[simpits-tech] Working turn coordinator and other coolness

[dabigboy at cox.net]

I have been quietly making big progress on the sim stuff! Tonight I finally more or less figured out my audio panel....seems a hangar fell on a Navion not long ago, and I've got the AMR-350 audio panel out of it. It's kind of old school, but the price was right. Tonight I made the pleasant discovery that it has the auto-silence function. For instance: if you have COMM1 enabled and also NAV1 audio, NAV1 sounds loud and clear until there is audio coming through COMM1, then NAV1 goes to a lower volume. Cool! I had initially thought I might have to gut the AMR350 and just wire directly into the switches, but it looks like I'll be just fine actually running my various audio sources through the stock unit. This means the audio panel itself has zero modifications: it will be literally a direct swap of a real audio panel from the real plane into my sim. I still can't figure out how to get sound over the SPK (speaker) leads, nothing seems to work. Not a huge issue anyway, headphones are working correctly.

I've also managed to convert a real turn coordinator to my sim. I gutted the internals and used two servos with a Phidget servo board, and some fun code in the X-Plane SDK. From the bezel/support structure forward, there are no more mods to the TC, meaning it appears in my setup exactly as it did in the real plane. Here's a video of the action during testing:

http://68.12.225.136:81/pics/sim/tc.mov
(You can also see my custom instrument display software running on a separate PC here.)

I also managed to get the computer installed into my sim that will run the instrument display, analog instruments, and some of the inputs and instrument audio. It's an old socket A board with 512m RAM on a tiny 13g HD, running Linux. It will be configured to boot directly to my instrument system, in fact the graphical interface isn't even being loaded (I love Linux).

Here's the motherboard tray mounted in the sim initially (old HP computers are AWESOME for cannibalizing these very nicely machined mini-ATX trays from):
http://68.12.225.136:81/pics/sim/back_early.jpg

The sim with the motherboard, HD, and PSU installed:
http://68.12.225.136:81/pics/sim/pc_installed.jpg

I am having a BLAST! There's so much cool stuff to stick in a sim....and this isn't even a full sim enclosure, it's just a desktop unit that mostly just holds the main instruments, radio stack, and controls. I still have a $700+ GPS annunciation unit (which I acquired for $25....ebay rocks) to interface into X-Plane's limited GPS somehow. :)

Matt