I hope one day CH would make a motion seat, so that

For $ anything is.

A friend of mine has this and loves it.

wow, awsome!!!
over one mega pixel, that is close to 1280*1024.
What kind of video card is required? does Radeon 9800 work on this?
how comfortable is that? does he feel eye fatigue after prolonged flight?

He has a good card, a 9800 should work. He never said anything about fatigue, he made a small fraps video using it (I think there are some on the site).
It's really nice, but the price is a little steep unless you are looking for more reality.

i saw the price was like $129, maybe its just the tracker price?
have to pay for the goggle display unit?

Go to the bottom of the page, it lists what you get.
The goggles are for 3D I think, something else entirely.

You mount the tracker on the monitor, and stick a "reflective spot" on your head or hat. You can buy a hat I see with it built in.
I think he said he got the hat with a package deal.

what??? you mean you just move your head to get a corresponding
view on the monitor? You still look at your monitor??
i thought you would wear the headset and eye goggles, then you move
your head to see in the google like VR, and totally drop the monitor. i guess I was wrong

I'm quite certain that you don't wear any goggles for this, I could be wrong but I think not.

Here are some videos.
Go over the entire site and read about it. That's a lot of $ to be spending without knowing for sure what your getting.

E-mail or call them.
http://www.edimensional.com/contact_us.php

You don't wear any goggles for it. One of the domicile managers over at United Virtual uses it and says that it's pretty much the best way you could ever immerse yourself in a VC.

I believe earlier versions used a special hat to track the head movements, but that is probably updated to just your head now.

PMDG's 747 forums had this video on it a while ago, definitely worth watching (in spite of it's 40 mb size)

I've seen pictures of somebody who attached a couple of big bass woofer speakers under his seat so he could feel the 'rumble' effect of the engine and gear.

I think it was the same guy who built his own tilt and swivel base with servo motors linked to his yoke and pedals to get a better effect.

There are all sorts of home cockpit devices available commercially but they generally come with a hefty price tag ranging into the thousands.

I've built a control box with 42 buttons as an alternative to clicking with the mouse or having to remember complex keyboard commands. It uses a card and cable out of an old keyboard wired up to push buttons. As far as FS is aware it's another keyboard and I've re-set the key assignments to be just one character commands. I have all the lights, switches and radio stack commands at the push of a button. Just had to be careful in the selection of the characters not to use one that is hard coded into the program for a specific purpose - like Esc.

If I'm flying IFR, once my flightplan is set up, my actual keyboard is pushed out of sight for flying.

Unfortunately, as a guest, I don't know how to post pictures here but if someone can tell me how I'll put some up.

That I would love to see, usually the people who have eliminated their keyboard have spend 100s or 1000s of dollars on GoFlight hardware!

Madbrit.
Interesting sounding setup you have.
You can post screenshots like anyone else.
Just get a host (hotlink) and place it between the two [img] [/img] marks.
Use http://www.photobucket.com/ as your hotlink.

The box and my desk.

I have it wired so I can re-assign any of the buttons to any keyboard character and then re-map that character into the FS assignments for the command I want it to perform.

The old joystick under the desk was what I used to link a simple set of rudder pedals I made to the PC before I bought the CH set.

Here's a couple of photos of those.

Madbrit,
What a great looking setup. 👏
You are a genius, a box like that would have cost a small fortune if you bought it on line.
Thanks for the look at it, outstanding! 👍

Wooooow...!!!!!!!!!!

Thars great madbrit.Gongratulations.

WOW!

Mind if I ask for a possible link on building the peadals/box?

And how did you do the dual monitors?

Thanks!

Anonymous wrote:

WOW!

Mind if I ask for a possible link on building the peadals/box?

And how did you do the dual monitors?

Thanks!

There are hundreds of pages about building your own. If you do it, come on back and show them to us. Good luck!

http://mypage.direct.ca/b/bsimpson/byoc~1a.html

http://www.acesim.com/main.html
Duel monitors.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-display-gaming-bigs,759.html

Thanks!
I need to get better at using google..

I unfortunatley will never register- I dont have any extra money/credid card.

Anonymous wrote:

WOW!

Mind if I ask for a possible link on building the peadals/box?

And how did you do the dual monitors?

Thanks!

I discovered a couple of sites for homebuilt cockpits, including the guy that had an old ejector seat built into a homebuilt F16 cockpit. There are some sites that give very detailed plans for building every possible instrument or control to connect into FS. Most of these use EPIC cards which can be very expensive and require special programming.

That gave me the idea for building the pedals and using the circuit card and connecting cable from a joystick. The idea being that the joystick card was already programmed to convert the movements into a signal to send to the PC and the cable was already wired to connect to the PC.

Thought about it for a while then starting building. Sorry, I don't have any plans. Basically a very simple connection of a linear potentiometer to a cross bar attached to the pedals mounted on rails. The most difficult bit was working out how to convert the backwards/forwards motion of the pedals to a side to side motion to turn the potentiometer. It was a bit of trial and error to get the measurements right to avoid 'geometric lock' on the pedals but some well placed stops on the rails prevented the pedals traveling too far forward or back.

Then I connected the potentiometer to the circuit card in a Wingman 3d joystick (replacing the joystick's own twist potentiometer connection to the card) which converted the signals so the PC could read them As far as the PC was concerened I was using the twist control of the Wingman 3d. They worked really well but after a while I decided to buy a set of CH pedals and yoke. (I'd started taking flying lessons and wanted a bit more realism for practice).

Likewise with the control box. I thought about it for a while and came up with the idea of using the circuit card and connecting cable from an old keyboard and connecting some switches to the 'legs' of the keyboard chip to replace the keys.

There's a little bit of work in figuring out the combinations to connect the switches to the chip. I used Excel and set up a matrix for the left and right legs of the chip. Then plugged the card into the PC and used a piece of wire to connect two of the legs at a time to see which character appeared in Excel.

Hold one end of the wire on a leg and connect it to every other leg. Then hold the wire on the second leg and connect it to every other leg.... and on and on. Some combinations generate a function, like Tab, Help or F1, and not a character so you need to watch what's happening in Excel.

You need to be aware of which characters or function keys are hard coded into FS, like Esc, Enter etc., because you can't use those but everything else is available.

Once I knew which characters I would use then I connected the switches to the legs of the keyboard chip. All the commands are set to single characters (A-Z, 0-9 and most of the function keys). I have 32 switches plus I kept 0-9 as a number pad. I used all single characters for the commands because using the 'Shift +' combinations are far more difficult to wire up and control.

The box is a project box from Radio Shack and the switches are push button 'momentary' switches. That means that when you push the switch it sends a single pulse, just like pressing a key on the keyboard.

Once it was plugged in and recognized by the PC I disabled the repeat function to make sure only a single pulse was sent each time a switch is pressed, otherwise you can get multiple signals. Great if you want to hold the switch in a have the landing lights flashing on and off. You could use momentary toggle switches too so they can be flicked to the on and off positions.

In the FS keyboard assignments I cleared the existing keyboard commands and set the character for a particular commend to match the character generated by the switch I wanted to use for that command. Again, the PC thinks I have another keyboard attached.

Multiple monitors is easier than building pedals or the control box. There are lots of sites (including microsoft and other posting here) that explain how to do it. In essence you plug in a second monitor to you graphics card (might need a DV converter to use the second slot on the back of the card) and let the system recognize it. Then go to the display settings, select the second screen and set it as an extension to the first. You should be able to move the mouse across both screens at this point and if you hit identify, you should see a number 1 and number 2 appear on the screens.

Once they are both recognized you can adjust the display settings (color, brightness etc) for each screen independently.

When you open FS, you need to switch to windows mode from Full Screen. Open the radio stack, right click, select undock and drag it to the second screen. Do the same for any other panels or views you want on the second screen. When you're done put FS back in full screen mode.

And that, as they say, is all there is to it.

Have fun.