A Next-Level Home-Built Flight Simulator

Every hobby needs to have a few people who take it just a little too far. In particular, the aviation hobbies – Radio control flying, FPV multicopter racing, and the like – seem to inspire more than their fair share of hard-core builds. In witness whereof we present this over-the-top home-brew flight simulator.

His wife and friends think he’s crazy, and we agree. But [XPilotSimPro] is that special kind of crazy that it takes to advance the state of the art, and we applaud him for that. A long-time fan of flight simulator games, he was lucky enough to log some time in a real 737 simulator. That seems to be where he caught the DIY bug. The video after the break is a whirlwind tour of the main part of his build, which does not seek to faithfully reproduce any particular cockpit as much as create a plausibly awesome one. Built on a PVC pipe frame with plywood panels, the cockpit is bristling with LCD panels, flight instruments, and bays of avionics that look like they came out of a cockpit. The simulator sits facing a wall with an overhead LCD projector providing views of the outside world. An overhead panel sporting yet more LCD panels and instruments was a recent addition. The whole thing is powered by a hefty looking gaming rig running X-Plane, allowing [XPilotSimPro] to take on any aviation challenge, including landing an Embraer 109 on the deck of the USS Nimitz Aircraft Carrier.

What could be next for [XPilotSimPro]’s simulator? How about adding a little motion control with pneumatics? Or better still, how about using a real 737 cockpit as a simulator?

[via r/DIY]

Filed under: misc hacks, transportation hacks

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