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Build Your Own Boeing 737 Simulator
crux6rind writes "This guy built his own Boeing 737-700 simulator in his garage. The simulator uses elements of a retired Continental B-737-100 along with other genuine Boeing 737 avionics and system components. The simulator will be of the fixed-base variety (no motion, just outside visuals), using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, interfaced with R&R Electronics' EPIC system. This system allows you to interface switches, lights, buzzers, gauges, digital readouts with virtually any PC flight simulator out there."
So who'd rather fly a boat than a sexy Stealth?
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
He paid 25,000 - 30,000 USD for the stuff currently. I figure thats about how much this slashdotting will cost him in bandwidth.
Ready....Aim....SLASHDOT
but this is uber cool anyway. I had a difficult time understanding the timeline of the pictures, but still, very cool. As an avid Sim Pilot and a student pilot, this is the holy grail of sim-ers.
--sig fault--
Build Your Own Boeing 737 Simulator - if you happen to have a spare 737 lying around to build it from!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
is that he can fit it in his garage.
Does the simulator keep track of how fast the virtual airline is burning up cash, and how long before they go bankrupt?
And, of course, no airplane cockpit is complete, these days, without a Breathalyzer.
- One from OZ built into a Ford chassis
- An F/A 18 Hornet simulator made from wood, also in OZ
- A Boeing 767 in London that "flies" around the world
- A "multi-mission simulator" by an avionics engineer in the US
- An F-15 in Washington
You're welcome.Let's try not to Slashdot 'em too badly.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
So how long do we give the Feds to come in and determine that it is in National Security interests to confiscate the hole thing.
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
As long as they don't touch my car...
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Iwas just over a year ago /. had another article just like this about a guy who built a 747 cockpit.
Check it out.
There are some 200 people (over a dozen using real aircraft fuselages) who are building home built simulators of aircraft and other things. I am helping to build a F-15C simulator, for more information see the July issue of "Smithsonian Air and Space". The task is really quite involved many of the people within the /. community would find that this is a very engaging hobby. One that involves every skill they ever learned and forces them to learn new skills as well. The very idea that these people are doing case mods that look like aircraft to run some of instruments would interest the /. community.
http://www.x-plane.com
...
This program has FAA endorsement, unlike that other toy I used to use
I can buy you a gem of a Piper Cherokee for that, then you would be flying for real.
*shrugs* That's about how much I have spent on all my flying minus the money I made by doing a little instruction and commercial flying.
Instead of the lame little (even at 21inch) CRT, why not get a reasonable LCD projector and a screen a few feet in front of the beast and look out the windscreen at it? Like they do with some real simulators...
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Look at the lenghts he had to go to in order to avoid giving $50 to MS!
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This isn't any more of a full blown simulator than any of the other cockpit building projects. Flight sim enthusiasts have been building their own cockpits using EPIC cards for years- one person even used an old F-15 nose section that was rotting away at a museum and refurbished it completely.
e .earthlink.net/~bluumax/o m/
Building F-16 cockpits is pretty popular, interfaced with Falcon 4.0 which is easily the most realistic combat sim all around (yes, Flanker 2.5 and Il-2 probably have better flight models). Here are some current F-16 cockpit projects:
http://www.f16cockpit.net/
http://hom
http://virtualf16.20m.c
One convenient thing about building an F-16 cockpit is the Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS joystick & throttle, which are exact replicas of the HOTAS system used in the F-16; all metal and accurate down to the lettering next to the buttons.
Again, this is not an uncommon thing in the flight sim world. Some go as far as purchasing flight suits and helmets to wear while flying in their virtual worlds.
Smithers: But sir....
Burns (pointing a gun at Smithers): I said, hop in....
Well, Fine! I'll go build my own simulator.
With Black-jack...and hookers.
In fact, forget the Black-jack!
Awe, screw the whole thing.
it will run on linux, mac, and of course the hated and feared os ms windows. it is free to d/l but is 23$ a disk for a copy of all the variations, documentation, and as much north american sceenery as possible. $15 for one of the sceenery disks and $70 for the set of 8
mirror
Home-built 747 Simulator, and we all know that 747's are the real bad boys of the sky.
Tierce
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
...is that his wife/girlfriend/mom lets him keep it.
A friend and I had an opportunity to do the same thing with an A-7 Corsair cockpit, but his wife nixed the idea of having a 7'x4'x12' perennial project in "her" garage.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
I work in the flight sim business developing software. I was in the commercial side of things (Lear, Cessna, 777, etc) for a couple of years and most of the host software is written in Fortran. Now I am in the military side of things (Apache, Commanche, F18, etc.) Fortran and Ada form the basis for much of the host code. It is an ugly depressing world down in the bowels of the host code for these high tech sims. The Visuals, networking (HLA), and newer systems are starting to propogate towards newer code. It is interesting to see the mish-mash build for such huge projects. CGF (computer generated forces), SAF, IOS (instructor operating staions), are typically of a more modern paradigm, but they interface with Ada and Fortran code that drives the host simulation. You have never seen so many global variables in you life. GOTO's abound. It is a wonder to me at times how the systems work at all. But diligence and hours and hours of trainer time seem to work out most of the bugs. I usually get 10 or so hours a week on a trainer and most of the time don't even fire up the engines and fly it around. At first it is the ultimate video game, but after a while, it is just a job and deadlines have to be met and my code must work. Flight Sims are amazing engineering projects involving hundred of engineers and millions of lines of code. It is imposible for one engineer to know the inner working of all the systems (although I think my cubie might). It is definately an exciting and satisfying industry to get into as a young engineer or software geek, but be prepared to get out that old FORTRAN book from your freshman year in college because you will need it. Oh yeah, and brush up on your Ada. And you better know Unix/Linux. Windows don't play in the real time sim world. All of our systems are progressing from proprietary Unix systems (SGI-IRIX) and the like to Linux (RedHat). Host, visual, IG, networking. All of it eventually will be Linux based PC systems. The cost savings are too important to ignore. And we have the inhouse know-how to run on any system. Why not the cheapest?
You do have a point, and the same thing occurred to me just after reading about this. The thing is, technology is becoming easier to work with for everybody, for better and for worse.
I just recently heard about a guy (I believe here in Australia) who is building his very own long range cruise missile in his garage. Why he's doing it? To prove that if he can do it, so could people with an interest in doing some real damage.
I'm not sure what his point is beyond that; what he thinks the government should do given when it comes to the realisation that people can do some seriously dangerous shit in their own backyards. Personally, I'm inclined to say that terrorism has to be attacked from the other side of the spectrum, remove the frustration that leads to it.
Terrorism doesn't have reason. It can't be justified, understood or explained, but what we have to understand is the frustration and hopelessness of the oppressed palestinian people and the poverty and misery in wartorn countries like Afghanistan that leads them to the societal suicide that terrorism is.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
I was watching the Discovery channel, and saw a show about pilot training or something, and it compared the American training sims (with real cockpit controls, digital displays surrounding the pilot, etc) and Soviet ones (where the viewable area around the pilot was broken down into 6 or so sections where the picture on each section was actually printed on a roll, and the rolls would all scroll back and forth with the pilots movements to try and provide a realistic setting for the aircrafts movements).
The show mention that as the Russian technology/funding improved, and they were able to build better simulators, they auctioned off their old ones, many of which went to nations with hand-me-down militaries, like Afghanistan.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I'd really like to look into buying one just as a keepsake, although they probably belong in museums =)
In my six years at Boeing (and I'm told that, given the layoffs, I did well to last that long), I was fortunate enough to be able to 'fly' the full-motion 747 sim, as well as the fixed-base 737 NextGen.
Although the full-motion is definitely what I'd class as a "wild ride" in terms of convincing one's senses (ever try to land a 747 on only two engines?), I found that (much to my surprise) the fixed-base sims can produce many of the same sensations, simply by the projected movement on the window displays.
In other words: When I went into a climb in the fixed-base unit, it still felt like I was tilting up despite the fact that there were no motion components to move the cab around. Same thing when I went into a turn. I caught myself leaning into it, and feeling like it was really happening, just as I did during my private pilot training.
While fixed-base may not provide the full experience, it most definitely provides enough to effectively fool the senses if it's done right. And it sounds like this fellow did it right.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
The solution to the hijacking and using the plane as a missile problem isn't to clamp down on general aviation or to impose stricter regulations on flight schools. The solution is to increase in-airport and in-aircraft security. You also assume that the terrorist has no previous flying skills. What if they recruit a disgruntled airline pilot? Then all the identity checks at flight schools in the world won't help you.
You can buy your own simulator here. The "Tropos" system even uses a custom ATI Chipset.