Throttle lever in progress

Here are some pics of my throttle lever #1 in progress. The handle is cut out in three pieces and the middle piece (B) is shaped to hold the switches and the reverse thrust lever.




Here you can see the three pieces together, note the opening where the thrust reversers will emerge. The lever #2 piece A and C are on the cutting bench waiting for the next session, piece B is already done. I'll be using Phidgets sliders to capture the action for both throttles, flaps and speedbrake.

De-Ice Operations

Here I am working as a certified Cat 5 De-Ice supervisor on the B-apron EHAM. The hours are extremely early, but the experience is exciting and comes with a great deal of responsibility.

Taxitime to the sim

Over the past three weeks I have been travelling a lot. Three times to Paris and once to Rome for the IATA World Cargo Symposium. As we have dual HQ's in Paris and Amsterdam the flights AMS-CDG-AMS turns out to be a reunion with collegues from former departments. However one flight turned out to be more special. The captain on this flight was somebody I had done a presentation together with, for the workers council. This resulted in an invitation to the front office. After one hour delay due to bad weather in AMS with reduced runway capacity, we got the push back clearance and taxied out to the runway. The ground controller then realized his mistake because we had a later slot time. By now we were near the runway with engines running and the gate position was taken by another a/c. So after 15 minutes we were squeezed in and took off for AMS. Near the border of the Netherlands we expected a holding, but this did not happen and hugging the coastline until IJmuiden we were vectored in for 18R Polderbaan landing on manual command, which was great to watch. After another 15 minutes of taxi time we parked at our gate, and the crew went on to the next flight, while I headed to the office for another day at work. The total taxitime equalled the total flight time which is kind of strange for such a fast mode of transportation. Luckily the taxi time to my sim is much shorter.

Pick up the pieces

After a long time of no cockpit action I was triggered by a planned visis from a friend to get back into my pit. Started soldering some switches, upgrade the software, endured a nasty system crash (pci.sys corrupt) and eventually I could fly again. Programmed the CDU to do a EHAM 18L departure, HOLD at VBG, and approach to ILS 06. Works like a charm, only have to adjust the HOLD entry pattern to make it a more smooth ride for the passengers.


This is what the cockpit looks like now. The outside display needs to be connected to a Matrox Triplehead 2 Go and all three screens will show the view. Slowly step by step I'm getting there, although the road is long and winding.

Another scrap cockpit available

Unfortunately this beautiful new plane was damaged beyong repair during an engine test at the Toulouse airport. Let's hope it was not due to a software error like: If n1>40% then Release_Park_Brake="true".

A330-200 CAT III Approach EHAM 36C

Hi all,
This movie on Youtube is from an A330 pilot.
It's a CAT III approach on runway 36C with an Airbus 330-200.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rft5lh2LWLY
Enjoy it!

Mycockpit.ASS

So here is the story. You have a small website with lets say 200 members. You get an enthusiastic guy in and he spends 2 years on this site after work, evenings, nights. You offer him PARTNERship. Several succesful changes are suggested like a name change to mycockpit (who in heaven's name can remember frisbi or ifsbi or whatever), and also suggested the merge of several other forums. So you grow up to 2000 members. Now a funny thing happens. The old guy is putting up some money and decides to go to a faster hosting provider, more cost, but what the heck, is still only 30$ a month. And once again, after protest of the other 3 partners (?) the old guy with the money decides to take an unilateral step and takes on a new hosting server including system administration for a whopping total of 275$ a month. Whoa pardner, we don't have that kind of income. So we go after some advertisers but no-one is buying into a niche website (duh!). The guy starts to get aggressive and claims nobody is doing anything. btw the advice not to spend this kind of money is taken as a personal insult. So another partner tries to bring in friends for hosting at 60$ a year and asks for a bandwidth upgrade to make it conform the market (read my lips: not competitive, just conform). But the nose goes up and the offer is refused. To cut a long story short, eventually he throws out two of the partners who dared to critisize his bad business accumen (I never make mistakes, huh, got that...) and takes away their admin rights. Some good folks try to intervene, but the unilateral decision is taken and will not be reversed. Now wait a minute, wasn't partnership something about joint decision making. Anyway I'm glad not to be partner of a money losing place where a single guy can grab the power just like that and keep all members hostage while sinking 3000$ personal money per year. I hope he has a supportive wife. Lucky me that as a former partner I still hold some funds that I can use to setup a place where we can rebuild the mycockpit gig once he crashes or stops funding this crazy scheme. In Dutch we have a word for this: Olie-dom (totally stupid).
Your honor, I rest my case.

Embraer

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Embraer main facility at San Jose dos Campos. A tour through the facilities revealed a very enthusiastic group of people working on new aircraft. I saw various types at various stages of completion. The cockpit of the 190 was a beauty and has a clean design. A nice detail outside was the deployed Ram Air Turbine. Also the Phenom 100 is a nice small jet. Go see some pictures at www.embraer.com

CPU Upgrade

Today I performed the exciting dangerous first step towards upgrading my CPU.
I have the highest available CPU for the 939 socket in my posession an AMD X2 4200.
However it's not a simple case of plug and play. I needed to upgrade my chipset drivers and subsequently also my BIOS. Never done that before...yikes. BIG RISK. Fortunately it went well, enven the (re-)activation of XP. Apparantly the BIOS upgrade enables multiple core support on this board and XP treats this as a huge change to the system (the new processor isn't even in there yet). Hopefully I'll have some time tomorrow evening to plug in the new processor with the Artic Silver coolant. Performance should be much better on FSX. Next I'm saving for a nvidia gforce 8800 GTS 640 DDR3 (waiting for the prices to drop to approx 250 Euro) and for a Matrox triplehead 2 go. Not sure if I should go to Vista...

New sub-project: Build a throttle quadrant.

After viewing this wonderfully detailed site I decided to see if I can build my own.
http://www.737ngproject.be/throttle.htm
First challenge was to get the drawings printed to scale, this took a couple of weeks until I had that sorted out. The next step was to glue it to MDF panels and cut it out.

To neatly cut it out I got my delayed fathers-day present, a proxxon saw.

Next: cutting the frames, I'm halfway done...then the hard part begins.

Progress at last

Friday my friend Leonard helped me out and we soldered a lot of wires for the MIP. As I have the CPflight MIP board it's a pretty straightforward process, although its hard to keep track of the wires. I use the Cat5e wire so there are enough colors. I use orange for the common/ground.

After adding the wires and connecting them to the terminals we started the sim for a short flight EHAM 36R departure to SPY and landing on the EHAM 18C with 7 nm runway extension point in the FMS. But into the flight I experienced some issues where the EFIS did not respond and the NAV went dark. Also the indicators did not work. Bummer.

The next day I decided to get the CPflight MIP board its own power source, and this was a great remedy. All went ok this time.

The only thing I still do not understand is the MAIN DU rotary. It should change whats on the display, but I see no change. It only switches to off when I select a pole that is not connected (yet). Anyway. Something to do. I'm getting a good vibe from doing all this.

Next steps are not clear yet. I need to get some pushbuttons for the MIP.
And I want to find out how to setup PM Systems with all systems running so I can do a quick flight (overhead is far from completed)

Other choices are where to spend the $$$ on, A triplehead to go and a new graphics board, or an Engravity Overhead panel.

Choices, choices....

FSX in the box

Very enthusiastically I purchased FSX to install on my one year old genuine Windows XP PC with AMD 64 -3500 processor. I had cleared out a harddisk volume for FSX and optimized with Distrix. All set to go.

So I inserted the shiny DVD and a pop up showed: "not a valid win32 application"
Cripes, what is this?!? Long story short: it refused to work. In my 5 year old PC it started the installer without a glitch (but I don't want it there!!). All I haven't tried is to build an old DVD-ROM unit into the new PC. This might do the trick.

Another funny thing. IE7 refuses to go to a website when entered in the address bar. Only by CTRL-O will it go there. I have tried many workarounds, and tips. All to no avail.
I guess this PC is haunted. Or Microsoft does not have it's act together. It's a very clean lean fighting machine, all genuine software. I guess being too clean makes it vulnerable.

Anyway, FSX remains in the box for a while.

Mycockpit dot ORG

The last couple of months have been dedicated to transferring most content of IFSBI.ORG to MYCOCKPIT.ORG which is much more easy to remember. And then the Team also upgraded to vBulletin which integrates very well with photopost etc. We had to get used to vBulletin but it's working very well now. And as the next welcome move, PM decided to host it's forums at IFSBI // MYCOCKPIT
Very cool!

btw. bought FSX and need to upgrade soon. Hopefully I will be flying soon on the new version.

Updates from Project Magenta

And there we go again, all my software needs to be updated. All these ZIP files have the new files in them and I'll have to spread them over my 6 PC cockpit. But first ofcourse make a backup of the way it was. It's a lot of work, but who is complaining aside from my neck muscles. There are some nice features in there.

As it has started to rain outside I feel like adding more wires to my cockpit. The phidget boards are there and the switches are there, so it's only the wires and the PM Systems logic to complete.

Great video

Here is a great video which was created on FS2004 and nice music to go.
Awesome and amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iomaxEtyoBQ

Chipset fan replacement

On my FS pc the chipset fan started to show funny rpm values and make some nois. As it turns out I'm not the only one having this problem and after my question I got a replacement fan. The board is a Asus A8N-SLI-Deluxe.

Here you can see the chipset location on the board, just below the memory slots. The old fan is removed and you can see the green chipset with some grey heat-paste. On the right hand side you can see the PATA harddisk 300GB I installed for backup purposes.



This is the close up with the grey heat-paste removed with cotton tipped ear cleaners. It's a Nforce4 SLI.



And here you can see the new fan fitted onto the board. Just had to pull the thermal grease protector tape off and push the two black spring loaded fitters into the appropriate holes on the motherboard.

Overhead Panel up and running

Section D and F are up and running, switches and rotaries installed. All I need to do is assign the corresponding offsets in PM Systems.



This is how my Pit looks like right now. The overhead makeshift panel is installed and some switches added, these need to be connected to the Phidgets 0/16/16 boards and assigned in PM Systems. On the MIP you can see some LED's for the indicators, these are connected to the CP Flight MIP extension board.



A close up of how nice the overhead switches are. Both look and feel are great!
These are from Engravity (www.737cockpit.com) . I can personally recommend them.

Soldering the MIP

And so here you see the CP Flight MIP board with the first wires coming out from behind the MIP. It takes a lot of painstaking work to get the right wires to the corresponding terminals. But the documentation is very detailed and I am very happy doing this. The only thing I need to sort out is the power supply, because I think I am having power shortage for all the CF Flight modules. Or maybe a short circuit, which I hope not to be the case.



I use cat5 ethernet cable as you get 8 strands in one cable. Orange is for the common. Here you see the landing gear lights and the autobrake rotary switch.



These are the Captains side indicators for A/P and A/T and FMC, etc.

Makeshift overhead panel

Here is the product of two afternoons hard labour. My makeshift overhead panel. I will try to get some switches and LED's working, connected to the phidgets boards I have now installed.

Phidgets fixed for the overhead

And now the time has come to fix the phidgets boards in an orderly fashion. A piece of wood, with 30mm M3 bolts and nuts, to hold the boards in place. The left two are older 0/16/16 boards. The third and fourth board are new arrivals. All four boards have v6.0 printed on them, but the number of chips is different. The fifth is the LED64 board with the connectors on board. To the entire left (not on the picture) is one more slot reserved for another 0/16/16 board.



To make sure the boards don't short-circuit, I used my hot glue gun to put three blobs around the lower nut so the board does not connect to this and keeps proper distance from the wood-shelf.

Section F switches

Here are all the required switches for Overhead Panel Section F. I ordered them at Engravity and a few days later they were in the mail. This got me working on a makeshift overhead panel (until I buy the real thing) and on the phidgets setup, as they are lying around without proper fixation.

Overhead panel section F switches

Today I hope to receive the switches for the overhead panel section F.
This will enable me to start the engines utilizing a rotary boeing style switch.

Have a look at www.737cockpit.com (Engravity) for the details.

The art of simulator maintenance...

The 8/8/8 phidget board was hooked up to PM Systems PC, but I have switched it over to the CDU pc. On this pc I have loaded FS2phidgets software so I can assign the analogue sliders to functions and add the parking brake. I have no clue how to program the analogue devices connected to phidgets in PM Systems. Haven't found a tutorial on this yet. So this workaround should get what I want and hopefully it won't screw up the CDU and netdir performance.

And now I also added the MIP board of CP Flight and have started to wire the Autobrake rotary switch. This is pretty simple. The firmware of the CP Flight hardware was upgraded to 1.12 (required) and now I also have to update the PM MCP, GC as well with intermediate builds.

Also I have programmed a flight from PC Pilot's magazine. The Round Robin adventures are my favourite reading material and they give me nice idea's where to fly including navigation tips.

At IFSBI we are getting the website more in shape and are adding news to the homepage more frequently, to be honest, I am a bit worried that few people post in the forum. I feel that we builders are spread out over too many different forums, resulting in low activity. It is my wish to converge these forum communities, but nobody wants to move yet. btw, anybody read the book "The world is flat", great reading. On a positive note, we have a Vendor interview going on with Robert van Triet of Engravity, yes the company that makes fantastic detailed panels. Very cool stuff and amazing craftsmanship. We'll be seeing more great products from this gentleman as he is a perfectionist at heart and does not settle for less.

On a last note, I am getting very friendly advice from all kinds of cockpit builders friends. Peter from Belguim offered his help on understanding open cockpits and SIOC, once I get around to this, and Yuri from Russia sent me a nice thank you note. It's great to meet so much nice people who share the same fascination for simulation and technology. Keep on posting...

MIP expansion board ordered

Today I ordered my MIP board. Can't wait. Claudio sent an email announcing it's availability and some seconds later my payment was made. Now I have to construct a gear lever, and all kind of other stuff. The autobrake selector rotary switch is already wired and waiting for the board. Read more about the MIP board at http://www.cpflight.com/sito/dettagli/mip.asp

More Phidgets to come

As to load up for my overhead. Have friends visiting from USA second half of april and they will bring this present to me. This saves a big amount in shipping cost as PhidgetsUSA.com only uses UPS at a 70 dollar rate for International shipments.



I also had a look at Opencockpit.com with IOcards , but have no idea how to easy interface them with Project Magenta software. So far Phidgets and CP Flight seem to be the only ones with direct PM support.

Anyway, April is going to be an exciting month with new products coming in.

CP Flight expands capabilities for MIP

CP Flight will supply a MIP board to handle all the switches and leds on the MIP. All logics are handled directly by Project Magenta software.



It will become orderable in the next few weeks.

Flightdeck Builders Meeting Rosmalen

BUILDERS NEWS - Today 35 builders convened in the Netherlands, Rosmalen to talk about construction and more. This was organized by www.flightdeckbuilder.nl Two speakers added their knowledge, first Dirk Anderseck talked about FSBUS implementations. After lunch Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers told us how to build a cockpit with Aerowinx PS1 as the core. Also Stef (dnoize) was there with all kinds of nicely built panels. Go and have a look at the 22 pictures in the Ifsbi Gallery.

Time to fly

It's been a long time since I made a flight. Left the office for a 4 day intensive training. But I'm back intown. At the cpflight.com site I found an announcement that a 737MIP board will be released shortly for use in Project Magenta cockpits. Great news, this is what I was waiting for. No offsets, just hook up the switches and leds and rotaries.

pm Instructor Station added

Now this is the greatest addition to my flying experience since a long time. I can now have a quick go at approaches and easily repeat it. Positioning the aircraft, setting the weather conditions is a minimum number of mouse-clicks away. And I can see where I went wrong on the glideslope/path. More flying hours!

Flight ZRH-MIL-NCE

Captain Leonard and I made a flight from Zurich to Milano to Nice. It was great to fly together after a long while. Handling a 737-800 requires two pilots and the tasks can be shared while the other does the cross checks.



A couple of weeks later we did many landings at ORD to get back into the routine after all that building. Nearly forgot how much fun it is to fly. Unfortunately Captain Leonard came down with the flu in the windy city. Next time we'll do Bonaire.

Overhead Panel

Working on the overhead panel, drawing, cutting, drilling, fixing, calculating, soldering, linking, programming., etcetera-ing. Lot of work.

I am making my own and it is a lot of work, but I must say, after putting it in my cockpit the sense of immersion is much better with something over your head.

Pics will follow sometime later....

I'm also spending a lot of time at www.ifsbi.org enhancing our offering to simulator cockpit builders.

CPflight NAV panel added

One of the -urgent- shortcomings of my cockpit was to tune in to the ILS frequency. Therefore I went out and spent some on a CPflight NAV panel.



I'll have to fit it into my pedestal, but first wanted to see it work so I temporarily put it to the right of the MCP.

Tutorials

Are you good at writing tutorials? I feel you have a talent there if you do. It's time consuming and takes some versions before you feel it is ready for the outside world. But once done, it is very rewarding to publish it at a location where many collegue builders can find it. My recommendation is to send it to forum@ifsbi.org. Eternal gratitude and fame will be your reward ;-)

Won an Ebay item; 747 emergency light

These lights are located on the fuselage next to the doors, and provide light in a emergency evaucation. The only thing I'll have to figure out is the voltage required to get it to work.

Join IFSBI.ORG

Join up and let's build a great community of flight sim builders.
Independant Flight Simulator Builders International

As said in the Cluetrain Manifesto: "Internet is a conversation". And for a succesful forum conversation, size and concurrent use is a required ingredient.

If you have your own forum, close it down and make redirect button from your website to the IFSBI site/forum. I'm sure by putting it all together it will be benificial to both as more traffic will be generated and you'll save time.

So climb on board, stick your pilot-behind in the IFSBI seat, and make the forum fly to great heights.





p.s. I have no stock options ;-) just like the forum very much.

Overhead choice to make

So here is the operational cockpit, so far. The next step is to get the hardware switches connected to the Phidget cuircuit-boards and the system logic in the Project Magenta software.

Another item is to think about the overhead panel. Should I use the touch screen and hang it over the outside view or should I go for a sheet of wood or ABS plastic and start adding switches and LED's.

If I could get the touchscreen to work as CDU this would be my preferred solution. But first I need another PC with a serial connector as the tablet which presently runs the CDU does not have one.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Touchscreens are great

And November must be my lucky month. Mario had a touchscreen (elotouch.com) for me and after adding a serial cable and installing the drivers it worked like a charm. Now I have to decide whether I want to use it for the CDU or for the overhead. In any case, there is nothing like toching a screen and getting a response (ok, I can think of something else in this category. The engine startup sequence could be completed by touching the appropriate switches on the screen. Awesome!

Pedestal in progress

Today Leonard helped me building the pedestal. Without his help it would not be finished today, thanks buddy! Now it is time to start working on the Phidgets, whick are the green circuit boards connected to USB ports. With these phidgets it is possible to control inputs (switches, slider-sensors) and outputs (LED's and servo's). The cargo fire panel can then be connected to the software and a real interaction with flight simulator is the result.


The pedestal is on wheels (like the cockpit cabinet) so I can use it in a single pilot operation or slide it over and fit in my double business class seats so Leonard and I can perform a double pilot operation.

Real Life Lower Cargo Fire Protection Panel - WOW!!!

Karen got me a real life 747 Lower Cargo Fire Protection Panel.
Isn't that something! Now I'll have to hook it up to the Phidgets board and get it to work with Project Magenta. Obviously Karen is added to the Hall of Fame.

Making a cabinet for the cockpit

With all the wires and computers and screens it was about time to create a cabinet on wheels to hold all. This will also enable me to make a Main Instrument Panel (MIP) and put the MCP and EFIS at the proper 15 degree angle. Left to the EFIS module you can see a keyboard/mouse switch selector. The two main computers are on the right in the cabinet. In future it maybe used for a co-pilot panel, however that is way down on the wish-list.



As you can see it took a lot of calculations, fitting, cutting and assembly to get it all together. But first it had to be researched on the web and in real life. With some print outs I had a look at a company 737 in the maintenance-bay and took some measurements. Wih the right eye-point the MCP/EFIS modules should obscure the lower rim of the monitor.



Next step is to build a Pedestal cabinet (on wheels)

Project Magenta and 4 PC's

The new computer has the MS flightsim running on two screens and the PM-MCP software for the CP Flight MCP and EFIS modules. The older computer has the PFD and ND running on one screen and the standby instruments and the upper EICAS on the second screen. The laptop has the lower EICAS screen and the last PC has the CDU running.



This picture shows the outside view over Bergamo -between Milan and Venice- spread across two screens.



And here is the CDU on a tablet PC with the LEGS page for a positioning flight from EHAM to EHRD.

New PC assembled, ready to go

So here it is, the monster machine put together.

Casing: Coolermaster Centurion 531
Powersupply: Enermax 490W
Mainboard ASUS-A8N-SLI Deluxe
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 Venice 3500
Cooler: Zalman CNPS7700-Cu
Memory: Corsair Twinx1024-3200 Mb DDR SDRAM 400Mhz matched pair
Videocard: Gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP
Harddisk: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10 250 GB, 7.200 rpm, 16 MB, SATA/150

New Flightsim PC

As the old PC was getting pretty slow, it was time to buy components and build a new PC as main Flightsim PC. The interesting bit was to remain within the allocated budget and buy as much power as possible.

So here are the components, ready to assemble.

Only as it truned out the memory banks with LED indicators on top are too high in slot A1 causing the Zalman cooler not to fit to the processor. Luckily www.azerty.nl were most cooperative to trade them for lower memory banks.

First cockpit setup

Dual screen and separate CDU and Engine displays
Purchased Project Magenta, so now the serious work begins.


And what about these seats, original Boeing 737 Business Class seats.

737 pictures

A very helpful pilot made some cockpit pictures for me.
Here they are: 737 cockpit pictures