Tag: USB

Tiny touchscreens

January 23, 2010

( 24/01/10: UPDATED with comments from mycockpit.org.)

This week I made a spec purchase which I hope will turn out to be very successful. If so, it’s something I’ll be recommending to fellow simmers who are in need of small-size, high-resolution LCD panels.

The display screens in airliner cockpits and in Garmin glass-cockpit systems are usually between 8 and 12″ diagonal, often 16:9 portrait, with variable resolutions but usually quite a high DPI compared to regular PC TFT monitors. These are pretty hard to get hold of, as manufacturers of these panels don’t sell to end-users, and even if they did you’d be hard pressed to put together all the associated hardware to drive them – and connect them to your PC – without some serious electronics skills.

This is why I was rather excited to hear about Nanovision’s Mimo series of small LCD screens. Not least because they weren’t hideously expensive.

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Switching on the lights

September 23, 2009

So, once you have a table full of power tools and the right materials to hand, what else do you need to make a home cockpit project go?

Well, obviously you’ll need at least one PC on which to run the Flight Simulator software, and chances are you’ll need three or four, depending on how many screens and instrument panels you’ll have. Speccing PCs, setting up FSX and interfacing controls etc is a subject I’ll come on to another day. For now, let’s look at the electronic side of things. Read More