Let there be lights!

Have added a new chunk to the old girl. Aquired a very used 1971 Cessna 182 glareshield on Ebay. Thought it was just going to look better across the top of the instrument panel than the piece of pipe insulation I had on there before. It did indeed! It also came with factory lighting installed underneath the thing to shine on my panel. The lights were set up to go on with 28v dc from the 182. After some helpful advice from someone whose internet handle was Emesis over at mycockpit.org, I discovered that I could go to my local auto parts store, and replace the bulbs with 12v ones. Miracle of miracles! It worked! They had bulbs that fit perfectly, and cost less than a grande skinny latte.

I had heard of hacking a pc power supply to power 12v systems before, so a Googling I did go. Found out it is about as hard as sticking a paperclip in an electrical outlet, so I did it! Some sloppy soldering, cussing and head sratching later, and I had a real life lighted instrument panel!

Feel kinda like Harry Potter the first time a spell ever worked for him. It works, I am not sure how, and it seems very mystical. But Dammit...It worked.

Phidgets and frustrations

Beloved reader,

I am happy to report that through much trial and error, I have accomplished my mission of making some lights turn on off when they are supposed to.

I have the electronics and programming all figured out. Currrently I have a warning light for low vacuum, oil pressure, voltage and low fuel in left and/or right tanks. I am working on the physical interface now, and just need to figure out how to make the faceplate and printing. I think the marker lights are working too, but need to do more testing. I am confident that I know the process now though.

If anyone wants a copy of the project file so they do not have to reinvent the wheel, leave a comment and I will be happy to share via email.

I am currently using FSUIPC, FS2Phidgets 5 and a phidgets led64 card to make it happen. Will post pics when the housing is in place and working.

But for now, I feel like I am on the road to finishing something! Progress is very empowering.

Offsets and upsets

Dear Readers,

Have some updates to provide....

Ebay has been very bad to me lately, and I now have too many disparate parts lying around that will be beautiful someday, if I ever get off my a$$ and start attaching them to the flying part.

Yesterday's obsession was in getting my GoFlight radios (I have 2xGF-166, 1xGF46 and 1 x RP48) to all work properly when the flight was started in cold and dark mode. I figured out how to do this with much cursing and biting of nails by using the Lua GFpower module(which comes completely ready to go with fsuipc) and creating another Lua file named ipcReady.lua that only contained one line which reads:

ipc.runlua("GFpower.lua").

This was an incredibly easy thing to do, but was not a good intro to figuring out what a damn Lua even was. Apparently it is Portuguese for Moon. The More You Know ....

If anyone out there in cyber land reads this thing and wants to do it, please let me know, and I will help you with the files and/or setup.

To compound things, I got a cheap Phidgets 64 led card from Ebay a few weeks ago. It is a card that allows you to have 64 different leds light up! I love shiny stuff! I just got all of the connectors in the mail, and have rigged up a test and can make lights come on! The eventual plan is to have this thing drive leds to light up the Outer/Middle/Inner marker lights, the idiot lights in the warning panel, and possibly instrument lighting when I start to build my steam gauges.

I plan to interface it through a program called fs2phidgets which is supposed to make it play nice with FSX. Well, I am a little overwhelmed in getting the thing setup. I have read about 250,000 pages of fsuipc users manuals today to try and find out which signal kicks out the information to turn on these itty bittty lights. When I asked at the forum where I could find what I needed, the program developer basically told me that I just needed to read the GD manual, but the one I was reading was the wrong one, I was now a developer not a user. Software developer? Me? That is as crazy as the US Navy wanting me to go to Nuclear Engineering school while I was getting a D-- in high school trig.

Anyway, I opened up the FSUIPC SDK (Software Developers Kit for all of you non-developers out there) and found a neat program called FS Interrogate 2 that allowed me to glimpse some of the changes in status within FS as they happened. So now I have a huge pile of offset codes for my 8 little bitty light bulbs that I somehow magically interface with the phidget thingy and they all light up.

Tomorrow I will work on FS2phidgets and hope it all starts to make sense...

Unless someone tells me their Large Hadron Collider needs a new chief engineer and developer, in which case the world will probably collapse in a time singularity as I am trying to RTFM.

ālea iacta est ("the die has been cast")

The idiom "Crossing the Rubicon" means to pass a point of no return, and refers to Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon River in 49 BC without disbanding his Legion, which was considered an act of war. According to historian Suetonius, Caesar uttered the famous phrase ālea iacta est ("the die has been cast").

I then started to figure out how to interface more hardware to the thing. I had a Desktop Aviator Model 1010E which I was using as an electrical panel (see below). I figured it would be easy to tear it's guts out and interface the switches into the new panel! The mechanical part was easy, and just required drilling holes in the panel and screwing the switches in. The soldering turned out to be a much bigger chore. The factory wires need to be extended to make the thing work, and all of them were thin as a Frog Hair. It is also possible to melt plastic switch housings with a soldering iron. After a great amount of frustration, and teaching my kids new swear words, I got everything soldered and interfaced into the panel, and everything programmed through FSUIPC. I could now flip switches and stuff happened! My wife, children and dogs were unimpressed, but I felt like Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk!

I got a little cocky and changed the Master switch to a Cessna factory split switch that I found at aircraftspruce.com . I also bought a toggle switch the same size as the others at Radio Shack and split out the Beacon and Strobe light functions onto discrete switches.

In the beginning there was MDF...

Welcome to my blog. I hope to use this thing to have a visual track of the progress I have made, and will continue to make on my Cessna simpit.

I have always dreamed of flying, and had some amazing opportunities to see a great deal of Alaska from small aircraft. Money does not currently allow me to follow my dream of getting my real life license, so I decided to build my own cockpit in my home.

I have been looking and coveting other builders cockpits on some great websites like www.mycockpit.org, and always marveled at how sophisticated some of the builds were. I also thought there was no way in Hell I was ever going to be able to do something like that. I am not a computer programmer, nor an electrician, nor a CAD specialist, nor possessing a workshop full of tools or an endless pocketbook to finance any of the above. In short, I am woefully unprepared for most phases of this process.

The first step was to decide what I wanted to build. Most of my time flying in Flight Simulator X has been in small Cessnas. I do enjoy flying the Goose and Beaver, but had to rule them out, because both have features that were beyond my perceived ability to build. The Cessna aircraft tend to be simpler, with flat panels and no frills; everything a first time builder needs to take the big leap.

I had been flying from a desktop setup that had a CH products yoke, Saitek proflight throttle, CH rudder pedals and a Natural Point Trackir unit. I thought I was Charles Lindbergh, Wiley Post and Pappy Boyington all rolled into one!

Then came the fatal day...

I found a CAD file online that I was able to have made into a 1:1 scale template for a Cessna 172 Main Instrument panel. I have watched enough New Yankee Workshop on TV to know that if I had a pattern, I Could Build One! (I also knew that I needed to read and understand all of the safety rules for working with my power tools, and to never forget the most important item of safety gear...safety glasses. Thanks Norm!)

A trip to a local print shop with my cad file, $7 in printing fees, A half sheet of 3/4" MDF, some spray on adhesive for the template, two bent jigsaw blades and a great deal of eyerolling from the Mrs. later, and I was the proud owner of a Genuine, Certified, Grade A Main Instrument Panel. I later created a $1.95 glareshield around the top edge with some foam pipe insulation I uploaded the plans to the Download section at www.mycockpit.org, for anyone crazy enough to be interested in copying my folly! Caveat emptor...