#DIY STEAM FLIGHT SIMULATOR THROTTLE QUADRANT SOFTWARE#
In this guide, we will discuss examples, ideas, hardware and software that will keep the total investment well under $10k.
Of course, the total investment will increase depending on how advanced and realistic you want to make your home cockpit.Īs we mentioned before, it’s important to think about what you want to do with your home flight simulator, your goals, and determine your budget correspondingly. Home flight simulators can range from a simple desktop-mounted joystick in front of a laptop, to entire cockpits that resemble the real aircraft. Step 2: What is Your Budget?īefore diving into the practical side of building your own home flight simulator, let’s first think about the numbers. In this guide, we will focus on the latter, as most of our readers are either licensed or student pilots, who want to use their home flight simulator not only for fun, but also to train and improve their skills. Thanks in advance.On the other hand, you have people like us, (student) pilots, who want to take maximum advantage of their time before and between flights to train procedures, navigation, or other skills, and which saves them tons of money in fuel and renting costs.
As an aside, my all-time favourite flight sim jet is the Level D 767-300, and it is on the throttle quadrant of that bird that my DIY unit will be modelled.Īny advice at all would be greatly appreciated. In summary, the signal imputs from my DIY flight sim throttle quadrant will consist of FOUR analog potentiometer settings - one each from the speed brake and flaps lever, and a pair from the throttle levers, along with TWO on-off switches connected to the thrust reverser levers.įor the flaps lever I intend to created fixed detents in the quadrant housing, along the flap lever's axis of travel, such that specific potentiometer settings of that lever will correspond to incremental flap settings that I can assign for the various heavy metal jets that I intend to fly. I haven't dabbled in electronics prototyping for many moons now, and I would sure be grateful for any pointers that could help narrow down which specific USB interface chip would be most suited for this application. My vague plan at the moment is to connect rotary 100K-ohm potentiometers to all levers at their points of articulation, and to feed the output from those pots into a commercially available USB interface chip, which should process the signals from each lever to enable the assignment and callibration of those variables within the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 "settings" page. My question here regards the circuitry that will be required to interface up my throttle quadrant to the computer via a standard USB cable. As an example, the speed-brake lever quit working soon after I bought the unit, forcing me back to using the "/" character on the keyboard.Ĭutting to the chase, I wouldn't be inclined to shell out $1200 for a realistic Boeing-style throttle quadrant from a vendor such as VRaircraft even if I could afford one, and so have decided to put together one of my own, with the help of a buddy who owns a small machine shop, and will construct the throttles, thrust reversers, flaps and speedbrake lever array, along their points of rotary articulation about pivot pins inside the quadrant housing. Right now I use a GoFlight TQ6 throttle quadrant for my all-jet flight sim sessions, and despite the functionality of the product, I have felt let down by the short life-span of its build quality. Hi all, This is my first post, and I did try a search before deciding to go ahead and ask for advice on my idea of creating a home flight simulator throttle quadrant that will work with a standard USB conector.įor some reason all the affordable flight simulation throttle quadrants currently on the market are manufactured with extremely fragile components, and bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
0 kommentar(er)
