cjp
Addon Developer
I've read a bit on this forum about building simpits, and I wondered how far an amateur can go in building a simpit.
So far I don't have the room for the plans I present here, so for now it's nothing more than dreams. I'd like to discuss it here so that people with different levels of expertise can have a look at it.
The basic idea of a simpit is to have an instrument panel and a very big screen. I'd like to know whether it's possible to add simulation of G-forces, in the same way as professional simulators do it (by rotating the simpit).
I think the important thing here is to visually close the sim pit, so that the rotation is not visible from the pilot view. This way, the pilot's brain will hopefully interpret the changed direction of gravity as caused by acceleration.
To make it practical for an amateur, in terms of power consumption and safety, the actuators should be as low-power as possible. The most important force in the construction is the weight of the simpit, and I found a way to make sure it doesn't have to be supported by actuators. My idea is to balance the simpit on a single pole, which is connected to the bottom of the simpit with a joint (2-DOF, allowing pitch and roll). By attaching counter-weights to the sim-pit, located around the pole, the COG of simpit+pilot+counterweights can be placed close to the joint (for stability, a bit below the joint actually). This way, the actuators (located around the simpit) don't have to carry the weight, independent of the orientation of the simpit.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires extra height below the simpit. I still need to figure out whether it will fit within a single floor (which is an important practical requirement).
To keep the weight down, I had the idea of using a small beamer instead of a real screen. a head mounted display would be even lighter, and way cooler, and has the advantage of supplying stereo vision. A disadvantage is that I don't know how to find a good and cheap (compared to beamer) HMD. Also, I'm not sure how to measure head movements accurately.
Stereo vision may also be accomplished with a beamer combined with glasses that periodically close for a single eye. The advantage of stereo vision is that it may be combined with another idea of me to reduce weight and complexity: not have a real instrument panel, but have a virtual one instead. A real plane of some form should be present, to give sensory feed-back to the fingers, and to contain some sort of touch-screen input device. In the case of using beamer stereo vision, it should be transparent, so that it doesn't block the screen.
Computers may double as counter-weights. Batteries may also be good counterweights. I thought of using batteries to make sure that short high-current peaks from the actuators don't overload a normal power supply.
I think it's about time to see what kind of budget is needed for this machine.
So far I don't have the room for the plans I present here, so for now it's nothing more than dreams. I'd like to discuss it here so that people with different levels of expertise can have a look at it.
The basic idea of a simpit is to have an instrument panel and a very big screen. I'd like to know whether it's possible to add simulation of G-forces, in the same way as professional simulators do it (by rotating the simpit).
I think the important thing here is to visually close the sim pit, so that the rotation is not visible from the pilot view. This way, the pilot's brain will hopefully interpret the changed direction of gravity as caused by acceleration.
To make it practical for an amateur, in terms of power consumption and safety, the actuators should be as low-power as possible. The most important force in the construction is the weight of the simpit, and I found a way to make sure it doesn't have to be supported by actuators. My idea is to balance the simpit on a single pole, which is connected to the bottom of the simpit with a joint (2-DOF, allowing pitch and roll). By attaching counter-weights to the sim-pit, located around the pole, the COG of simpit+pilot+counterweights can be placed close to the joint (for stability, a bit below the joint actually). This way, the actuators (located around the simpit) don't have to carry the weight, independent of the orientation of the simpit.
The disadvantage of this approach is that it requires extra height below the simpit. I still need to figure out whether it will fit within a single floor (which is an important practical requirement).
To keep the weight down, I had the idea of using a small beamer instead of a real screen. a head mounted display would be even lighter, and way cooler, and has the advantage of supplying stereo vision. A disadvantage is that I don't know how to find a good and cheap (compared to beamer) HMD. Also, I'm not sure how to measure head movements accurately.
Stereo vision may also be accomplished with a beamer combined with glasses that periodically close for a single eye. The advantage of stereo vision is that it may be combined with another idea of me to reduce weight and complexity: not have a real instrument panel, but have a virtual one instead. A real plane of some form should be present, to give sensory feed-back to the fingers, and to contain some sort of touch-screen input device. In the case of using beamer stereo vision, it should be transparent, so that it doesn't block the screen.
Computers may double as counter-weights. Batteries may also be good counterweights. I thought of using batteries to make sure that short high-current peaks from the actuators don't overload a normal power supply.
I think it's about time to see what kind of budget is needed for this machine.
