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My DIY home cockpit for Elite Dangerous (version 2)
(discuss.tchncs.de)
o7 CMDRs, made a tiny demo video show-casing the SimPit in Elite Dangerous 🙃
Pick your poison:
https://tube.tchncs.de/w/1nokGf66oWj34EdMvxYbSn / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXofGR4GRLk
Just slaughtering pirates (wasn't in the cockpit for months) but you get to see it from a first person perspective this time because I strapped the camera to my headphones 🙃
Utterly butterly brilliant. Even my partner said “ooooh buttons” looking over my shoulder.
What’s your setup here? I’d love to augment my HOTAS and Stream Deck with some more gizmos.
Heh, yeah I'm like that too: "oooh buttons" 🤓 It's completely homebrew beside the X52 Pro. Some parts are salvaged form old electronics. What part interests you most? I wrote some details here before: https://SimPit.dev/version-2/
Nuts! So is effectively a small, secondary monitor with a custom surround you’ve added buttons to?
Do the buttons connect to a keyboard controller or something different?
What software are you running on the monitor? Is it touch screen?
Do you have mappings for all the buttons or are some/many just for looks?
What’s the general layout of the buttons (i.e. what do you have mapped and where)? I think I counted 71 buttons/lights/switches!
Again, insanely cool setup. I’ve been making do with a large Stream Deck with a bunch of folders for everything and a plugin to update button states based on game state. It’s incredibly functional but nowhere remotely as immersive as yours.
Yes, the monitor is a separate entity but some of the buttons at the bottom are used to control it's OSD menu. It's not a touchscreen because it's salvaged from a very old laptop (and I despise touchscreens :D). It's software is a home brew React app basically as described for the old version here: https://simpit.dev/version-1/mfd-software/
I have a list for the buttons yes. All buttons are connected. I'm working on a write-up of the wiring. Some can not be read by ED due to button limits. I work around this by remapping them to keyboard presses (AntiMicroX). It's really so much that I can hardly showcase all in one little video 🤓 Some are currently not even in use and are crammed below the contraption. There's also a total of 17 status indicators which can display various states. That's a NeoPixel so it can be extended if needed. It's all driven and organized by an Arduino Mega. It's daemon is a Rust program that also raises a virtual joystick with the system.
Thanks :-)
Do Games like this have the ability to control the status indicators? It's not a feature I've seen before but very cool if it can be done. I love this whole thing and will definitely be reading your write-up... Even though I don't have a gaming rig, time to play any games or the money for any of it!
Some offer continuous ship telemetry, but that's mostly games that are more simulation focused and thus more grounded in reality - think flight sim. A few notable exceptions exist, like Fly Dangerous, that serves everything on a silver platter.
ED is a mixed bag. Some information is available in the JSON files it dumps regularly, where they can be consumed by various 3rd party apps, or your own. I've a writeup and a demo video of this specific part in an early state at simpit.dev/version-1/plumbing/
ED is however not very detailed and only dumps information if a certain threshold is reached. We get for example no airspeed in the files but we get latitude and longitude on a planetary and with the radius of the planet (yes, a game made me do Maths!11eleven) we can calculate some missing data to feed e.g. a primary flight display (the one that is stuck in the video - it does operate on a planetary ;-))