Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone. I hope that 2012 finds you all safe, secure and walking the right path with your lives.

God Bless,

Mongo

Why oh why?

...Did I ever decide to build a pit with steam gauges? It would be so much easier to shove a glass cockpit in my panel...

Steam are either:

1. complicated to build or

b. way too expensive and all made in Europe so the exchange rate and shipping are killers!

Got roughed up today on some instruments I had hoped to aquire. Sniped. Headshot. Boom!

Any of you out there thinking of building a pit, please choose glass, and learn from others frustrations!

Mongo signing out (for the night, I will wake up tomorrow just as obsessed with this thing)

Onward Rocinante! Yon Giant tests us mightily! Hand me my lance, good squire Sancho!

"That's Franken-steen"!

Amazing things are happening in here in DIY Pitland! I have acquired something I never thought I would own...

An actual, genuine, bona-fide, Dutch crafted, single or double servo, abs injected, Simkits USB generic gauge kit!

While my pit will definitely not be all simkits as I will have to craft a lot of gauges from home, now I have an idea of how to build the bad mama-jamas! I have the right faceplates...servo and gear measurements...pointer sizes...

Now to just convince my wife that I need to order some few other things. She has already told me that when the wings arrive she is leaving. Hmmm......how much is my paypal balance again?

Oh, yeah almost forgot. Pete Dowson and Tom_G have created a lua script that will allow the Bodnar BUO836X to have encoder acceleration for gauge use! It is like freaking Christmas around here! Gotta get off my butt and start building again!

The Yoke is on me....

Beloved Reader(s?),

Next step in my pit building is to extend my ch yoke. The way my yoke was setup, I constantly banged my knuckles on the MIP in a dive. Additionally, the case took up a lot of valuable real estate on the back of the MIP. I needed to access that are for instruments eventually. I had no choice but to trash my warranty, open it up, put it back together with duct tape and bailing wire.

I have been holding off doing this for months because I was scared of 2 things:

1. How to integrate the mechanics of the old yoke with an extension.
2. I did not want to mess around with all of the hair thin wires inside the yoke handle that needed to run through the shaft to the PCB usb controller.

I discovered an important lesson. With apologies to Master Yoda, I discovered that "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to long time abandoning of simpit projects to play Plants Vs. Zombies.

So I busted it open, and came up with some stuff to share....

1. The CH existing yoke shaft fits perfectly with 2 very common sizes of plumbing pipe! I was able to take the handle apart and very easily remove the existing yoke shaft. I then screwed in a length of 3/4" black iron plumbing pipe. This size not only feels and looks bulky, but threads in tight enough that normal control inputs will never cause it to loosen. I was able to use the stock shaft to still control the electronics and it was just as easy! A piece of 1/2" pipe nipple threaded right into the shaft! To complete the whole thing only needed a 3/4 to 1/2 reducer to mate them together. The whole assembly looks like this:

Winnner Winner Chicken Dinner!

2. I solved my soldering problem too! I discovered after tracing the 11 wires, that they all connected to 7 pins on the pcb board. I decided to splice them into an 8 terminal cat 5 jack at the handle end. Then I ran a peice of cat 5 cable through the shaft, and plugged it into another cat 5 jack which was wired to the yoke pcb. Now I have a system that is mechanically easy to take apart for repairs, or to get out of the way of other installations, that works great! Here is a picture of the yoke handle wiring.

That is all for now, Gentle readers. Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down!

Start Your Engines....

In the ongoing process of making way too much work for myself reinventing my unfinished pit, I decided that my previous magneto switch was not acceptable. I bid and won a cheap bendix switch on ebay. I thought to myself "Hey Self! You are getting good at figuring out how to interface stuff! This will be easy to add! Probably plug it right in and it will work"!

WRONG!

The real magneto switch has some problems wit interfacing directly to my Bodnar card, because each switch position does not necessarily ground just one contact. It has a jumble of 8 contacts that have cryptic markings, and caused me a big headache with the multimeter to figure out the matrix. Once I did, I spent a lot of time scratching my head trying to figure out how to translate them into the 5 discrete switch outputs I needed. Decided to start from scratch, and just figured out how to do it!

Here is a picture of the switch back that has all of the contacts. Note that my thumb is covering up the contacts I did not need to use.

These contacts are labelled cw from center as follows:

cntr-grd

10 oclock-S

11 oclock-Bat

12 o'clock-New contact

1 o'clock-grd*

2 oclock-R*

*1 and 2 o'clock are connected by a small plate, screwed onto both contacts. Remove this plate to break the contact into 2.

Here is a view of the other side of the contact plate. It shows 2 modifications. The first is drilling a hole at the 12 o'clock position, and countersinking it to accept a 6-32 x 3/4 SS machine screw. This is screwed through the contact plate from the inside and secured with a nut on the other side of the plate. The second is the washer that is affixed to the center. This washer makes the center ground run all the way around the contact plate, instead of the eccentric shaped ground the original came with.

The final step is to modify the wiper for the switch. The wiper is a plastic wheel cut to fit three wedge shaped metal contacts. The meatal wedges are spring loaded to press up against the contact plate, and short the contacts to ground. The wedge has three dimples that are raised above the wedge at each corner. I removed one of the dimples by drilling it out, and dremelling it flat, so that the wiper only grounds one of the contacts, and not two. Then I placed a piece of electrical tape over the removed section of the wedge, so that it would not accidentally ground the contacts:



The above picture shows a combination of the original setup and the modified wedge. Remove the wedge contacts that are at the one o'clock and 6 o'clock positions. They are not needed. This picture shows the three dimples, how I removed the upper right one, and insulated the unneeded portion. The final wiper looks like this:


Reassemble the switch with the 2 screws, hook the outside contacts up to your favorite i/o card input and the center contact to ground on the card. Assign the button presses in FSUIPC and you are done!

Took me a lot longer to type this up than to actually do the mod. Hope it helps someone else.

Give me a brake!

Progress Report: 04/14/2011 2147 ADT

After several days of tinkering I finally have a working parking brake that is a good facsimile of a real one. It is a used Cessna from an unknown model that was procured on Ebay, After much trial and error, I have one that functions like the real thing and even talks to the computer!

Video of the operating unit can be found on youtube here.

Tomorrow I start work on the center console! The console is going to consist of a fuel cutoff valve, stabilizer and rubber trim wheels and indicators, and a cowl flap handle.

Found some people who have extended the shaft on their ch yokes, so have added that to the to do list. In a drastic dive now, my knuckles are hitting the instrument panel, so I am glad to have found a solution that may work! If I have not mentioned it before, if you have not found this site through mycockpit.org and you are interested in a simpit, you are missing out. Go check them out, I guarantee that you will learn a thing or two, and get a warm welcome.

N58243(virtual) signing out...

It'll never fly Wilbur!

Just got back to pit building after a several month hiatus. I ran into a point where I was so overwhelmed by all the parts I had that were not added, that I did nothing. Sigh...

I have finally figured out how to attach the glareshield to my mdf panel. It looks much better now. Also have added some super cool instrument bezels to the front of my panel.(Thanks Mondo50M!) Added the first encoder to the panel to control the altimeter adjustment. Hopefully the wiring and interface card will work the first time. Hacked an alt air switch to actuate an electrical switch so I can simulate vacuum failures.

Have the framework cut for the console interior so I can start to design the mechanics for the elevator trim and indicator. I definitely need to focus on the progress and not the to-do list. I guess that is why I am writing this post. So that I can have a sense of accomplishment and not frustration at lack of progress. Baby Steps....

Thanks for your indulgence while I puked on you dear reader.

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.