Thanks to all of you sim pit builders, I have been able to extend my joy stick, build rudder pedals and single throttle. My next step is to build a twin engine throttle, with prop and mixture levers. I have read many threads on this subject, but I am still not sure where the extra axis come from? I would appreciate any help in this area thanks.

Get the USBAxis module from www.opencockpits.com (first click the "UK/US" flag on the right, then under it the "GET IOCARDS" icon.OR get the MJoy from mindaugas, search the forum for "mjoy" and you should find the website address.Good luck and post pictures when you have stuff..For ideas, my throttle might be useful, it is simple construction and works well:http://gallery.tigert.com/tigert-albums/ho.../abr.sized.jpegFlat aluminium strips for the throttles, the knobs are bottlecaps (heh, yeah, works great :)) glued with hot glue (the throttles have a short bolt with nut+washer+nut to give more "grip" to the glue. Fill the cap with the hot glue, stick in the throttle rod and hold still until it cools. Trim off the excess. Works nicely and since it has the colors already, no need to paint :) Just sand off the "DIET PEPSI" logos carefully :)The white parts are nylon "bread cutting board" cut with a "hole saw drill" and everything is fixed together with a M8 bolt and a "winged nut" that can be used to adjust the friction. Movement to potentiometers is done with steel wire pushrods with Z-bends on both ends.http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...el-aug25-05.jpgSimple but works great - just in case you needed ideas, of course this can be done in other ways too..//Tuomas

to give more feeling I've link my throttle-props-mix to the slide potentiometers with hydraulic system.Two hospital-10ml-pvc-seringues linked with a perfusion tube fulled with fluorecent green anti-ice liquid .When you move the throttle it push the piston which move out the linked piston of the second seringue and push the 10k pot.This give an great hydraulic effect with good feeling and a little delay: good for my biturboprops cockpit.ByeBOB

>to give more feeling I've link my throttle-props-mix to the>slide potentiometers with hydraulic system.>>Two hospital-10ml-pvc-seringues linked with a perfusion tube>fulled with fluorecent green anti-ice liquid .>>When you move the throttle it push the piston which move out>the linked piston of the second seringue and push the 10k>pot.>This give an great hydraulic effect with good feeling and a>little delay: good for my biturboprops cockpit.Yeah. Not needed for a piston twin thouhg - the throttles are just mechanically "frictioned" pretty much like my construction to keep them from moving by themselves, otherwise it's just cables to move the stuff inside the engine compartment.//Tuomas

Hi, bob and Tuomas, Thanks for your reply, I will work om your suggestions, thanks again. Tuomas your panel looks very impressive, how did you do that?.

It always amazes me the power of UNITY of our hobby. We just have such a tremendous amount of resources available from our fellow builders. Such beautifully workmanship Tuomas:)

>It always amazes me the power of UNITY of our hobby. We just>have such a tremendous amount of resources available from our>fellow builders. Such beautifully workmanship Tuomas:)We had a small sim builders meeting in Finland last weekend, and I dragged my project (literally, almost broke my skull when carrying it out of the house over some rocks with Joni, ooof, but luckily nothing broke in me or in the sim..)I was amazed myself. The inspiration of the upcoming meeting got me excited and I got the sim further again, more in the 2 weeks than the previous year :) But all in all, it now has the first working electric elevator trim mechanism I have seen in a hobby project. Made from a power drill :) But hey, it works! And it feels awesome to be able to trim off the control forces just like one does in a GA plane. For the first time I am able to use the trim like I do in a real aircraft, and that's been pretty awesome to realize. The crazy idea does indeed work.I posted about this a bit ago, but it probably went unnoticed because of holidays.But yeah. We have a good community here, and I like the spirit of sharing ideas and comments.As to my panel.. it's a longish story. Lets take it from the beginning.. It started in 2002, I first built a small panel I could just have under the keyboard while flying..http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-stuff/console2.jpgYes. That's a hacked keyboard. That's what we had then, no FSBUS, no IOCards, no Simkits, no Photon.. But I had the gameport, throttle and mixture, flaps and some lights switches. They worked. And I used them to practice for my PPL.Flightsim.com had some interesting howto's and those got our mind rolling.. Kev's cockpit, Roland van Roy's awesome HOWTO, the pondering about optoisolators and relays to have toggle switches possible with keyboard hacking... etc.. Then a friend of mine found FSBUS. WHOA. This is what I call the "we lost control of our moped" -moment. It's been quite a ride since.So. With a couple of friends we built some fsbus systems and ended up using a friend who worked in China at that time, to get some pcb's manufactured professionally for us and another friend brought them to Finland when he returned from a work trip..At that time I wanted to have instruments separate from the outside visual view, and I happened to have a 15 inch monitor around. I stuck in a PCI videocard next to the Geforce 3 and made a custom panel with CfgEdit, the free predecessor of FS Panel Studio. Flew with two screens and the "throttle box" for a while, and it was cool.Below is a 5mm steel rod, a champagne cork epoxied to it, and a soft drink bottle cap glued on top of everything for the "mixture knob" color and feel :) Everything is going through the panel via a 10mm bolt and nut that has a 5mm hole drilled through (use drilling oil so you dont waste 4 drill bits like me... :) It gets HOT and melts the drill :))http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...f/throttle3.jpgFSBUS enters scene. Added carb heat. Got real toggle switches, not just "returns to off" -type ones..http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...-magnetos2.jpegDecember 2002.. Got our C172 sim project started at the club.. We had found a C150 fuselage that was stripped for parts in the literal sense..http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-stuff/mik-simu.jpgAfter 2.5 years of work by 5-6 guys for about 3000 hours that we later stimated, we now have this:http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-stuff/simvis.jpegPretty crazy. I am pretty blown away by the fact how neat the project is today.. It was a true team effort and just blew away our expectations.. Anyway, enough of bragging about that, time to get back to the timeline.. December 2002.. I wanted a panel at home. Now we are actually getting back to pimwa's question.. heh.. http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...topconsole1.jpgSo, plywood, got myself a hobby saw (best purchase ever!!) and did a small panel in a week during christmas holidays.Plywood.. http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...topconsole3.jpgMore plywood and paint.. paint does WONDERS, turns a wooden box into an aircraft panel..http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...topconsole4.jpgAnd this is what I have still on my setup. I have since built a "base" for it, so it first stood on the floor, then I built a "floor" with wheels on it so it can be moved away from the monitor when I am not flying.http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...topconsole9.jpgIt also now houses a 17-inch TFT monitor instead of the CRT, and the TFT actually fit great in the place of the old screen, so I was able to keep using the old construction. Nice!On April 2003 I sketched this, and named it "world domination plan"http://tigert.com/aviation/vatsim/cockpit-...ation-plan.jpegI think after 2 years of doing this stuff I started to get the idea _what_ I want to have. I wanted a twin engined light GA plane. The idea is to practice procedures so I can be more prepared to fly high performance planes in the future, if I decide to do so. So the cessna throttle knobs got replaced by the twin throttle quadrant instead.I am still missing the enclosure from the world domination plan, but I got the fresnel last weekend.. so it's heading there .. :)What a crazy hobby, but I love it!//Tuomas

I love it!!!!! Fantastic:)

Wow Tuomas, Amazing.... I bet you felt good about it. Just curious, on picture 5, what kind of display did you use for external view is it 3 Monitors or TVs ? Keep up your work, looking forward to see result of your sim with frensel len.

>Wow Tuomas, Amazing.... I bet you felt good about it. Just>curious, on picture 5, what kind of display did you use for>external view is it 3 Monitors or TVs ? Keep up your work,>looking forward to see result of your sim with frensel len.It's actually three collimated mirrors donated from Finnair Training Centre, we are lucky with that. It has some parallax issues with two pilots (we align it for the left seat) - but the overall immersion is way greater than the slight problems. Basically the right seater sees some black bars where the different units should meet each other, but one gets used to them surprisingly quick. And the person sitting on the left seat sees it better, that's the idea.http://www.mik.fi/midcom-serveattachmentgu...ew_oh-com-3.jpgIt has 3 x 45 degrees = 135 degrees field of view. One could probably do the same with 3 fresnels, though the mirros give better image quality.//Tuomas

Wow!THREE collimated mirrors, give-away by finnair Training Center? Its way above lucky! I have always wanted to have collimated mirrors, butm *Tsk *Tsk too pricey. Also, there isn't so many companies around the world that sell it. :( Hopefully, one of these day, there would be a better and cheaper solution on exterior view or variety type of visual display for our cockpit builders. Anyway, Good luck on your up-coming project, hopefully to see more out of it.

>Wow!THREE collimated mirrors, give-away by>finnair Training Center? Its way above lucky!> I have always wanted to have collimated mirrors, butm *Tsk>*Tsk too pricey. Also, there isn't so many companies around>the world that sell it. :(> Hopefully, one of these day, there would be a better and>cheaper solution on exterior view or variety type of visual>display for our cockpit builders.> Anyway, Good luck on your up-coming project, hopefully to>see more out of it.Georg Liigand from Estonia visited our sim (hey, Tallinn is 25 minutes away from Helsinki with a small plane :-)) and shot some video, here's a pretty good view of our sim:http://www.skyfilmproductions.com/index.php?p=freeIt's the "Malmin Ilmailukerho Cessna Simulator 4:20" -link, currently the second on the page. Check it out! And dont worry about the vertical speed indicator, that was a temporary glitch that corrected itself at liftoff :) We need to build a Wideview setup in the coming fall. That'll be interesting - the parhelia + AMD Athlon XP2500+ is starting to slow down with the latest sceneries etc.. You can see the visual a bit, but also the parallax problem - it's very hard to shoot video from outside the sim with some scenery visible. It's better when you are sitting inside of course, but the parallax problem does give some "blind spots" for the guy sitting in the right seat. It's not as bad as it appears on the video though. One gets used to it quick. This issue is present even on the "big" airline simulators using collimated mirrors like this, only the collimated projector systems with one large mirror overcome the issue since they have one seamless view that has no segments.Fresnel lenses make good substitutes for the collimated systems, especially considering the price. There's no budget that would be enough for us to actually go and *buy* even one of those things.We are an aviation club with "youth activity" work, that is a good way to both get more people interested in aviation in general, and also to get donations like this for our project. No fricken way could I have gotten the mirrors donated for my personal project.. (and I wouldnt have the space either) - but doing a sim in a club is a good idea in many ways. You have more people building, you have more space. And you can fly it together. One of us is a controller in VATSIM, so we often open the virtual tower at EFHF so others can join as well when we fly the sim. Of course when the weather is good, we take the real planes and leave the sim alone :)I have the personal twin engine panel project too, but it's way smaller scale..//Tuomas

Hi Tuomas, Thanks for your replies and all of the others that came with it, Your setup is very impressive .Thanks again.