Sean Cooley

Time for some exciting Mid-September progress! As you can see by the thumbnail, I’ve had quite a bit of free time on my hands so I’ve had the chance to get quite a bit done in the past few days

So obviously I’ve been focusing on getting the center console completed, so we’ll start on the left panel and talk about the work completed there. This panel is what I’m calling my primary combat panel, which includes controls for missiles, SCM, basic targeting (advanced targeting will be in a different location), as well as other important controls such as decoys. Although I haven’t quite completed it yet, the darker trim piece will be cut soon and painted before mounting to it.

Moving on to the center console, I got the base paint completed. Then I got to move on to some more interesting projects, such as the MFD displays.

Now, those of use who have tried to build simulators know that there currently isn’t a built-in method for us to pull out the MFD displays from the game. Hopefully CIG will pull these out at some point (cough cough), but I also would probably rather them focus on a few other things first hahaha! Anyways, these MFDs are primarily for looks and for use in the future if CIG will give us a way to pull those screens out of the game.

That being said, I used some simple screens and driver boards from AliExpress and the Thrustmaster Cougar MFDs. I then created a simple mounting bracket that can be easily printed, which I’ve made available for free on Thingiverse (link at the bottom of this post). I then wrapped all of the cables around the backside of the screen and printed another bracket to mount the packages neatly together. I also routed the cabling so I would have an easier time with cable management when I go to wire everything together in the future.

The final little bit that I’ve gotten wrapped up is a mount for my head and eye tracker. I’ve one with a Tobii Eye Tracker 5 for the hardware, and the printed mount can be seen below. I was a bit worried about how the cable comes out of the body of the eye tracker, but it wasn’t too bad and I could build some clearance into the main console to make up for it.

That mostly wraps up everything that I’ve manage to get done so far, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting the next things completed!

My goals for the rest of the month are fairly simple. From a mechanical design standpoint, I want to finish the last panel on the left hand side panel as well as tackle the slightly challenging tablet panel that is being mounted in the middle of the center console. After completing this, I really want to get all of the switches in both of these regions ordered, installed, and start to work on getting everything programmed out. However, my budget has gotten very tight this month so I’m going to have to wait a bit before I can order the switches.

From an electrical design standpoint, I am needing to design some PCBs and control schemes for the LED and lighting behavior throughout the entire cockpit when certain switches are used such as my power switches. This will likely take some time and won’t be finalized until I have the number of LEDs fixed to make sure I can handle the current required, but I should still spend some time thinking about it to get an idea of how I want to approach it.

Alright so I want to get some of your feedback! I have been considering selling my design files for all of my control surfaces so y’all can easily print them for yourselves so you can start building your own cockpit! I’m sure of the pricing yet or what it will look like, but I am wanting to prices these pretty inexpensively and make them available. If this is something you would be interested in, please fill out the poll below so I can get an idea of whether or not y’all would be interested in it or not!

Alright that pretty much wraps up my update for this month! Thanks so much for tuning in and I can’t wait to talk to y’all again soon!

o7,

Sean