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Building a Cockpit Setup for Simulator Games?
Milo_Mindbender asks: "For awhile I've been looking at building a cockpit-like setup for playing simulation games. One problem is finding a way to hook up a large number (up to 100) of lighted push-buttons in the thing and interface them to a computer that would poll the switches and control the (Tri-color LED) lights. Since the buttons/LEDs won't be clustered together, it would be nice if each button (or group of 4-5 buttons) could be on some kind of multi-drop network so the thing wouldn't turn into a wiring nightmare. The trick is that you don't want to miss button presses and you want to let people hold down multiple buttons without the setup getting confused. The big problem though, is cost. Anybody got an idea of how this could be done, preferablly with off-the-shelf parts, for under $5-$10 per button including the button?" Combine this idea with the earlier article we did on LCD-screens-for-cockpits, and you might have a kick-ass setup! Networked mech sims, anyone?
Your problem has probably been solved, as there's a somewhat decent sized following of people who build their own flight sim cockpits, and I think I even saw one mech cockpit.
;)
Build Your Own Cockpit
That has a few links. Plenty more can be found with simple google searching. I had this idea a few months ago, and like any idea I have, I checked to see if it was done already, and sure enough
As for LCD screens, they've got that stuff figured out. Check it out, you won't be let down.
If you want a high-power, instrument, multi-engine, or ATP (airline) certificate many more hours are of course required. However, 1000 hours is close to what you need to get an airline job, not to cruise around on weekends in a 172!
sPh
Check out what Dallas Semiconductor has for products. Check out there 1-wire items. (www.ibutton.com has a number of related links).
Basicly, they have modules to do damn near anything you want, they can check the status of a switch, toggle like a transistor/buffer combination, etc. And you can have a number of devices on the same 1-wire network. Each device is individually addressable, and device types can be access in groups.
(While they call it a 1-wire network, it is 1 wire + ground, can be accessed various speeds depending on the attached devices. (Up to 1 megabit I think.)
So, basicly what you'll want to do is work out the fastest polling rate you require and figure out if you can adaquatly transfer enough data to meet the worst case scenario. (best case is probably easy, as you can poll to see if devices changed.).
A rough estimate would be that you could do all this for about $3/[switch|LED] combination.
This is one of those instances where I really wish I had mod points to mod up the parent.
Noone else has mentioned this and this is really exactly what you want.
Without having multiple interfaces, you will not be able to handle 25 buttons and LED without using some sort of controller. I recommend purchasing PROGRAMMING AND CUSTOMIZING PICMICRO MICROCONTROLLERS. This book goes into great details (with good examples) on how to make button debounces. It even comes with a circuit board to build your own programmer (saving you quite a bit of money).
With a cheap breadboard, and a couple PICS, you could make a circuit that had a serial port that could address any number of buttons.
If your really ambitious and get the thing to work, you could make a small board run and sell kits on eBay and probably pay for the project while your at it. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks that would pay good money for a flight simulator console.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
http://www.arcadecontrols.com has a lot of information about hooking pushbuttons up to keyboards and so on.
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