DIY Simulators. Simracing, Flight simulators and more

This video is how I gutted my already modified old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS joystick of my ViperPit and made it work again with the help of an Arduino Pro Micro. This flight stick (and also the other peripherals) do belong in a museum but where’s the fun in that? I modified it and now it’s a generic USB joystick that works on any recent system. I focus mostly on the 5x5 button matrix since this is the hardest part to understand. In the end are a few minutes of playing X4 Foundations with it to give it a good test run. Now it just needs some oil for the creaking 😅

https://makertube.net/w/qrqqZLr2QvJFjCwyNzzAmp / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYiPFDpHwmc

I made a snap purchase. Kinda a shame that the seller gave up this hobby. Sold everything for an apple and an egg. It's a ViperPit loosely based on a F-16 with a wild mix of panels and hardware. Nothing of this is functional though. Yet.

Winter may come! I wonder if I can convert it into a VF-0 (or mount my VF-1 panel on the frame) 🤔

Man… the feel of those lovely switches and dials alone ❤️

I hope this isn't too far outside the scope of this community; I just thought the people here would find it interesting how the same engineering problems were solved before computers were ubiquitous.

This works way better than I expected. This is a static image test for a HUD on my home cockpit using a dead cheap beamsplitter made of plexiglass and a smartphone.

This works by placing a smartphone (or really any kind of fitting display) below it. The beansplitting characteristic allows some of the light to pass through and will mirror whatever is on the phone display below it. The image is inverted though so a HUD mode requires an already mirrored display mode. There are apps for this but since I use HTML for all my GUI stuff I can probably just use CSS for this task. Most of the work was finding out how to get Firefox to do fullscreen (which can be requested via JS from a user interaction - so it has to be some sort of clickable element) and get it to keep the display always on.

A more advanced build would use a beamsplitter glass. This thing here is "designed" for cars and is according to the review a really bad product because it doesn't work well with day light or likes to slide around. All problems my desk does not have, of course, so I got this on a whim to see how it would look and I'm mind-blown with the result already 🤓 What do you think?

Originally noted at https://beko.famkos.net/2024/09/06/15629330/

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21415025

It has been a while that I tried Star Citizen. With the new Neuralnet Tracker plugin (AI haha) for OpenTrack we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try head tracking without a dedicated head tracker nowadays. And all that on a Linux PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

@fk_tech shoved my nose on Monocoque today, which appears to become an alternative to Simhub: Cross Platform device manager for driving and flight simulators, for use with common simulator software titles. It supports e.g. bass shakers, tachometers, simlights, simwind through USB and Arduino serial.

And it works on Linux PC: https://github.com/Spacefreak18/monocoque

See a demo on https://www.youtube.com/live/GVghB4aMEmY by @fk_tech

I also jumped into their Matrix room (#simracer:matrix.org) and they seem like a friendly bunch too.

Mebbe worth to keep on the radar.

Edith says: Shorter videos to get the gist:

• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TznEHQ4lPZM
• https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t27kFte_fIE

Found this on my daily YT journey for home cockpits and I can get behind that channel slogan :D

Pretty wild how much know-how is laid out there. Extra kudos for using FreeCad instead of Fusion360.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/18462516

I implemented a proof of concept to add the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC. Apparently only TrackIR and FreeTrack (both Windows only) are supported so far. Still needs some fine tuning but I'm really happy with that single day coding frenzy considering that I didn't touch C++ in years.

I never did create a merge request so far. I'm still going to but it's really low priority for me rn :-/

This is a demo of the implementation with Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, a BSG mod for FreeSpace 2 Open. It's also on YT should you fancy that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB8lRV1m54

I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this.

Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️

Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn’t check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end – sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.

I for a long time had a wooden attachment to my Ikea Poang chair that I attached my wheel to. It became quite cumbersome to climb in and out of the chair like a canoe. So Finally I added a new shelf so the chair is free.

Note, not mine. Similar to mine. In fact totally down my alley :D