This is how mine looks at the moment.
It looks nicer because I mounted the nuts for the switches between the acryl- and front panel. So they become invisible.

Below are some more pictures of the panel. And the Heading selector switch.
I did some extra work here by drilling a  hole through the 4 pos. rotary switch and mount a rotary encoder behind it. This way the resolution of the heading selection is adjustable.

I’ll be adding some pictures soon.

Cool huh!?

The new drawings are finished also. I searched the web for the proper cockpit dimensions  So the new drawings have more realistic measurements. And a wider center view screen (24″ in stead of 19″) There is room for 6 PC’s and the overhead is lower. So the whole cockpit is less in height than the previous one. This also is more like a real B737NG cockpit.
Another improvement is the steering column. We have a real column now, whereas the previous version used only the Saitek yoke, but the way it was mounted it gets in the way for a clear view on the MIP (Main Instrument Panel). So this time I still use the Saitek controller, but a bit modified. The Saitek is mounted underneath the MIP and is connected to the steering column by an extended steering rod. And inside the column with a belt and two toothed pulleys. The original Saitek yoke is mounted at the top of the column. The construction drawings of this will be published also.

Here are the new cockpit drawings:

So I’ll need 4 PC’s for now. 3 view- and 1 control PC.
I still have the control PC from the previous Cockpit. This is a MSI K9N SLI main-board with 2 PCI-e slots. So I can connect 4 monitors to it. These will be the flight control monitors, and an instructors panel.
For the view-machines I just bought a few P4P800 boards with a 2.4GHz Celeron on e-bay. The were under EUR 40,- so that is quite cheap. I have the ‘old’ video cards from the previous cockpit. NVIDIA geforce FX5600 cards. They will still do the job

Summary:

Control PC:
MSI K9N SLI main-board
AMD Athlon 3800+ (2.41GHz)
1.5 GB DDR2
350 GB SATA-II HD
2x Radeon HD4350 Dual head Video card

All 3 View PC:
P4P800 VM main-board
Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
1 GB DDR
40 GB HD
Nvidia FX5600 Graphics card

x-plane in action

X Plane 9 is the world’s most comprehensive and powerful flight simulator for personal computers. X Plane 9 offers the most realistic flight model available for home use.

So that’s why I use X Plane 9 in my Boeing 737 cockpit version 2.The big difference between Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and X Plane is the way the flight dynamics are determined.
In MS Flight Simulator you can tell a brick to fly by specifying the proper flight dynamics. X Plane, however, calculates the flight dynamics by breaking down every surface of the air-plane and calculating the forces acting on each piece individually. So a brick in x-plane will fly like a brick…
A very realistic behaviour of the air-plane can be simulated this way.

X plane 9 flight simulator  has a very open interface. This is good when you want to connect all the cockpit hardware to it. There are several plugins for X Plane that allow you to control your plane by third party software.
Another pro of X Plane simulator  is the cost. Or better the lack of it! When you download X Plane, you get 6 DL DVD’s for only $29 !! This makes  X Plane freeware!. almost…
You will get all versions at once: a PC X Plane, a MAC X Plane and Linux X Plane. Plus the world scenery’s. Plus an airplane maker and a scenery maker. Also for all three platforms. It is absolutely high quality software. (It’s almost as if I’m selling it here )

The hardware you need for X Plane 9 is about the same as for MS Flight Simulator 2004. A 2GHz PC with 1GB of RAM and a reasonably powerful video card.

Check out X Plane 9 downloads on the vendors web site!

the SemiCircle

When I started building cockpit #1, a B737NG single seater cockpit about 4 years ago (the year 2006).  Not very realistic of course, a single seater, but I lacked the space to build a full two seater cockpit.

Also the half circle of 7 pieces of 17″ CRT monitors did not allow a second center (seat), since a semi circle only has one center, where the observer (pilot)  should be.

Anyway, the plan was to build a cockpit where the pilot sits in the middle of a semicircle of 7 screens. On these screens the outside view is visible. Everything moves in real time. Then in the MIP (Main Instrument Panel) two displays were supposed to be fitted. One for the ND (Navigation Display) and the clock and one for the AI plus the analog meters.
Another display would show the EICAS and/or the FMC or GPS.

5 views- 1 contol monitor

This Cockpit ‘flew’ on Microsoft’s’ FS2004 Flight Simulation software. I used 3 PC’s, 1 for the front view and 2 for the right- and left hand views. I flew with a total of 5 view monitors 1 front, a 30 deg. left and a 60 deg. left and the same on the right hand side. The side PC’s used a Ge-force Dual head FX5600 graphics card. The MIP was controlled by a fourth PC with 2 dual head video cards. To drive the 3 MIP display plus a display to control the flight-plans and start and stop flights.

What I did to establish the five views was to have multiple PC’s that run an instance of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator FS2004 in ‘scew’ mode. They get their coordinates through the network from the 4th PC that had a FS2004 running where the actual controls were connected to. This is the PC where I was flying on.

The Idea was to control the FS2004 by means of hardware controls. These were connected to OpenCockpits IOCards Interfaces. The logic would be handled by SIOC PLC-like software. All of the above has actually been working for a while. I used a USB joystick as the flight controls.

Watch me fly in Grand Canyon.

But then I met this girl… We got married, moved to another house, and this gave me the opportunity to reconsider the whole cockpit concept.
With all the knowledge I gathered from cockpit #1 I should be able to make a better one now…

Lets call it cockpit #2

I will give a quick review of the plans that I have at this moment. I can’t guarantee that this post will be up to date all the time. But I will try to update these posts regulary.