of the plexi.
I have to prepare a new mask and restarting with a new piece of plexi but with the new diamant tool I bought for the dremel the cutting seems much better then before.

Cutting the plexi

I am currently trying to cut the plexi for the designed light panel but it is not easy as I thought.
The idea is to insert the picture between two sheets of plexiglas, the first one is 3mm and the second 2mm.

I did cut the 2mm sheet with a cutter but it was not easy to maintain the cutter straight enough and I had to repeat the procedure a couple of times; finally I decided that a cutter is not good enough for the 3mm sheet.
In fact, for the bigger sheet I used the dremel but I am still not 100% satisfied of the final result especially while cutting the holes for the electronic components. I have then bought a diamant tool to try again.

During Easter the main hard disk of my pc broke and I need to found a valid replacement: hopefully I didn't loose all my data! In any case I need a new HD and some time to reinstall the operating system and all the rest.

Light panel

Yesterday I spent some time with the design of the light panel.

I have decided to use openoffice to draw the panel. In fact the suite draw of openoffice allows to draw objects with several interesting features. For example it is possible to define custom objects, their positions, group and ungroup objects and so on. It is basically the free version of Microsoft PowerPoint. Another advantage of this tool is that it is possible to save in a great number of file formats.

The following picture shows the panel:

The panel is divided in 4 parts. From left to right, the first, the panel flood is composed of 3 switches to set the cockpit lights. The second part contains the three switches for the taxi lights; the third panel has the landing lights and the last panel has the switches for the external lights.
The real 767 and the LevelD panels are different from this one, for example taxi lights are below the flood panel. But I need a slim panel to locate over one of my monitor where I have around 5.5cm of available space.
The yellow parts are those that I need to cut to insert the switches.

Round switches will be standard ON/OFF switches of different sizes, for example the landing switches are bigger then the others.
Squared switches have a green LED on board that illuminate when the light is on.

The draw will be printed in a label and attached to a plexiglas panel. White chars and shapes will generate the retro illumination that at the present I plan to create by means of several white leds.

The panel is freely available: send me an email if you want to have your copy.

Power supply gallery

Yesterday I created a new web album in picasa with some pictures I took building the power supply:

Power supply

I don't think these item is very interesting for people building their own home cockpit. However I like to have an history of what I did and the blog fits very well.
On the other having a gallery of pictures allow me to look how the tools are built without opening their box (even if in this case it is very simple).

The output power line is composed of a 5V and a 12V line as I said in my previous post. The plug dues not allow to connect the 5V with the 12V and vice versa. of course.

Now that the PS is ready I can start thinking to the more exciting part: building the cockpit or... well.. my
version of the cockpit.

Power supply

These points should all be implemented while building the power supply:

• the unit must be positioned into a movable box
• the unit can be positioned in any way even upside down
• input: one socket powers the PSU
• output: one socket with 5V and 12V output power lines
• it must be possible to add more output sockets in future
• one switch to turn on or off the PSU
• each output socket has a 2 LEDs showing if the 2 output lines works (a yellow LED for 12V and green one for 5V)
• the USB expansion card is positioned into the PSU
  • the box has an USB socket to connect to the PC
  • one LED shows if the USB card is powered (the power is takes directly from the USB card)
    
  • one DSUB 25pin socket to connect the master to the USB expansion card
  • it must be possible to add more DSUB sockets in future to connect more master cards
    
• the box must have a cooling fan

I have bought a box for the PS from OBI: it is a tool box that costs around 9 euro.
I am going to build the PS into such a box by installing cables, sockets and LEDs as specified by the requirements written upon.

The observatory where I work has a disposal area where they put old PCs and old hardware before throwing away. I went there a couple of times and I have taken an ATX power supply from an old broken PC. This will be the core of my PS because it produces stable 12 and 5V power lines.
The only items I have to buy are the sockets (especially those bringing 5V and 12V lines), the USB connector and the DB25 poles to connect the USB card to the remote master.

The following picture shows a schema of the PS. Red lines are power lines. Blue lines represents computer data flow. As you can see the PS has only one power socket and one DB25 socket but there is enough room to add more in future.
The switch to power on/off the PS is not shown but it is close to 220V input line.

Some pictures will be added soon showing the building process.

The simulator into the closet

My apartment is not very big and I needed a place to put my windows box and my flight simulator stuff without having cables visible in any place.
I would say that computers are never nice looking but in my case with all the cables running from the box to monitors, joy, MCP and so on my PC looks very ugly. My wife, the boss, decided the computer must be hidden somewhere.

I don't have a free room available so I have decided to put all the stuffs into a mirrored closet in the living room. When I am not flying the closet is closed and the computer invisible. I have to mediate, of course, because the available room into a 1m wide closet is not what we can think of by talking about an home cockpit. However, planning the space very carefully I can demonstrate that the project is feasible.

The first step was to build a wooden armature to reinforce the closet itself in order to be able to hang the monitors or other devices along walls. The armature goes into the closet just upon the table:

The second part of the project was to install all the hardware into the closet: the PC, 2 monitors, the joy, the MCP, the 4 radio modules, headset, webcam, printer, scanner.

The idea was to have the PC and the printer on the floor. The 2 monitors hanged on the wall as well as the radio modules and the MCP.
The keyboard goes below the table so there will be enough room for the joystick, the mouse, papers and charts over the table:

You can see some more shots I took while building the system is in the closet gallery:

The flight simulator into the closet

This introduction is probably enough to explain the situation and the solution I found. I would say that I am quite satisfied and even surprised for the final result. And even more important, my wife is satisfied with this solution.

Flying without keyboard

My wish is to fly with the simulator without touching the keyboard and the mouse as far as possible.

The idea arose when I bought the MCP and the EFIS and I found out how great was the improvement in realism.
At that time I bought the hardware from CPFlight because I did not have any experience in electronics apart of some concept due to my work.
For the same reason I bought a ready-to-use NAV, VOR,ADF and COM modules.

My apartment is not very big and the PC and all the stuffs to fly have to be installed in the living room but they must be hidden when nobody is flying.

This constraint means that all the equipments must be placed into a mirrored closet.
As you can see in the following picture, the central part of the closet is open and ready.

As a consequence, I can have as much hardware, instruments and panels as I can put inside the closet.
It is also possible to have hardware that I can easily move from one position to another when I fly.

This constraint affects my design in the following ways:

• there is no room for the second officer panels and instruments;
  
• the panels can't reproduce the original ones i.e. I have to create my panels putting all the controls I need in a logical way;
  
• all the panels and the hardware must be easy to move from one position to another (inside the closet and tomorrow in another room outside o f the closet).

After a survey on the web, I have decided to adopt Opencockpits cards.

The main reason is that the community of Opencockpit users is quite big and the brand is based in Spain, Europe, so I can order the pieces and have them ta home in a short time.
Opencockpit cards seem clean easy to build even for non expert people like me.
The software seem easy to configure and interface with FSX.

As a starting point, I have bought an USB expansion cards and a Master card.The first one connects to one of the USB sockets of my PC and has 4 sockets to connect up to 4 masters card.

Besides that, the USB expansion card has 4 potentiometer that could be used for driving axes.
The master card has input and output lines as well as a socket to connect displays.
I kindly suggest to browse the Opencockpits website if you need more info about these cards.

I have installed the software and the hardware and tested their functioning with a simple experiment: I wanted to command the landing gear with a switch and have a light (LED) on when the landing gear is down.

I have then connected the USB to the PC, the two cards together, the master card to my power supply, the cables to input and output lines.
I have then installed the Opencockpit software and started FSX with the default 737.
For this experiment I did not use SIOCbut ConfigIOCards that allows to link switches and LEDs (i.e. input and output lines) to FS SDK offset through FSUIPC.
The following picture shows my test suite.

You can see the 2 cards directly connected, the power supply in the left side and a white LED over the keyboard. I needed no more then 2 hours to have the hardware installed, the LED and the landing gear switch working. That is a very good result given that my experience in electronic is almost null.

At this point the project can start!I want to build my hardware to fly the 767LD with the help of the software developed by Niko Kan.

The first step is to build the power supply unit (PSU) then all the the panels that depend on this one..

Flight simulation

Flying with a simulator is my preferred hobby.
Well not as good as snorkeling but during german winter it is far much better to find some indoor activity!

I bought my first home computer, a Commodore 64, after playing with my cousin's flight simulator in far 1986.

As the time passed I changed several computers and flown almost all the simulators available on the market.
Actually i am flying with the Microsoft flight simulator X.
The main reason driving this choice is that the MS FS is the most supported product for third party hardware and software.

There two kind of flight I love. One is an unruled VFR when I do not want to think about anything: just start the engine, take off, watch out for the landscape and eventually land safely somewhere.

I love to fly in place I know very well, like around Trieste or Cagliari. Sometimes when i have to go somewhere for vacation or for job i like to fly around a little bit to have an idea of the place before arriving.
At the present my preferred plane for VFR is ATR 72-500 from Flight1.
I found the plane and its systems very well done; for me one of the most complete turbo prop plane one the market.

My choice for IFR flights is the 767 LevelD.

I think one on the best planes to fly with a good reproduction of the real systems, frame rate friendly and I know this product since the the PIC version.
I fly Condor because I like the company, the colors and the livery.

My flight are usually quite short because the best parts of a flight are departure and landing.

I find quite boring to stay in front of a PC simulating a long flight between Frankfurt and Los Angeles just monitoring the FMC until is time to start the descent.
It is better to plan a flight like Munich-Rome for example having the time for a little rest after turning off the passengers lights and and before preparing the descent.

I like to fly trying to emulate the reality so I do not use tools like navigators and so on. I only have my plane and possibly other pilots and ATCs around me.

In fact I always fly online, with IVAO.
Given that I am not a real pilot, I admit that my vision of reality is miles far away...
My IVAO id is 108576 and today I have 934 hours logged in the system. A lot of time.. around 39 days.

After years flying online and offline I have decided that having one screen and a 4-axes joystick was not enough and I have decided to have a better setup.

The dream is to fly without touching the keyboard.
I am still far from that but i am actively working on it building my version of an home cockpit.

My PC is Scaleo from Fujitsu-Siemens as follows:

• CPU Intel pentium 4HT, 3.2Mhz
  
• RAM 2Gb 400Mhz
  
• 2 HD SATA of 150Gb each
  
• Graphic card ATI Radeon X1800XT dual head, 512Mb, PCI Express
  
• LAN Ethernet
  
• WLAN netgear on a PCI card
  
• 19" LG monitor running at a resolution of 1280x1024
  
• 17" Samsung monitor running at a resolution of 1280x1024

The operating system is Windows XP home, unfortunately in german that makes solving problems very time consuming.

With such a hardware configuration the flight simulator runs at around 15fps not very high but fortunately FSX is smooth enough.

Under certain conditions like bad weather and heavy online traffic it slows down to about 10fps and sometimes I have some short stop of around half second that at the prsent is not big problem.
I am thinking to an upgrade of course.
I foreseen to buy a new PC after next summer: at the present I am a little bit concerned about dual core machines and Windows Vista.

The following picture shows my initial setup for flying.

The picture was taken when I bought the MCP and the EFIS from CPFlight to flight with 767LD.

At that time I was aware that the hardware is not for 767 but for 737 but the 737 buttons are mapped in the 767 ones.
I am quite satisfied but I have to say that CPFlight system is not 100% bugs free; in particular it happens from time to time that the MCP turns black and non responsive during final approach phase and the HDG reset to 0.
This last bug is quite annoying because if in lateral mode, the HDG reset to 0 and the plane starts to run toward 360.

I use the biggest monitor with the main view of FSX.

I still fly with the traditional 2D view but I am trying to get used to the virtual cockpit that is much more useful especially for taxing and flight preparation.
The virtual cockpit is much more useful and realistic but with the 2D I have everyting available at a glance.
When my home cockpit will be ready, I guess I do not need the 2D anamore and I can safely switch to virtual cockpit

The second monitor contains secondary panels like pedestal, overhead, FMC, IVAP together with charts.

I do not use tools like IVAE, QuteScoop, FSNavigator and so on because I think the reduce the realism.

The joy is a Saitek X45.
X45 is not produced any more but is still a good product having the main stick with 2 axes and the throttle handle with an axis to control ailerons and the nose gear.

There are enough buttons to raise and lower the flaps, apply differential brakes, push to talk, main brakes and so on. In this way I can afford approaches and landings without the help of the keyboard.

Just a few words more about the picture upon.
The 767LD is at LIEE, both engines off, and I was testing the hardware from CPFlight. You can see a lot of cables in the left side that connect the MCP to the windows box and to the power, other cables connect the 2 parts of the joy together and the USB socket.

When I installed the MCP and the EFIS I was still stuck to a traditional way of simulating. I was really surprised of the improvements the hardware gave to the realism and I start thinking to build a kind of home cockpit to fly reducing the interaction with the keyboard and the mouse.

This was the start of my dream and a new hobby: build my prsonal version of an home cockpit.
I will talk you more about that in one of my next posts.

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This post has been written by copy and paste from my home page.
The original content will be removed from my home page very soon.