[Jared] managed to find a professional FAA-certified flight simulator at an auction (a disassembled, partial one anyway) and wondered, what would it take to rebuild it into the coolest flight sim rig ever?
In a video, [Jared] gives a tour of the system and highlights the potential as well as pointing out challenges and drawbacks. Fortunately the system is of a modular design overall, and the motion control system is documented. The chassis and physical parts are great, but the avionics stack is a mixed bag with some missing parts and evidence of previous tinkering — that part being not quite so well documented.
Conceptually, a mid-tier gaming rig with a wraparound display will take care of the flight software part, and some custom electronics work (and probably a Raspberry Pi or three) will do for interfacing to various hardware elements. But a lot of details will need to be worked out in order to turn the pile of components into an entertaining flight sim rig, so [Jared] invites anyone who is interested to join him in collaborating on innovative approaches to the myriad little challenges this build presents.
We’ve seen the community pull off some clever things when it comes to flight sims, so we know the expertise is out there.
My little cousin (he’s in highschool) is really into ETS (a truck sim game) and Microsoft Flight Simulator. He has been telling me to make him a sim rig for both games for 3+ years.
I have all the skills, hardware and firmware (well, mechanical CAD skills are not very good but passable). I have made multiple macropads for personal use.
The only thing stopping me is laziness. In my defence it seems like a large amount of effort with a lot of programming, mechanical design and all probably having to read a lot of documentation.
not to mention time and money… And I don’t know the tone, but if some snot nosed brat started telling me to do something for his pure amusement, I would be telling them to shove it up their
No matter how interesting the video is, if audio isn’t in sync, it screws up the whole experience of watching the video. Very sad, this is 2025, 99 years after solving the audio in sync with moving pictures problem.
I’m nonetheless still very anxious to know what was paid for this “machine”, I googled “for a song” but could not find a useful answer, very annoying. Hey… I’ve got a secret, it’s awesome, but I’m not gonna tell you. Very annoying. If he didn’t want to tell how much in real currency, then at least tell us how many songs this machine would have cost when it was new. I guess it was more than two songs, perhaps even more than three or four, who knows?
What does it matter what he paid for it? It’s not like there’s a secret supply of these things at that price; there was ONE, and it’s already been bought. Even if the guy sells this one on, it’s not going to be for the price he paid for it. So the number is literally useless to you or to anyone else.
Unfortunately syncing digital audio and video is not always as simple as one might expect. With digital everything very much depends on the plethora of technologies you use to produce it: the software, the video and audio codecs, the container (AVI, MKV, MP4), the original video format (constant or variable frame rate?), the video player you’re using etc. They don’t always play well with each other and some combinations outright don’t work. Sometimes you make a video that plays perfectly on your Windows laptop but it loses sync on Android or you upload it to Youtube and see it stuttering on your smart TV. The pros probably know what combinations work and stick to that, but not everyone is a pro.
There is a (very bad) reason why a lot of tech still uses h264/mp4/AVC.
It’s a pain in the donkey to use, but at least, anyone knows how to use it.
But yes, you are true.
Some codecs denotes time in, well, time, like ms or such, other use frame number and a fps (good luck for long video).
As for audio codeced, it’s more or less the same.
Some strean chunks of 1k and tell you “each chunk is XXXms long”, some other gives you variable lenght chunks and say “Sample rate is YaDaYaDa”, and so on.
So, while some may play together well, mixing famillies of codec often needs the decoder to be flexible for it to work.
There is no doubt this is a quite impressive project, but I’m not so sure whether this would be the “coolest flight sim rig ever”. There are some completely over the top projects out there. Take for example EEVBlog #1268, where Dave goes to visit a flight sim in the making which is build from an actual second hand 747-400 cockpit. And I think there are a few more project on this scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug7xa-7sako
There’s an event cooler one in a large shed in Yorkshire, UK, it’s a fighter jet simulator that was surplused from the RAF and the cockpit is mounted on three enormous servo rams, surrounded by a 360 degree projection screen with, I think, six Bahco laser projectors.
one could probally get a 737 MAX cockpit for a reasonable price, its not like they are exactly flying (heh) off the lot
“A professional FAA certified flight simulator” ?
This is very – “disingenous”. Perhaps at one time it was certified as a CPT FTD, but in it’s current state, it’s more of a has been arcade game – and that’s all it ever will be – “full stop”.
A “professional FAA certified flight simulator” is under FAA 14 CFR Part 60.
QTG’s describe the criteria for certification.
A Level D sim (on a full 6 DOF motion base), the cockpit uses actual flight hardware. So the PFD’s, MFD’s, LRU’s, etc are the real boxes (translation: very expensive), that are fed simulated data from the custom software driving the simulation via the industry standard data bus (ie. ARINC-429)
The home built rigs are more for entertainment.
The’d never pass muster to be issued an actual FAA serial number as a training device.
It’s hilarious when MSFS pilots in their basement argue with “real world” pilots over how to ‘fly’.
Seriously ? smh
Hilarious. Why? The “MSFS pilot” can be just a curious (and interested) individual following every trace of information he can lay his hands on, and if a “real world pilot” wants to share experiences then kudos to him.
And even completely uncertified hardware can be used by “real world pilots” to test procedures and train muscle memory. I guess this would be especially valuable for pilots who do not have many real flight hours. Real flight hours are of course still needed to keep their certification, but that does not mean that “uncertified hardware” is useless for real world training.
And I can see the appeal of (re) building a flight sim from a rig that was once FAA certified, but if they’ll ever claim it still is and start using it for pilot training in this way, the’ll probably get into trouble with the FAA really quickly. But maybe they have a loose doorplug or an open window to fix that. Those seem to be popular choices at the moment.
The de-sync seems to be caused by the jolting MTV blast which I skipped and then its off. Bluetooth micing can cause it. Stick to realtime lecturing with camera presence with no editing and this won’t happen. I’ve never seen this before extensive digital editing and MTV ethic. Reality TV cannot be edited. Could this mentally induced noise cause one to switch off fuel on take off? Not a good way to fly.
What’s that “PuSH Inc” company shown on the PCB’s at around 09:00? Maybe they are willing to share some info or sell spare modules.
It also seems there are regular PIC uC’s on those boards, so even worst case, you don’t have to replace them, but can just reprogram the uC’s. Those PCB’s are surprisingly empty (I.e, easy to reverse engineer). I would expect some kind of bus protocol with packets. I would have expected RS485 or CAN drivers on a project of this caliber. Without extra hardware, the protocol is pretty much SPI, I2C, UART, or some bit banged TTL thing. Maybe a bit of LIN, or something else with open drain?
PuSH Inc is apparently: https://pushei.com/
It seems to be “just” a PCB factory (With PnP) but I don’t see a hint of software engineering or even PCB design on their website. But it does make me wonder why their name is so prominent on the PCB’s.