Category: Panels

The big 2016 update!

December 31, 2016

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So, when I last left you – bar my recent video – I was happily building consoles and pedestals and integrating my hardware.

I decided some months ago to go down the multi-channel route with Prepar3d; using multiple PCs networked together to render my outside views, primarily for performance reasons. Standalone image-generator PCs will always out-perform a single-PC system rendering multiple outside views. Since I needed a 180 degree view and this can’t be achieved with P3D (or FSX) because of the way that the view rendering works, I would have needed multiple side-by-side sectional windows to get a full outside view.
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Fairly brief update

August 4, 2016

There’s a much longer update coming in a few days, hopefully. But as a summary, I’ve been working on the pedestal and console and the various panels that will fit on each.

I’ve abandoned the previous pedestal frame and built a new mini-pedestal that only holds my Throttletek flightbox. Why? Well, the pedestal I had built was quite large and frankly I didn’t need something that big in the space I have available. Also, my plan to put a screen in there to use as CDUs and weather radar was compromised when I decided to go down the G1000 glass cockpit route – I wanted a large central touch-screen for an enhanced G1000 setup that could do double-duty as Boeing or Airbus or Avidyne avionics. I decided to separate the CDU part from the main pedestal, and to use the two 7″ touch-screen displays I had originally planned to make radio panels from as the CDU panels instead.

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Consoling myself

April 24, 2016

WP_20160423_17_57_17_RichYou always get the punniest titles with this blog. It must be the old sub-editor in me coming out. Anyway, it’s been a while since the last update and I have gotten a few things done, so I wanted to share progress notes with you (though I’m also live-tweeting the build as it goes at @neilhewitt, if you want to follow along).

With the replacement screen more or less finished – it still needs trimming, and I haven’t put the final coat of Screen Goo on it because I want to be ultra-sure this is the one before I open that expensive tin – I moved on to the rest of the mini-pit. I mentioned the console I was building in my last update, by which time I had just built a console frame and was talking about swappable modules to mount on it.

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Don’t label me!

December 12, 2015

Just a very quick update – today I finally got around to printing and adding labels to the magneto and switch panel on my temporary simpit.

This is not quite as easy as you’d think, at least not without the proper tools – Adobe InDesign or similar. But you can achieve good results with Paint.NET, provided you measure things carefully and take note of your printer’s DPI setting.

In my case, my printer does 600DPI and so I created an image at 600DPI and sized it to fit, then put labels on as text and adjusted them until they were in the right places.

For the magneto, I pasted a piece of paper onto the top of the plastic panel, marked off the switch positions with a pencil, then scanned that in and put it under my image, scaled correctly, so I could position the text labels.

Then it was a matter of firing up my trusty colour laser printer, printing onto A4-sized sticky labels, cutting out the relevant parts with a scalpel, and then sticking them to the console. Results are below. They’re good enough, although some of the labels are a little off-centre. Never mind!

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Can we fix it? Spoiler: yes, we can!

December 7, 2015

console_fixThus far, I’ve done essentially nothing on the next-generation projection screen front; which is to say, there’s a big pile of wood in my hallway waiting to be turned into a 180 degree wraparound screen. I had intended to get onto that this weekend, but as it turned out my DIY skills were needed on the existing sim.

This week, for reasons unknown, the magneto extracted from my Saitek switch panel stopped working. I think it might have had something to do with the relatively poor mounting of the switch in my temporary simpit, which kept coming loose. When loose, turning the switch would result in the switch itself rotating, and eventually the switch barrel seems to have broken. Oh well.

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Virtuous circles

November 29, 2015

When last I left you, I’d assembled a temporary simpit that I planned to use while I waited to put up the garden building I’m eventually going to use as a workshop / sim room.

Since then, I’ve mostly been flying the sim. It’s been good fun. But, as it always does, the upgrade bug bit me and I decided that what I’d assembled just wasn’t really good enough, even for the short term. The big issue is the display – a 55″ TV is nice, but it’s not mounted ideally and can’t be because of the height of the console. I will eventually build a new, more accurate and sophisticated console, but that’s going to take months. So I wanted to address the display issue.

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Definitely getting there

August 12, 2015

So I continue to work on my desktop instrument panel. It’s very nearly finished now.

After getting the panel the right size last time, I took it apart and worked on detailing things a bit. Using simple wooden moulding strips, I put some details around the yoke port, the screen port, and the base of the panel. This improved the look no end, especially as some of my holes were a bit ragged – cutting freehand with a jigsaw is not good for ultra-straight cuts.

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Lighting panels

October 27, 2009

Having spent a while obsessing about the glareshield, I turned my attentions lately to the issues around the main instrument panel and the other control panels I’m going to have on the sim.

As this is first and foremost a glass cockpit project, there won’t be a plethora of buttons or guages on the MIP itself, but there will still be a number of panels to be created, including lighting control, MCP, EFIS, radio control etc. From the beginning I decided that I wanted my panels to be backlightable for that genuine airliner effect. While most airliners have panel lighting that will cast light down on the panel from under the glareshield, they will also have backlit panels for when those lights are off. Read More