metalnwood

You will have to take the plans and see. Some guys might not want to do it and you will see a big cost associated for the hassle. Some might need the business and offer it cheap. One might just look at it and tell you $150. You are going to have to ask :)

I am not sure that would be practical. It is a big unit so two side by side would be awkward. I am not sure why you cant get the warthog anymore, they are out of stock but cant you get it somewhere else? Did they have a price no one else had?

Stefan, thats in interesting proposition which in theory could be OK. the image would have to be scaled and transformed but I would be curious about how it could look. There would not be any issues with lining up the hud on the screen but you would have to scale things so that the outline of the hud lined up on the screen. That could be more difficult that the former.

If it was either the CH gear or the 940 then I would go for the CH. I really would not like to live with the ch throttle anymore though. If you can get another warthog then do it!

yeah but the 3mm gives a proper edge for the flush trim bit to work. Ahh, the fun days before CNC when you had to make patterns and templates all the time :)

Yeah, sometimes I think it's too bad I dont live there either! I know for sure as someone asked me about something else that sending a flatpack kit for saomething else. Shipping was ~880USD for a 50KG item around 400x1000x400mm. Ouch. That certainly makes that kind of product uneconomical for me to do. One thing that could be possible is to make a template pack from 3mm ply or mdf so that you could then use a router with a flush trim bit to get perfect copies in 12mm/18mm sheet. Even then it's probably expensive to ship.

Its looking awesome :) the Lua you posted a few posts ago, I cant tell the order that things are done. for the one that is not working is there any chance you added the background after the rwr was added so you effectively covered it?

With porn having overrun the internet I understand how sometimes when googling for a product it is buried under pages of 'other stuff' I dont think you looked far enough, I am certain you bought the wrong 'thrustmaster'

Without track ir I would have to say I would feel like I was at a disadvantage if I had not top view. Given how often I would be turning a tight circle and looking up (which in my bank would give me a view of the ground I am turning towards) I would feel like my targets have snuck up on me as they would just come in to view quickly rather than tracking them. Not sure how well I explained that but I reckon top view is used a lot to miss out on it.

I owned the fighterstick/ch throttle/ch rudders for some time. The stick was great but when it came to center mount it had a base a bit larger than I wanted. The rudders were a bit closer together than I liked and I must admit I didnt care for the style of throttle a lot. I have just listed the negatives. The gear worked and worked well. After many years finally one brake axis went on the rudders. When a10 was in beta I started to play that and when word that the warthog was being released I was very keen. In NZ the price was going to be horrific so I went and bought a logitech 940 to see what it was like, i.e. would it lure me away from the insane price I would need to pay. In the end it didnt so I wold it on and bought the warthog. The hog arrived and proved that it was a completely different kettle of fish from any controller I had ever owned. It ticked all the boxes for me and I would not go back to any of the others. I ended up replacing the ch rudder with the saitek combat pedals purely because I wanted more distance between my feet but there is a center detent in the saiteks, there is also a mod/procedure to remove it. On the CH rudder is is a spring to return to center so it's not really noticable, I found myself applying rudder accidentally on the CH but not on the saitek by resting my feet so I would say there is no real detent in the CH. Bill, a number of people ask the same question often but rarely do they have the money on hand and are willing to shell it out. Often they want to be talked in to the lesser product and I would agree that one of the other products would do. In your case with money not being an issue then go for the hog, no doubt. The saitek 'will do' but the hog is a step up. The throttle you will love, the CH throttle I dont think you will nearly as much. If you fly the dcs A10 you cannot go any other way, honestly if you dont get it and fly someone elses with the a10 you will top yourself for not having got it.

Not sure if any of this helps you Linden but this is how I was mounting my pcb and LCD driver board. I will mount my own electronics in the same way, on the back of the switch PCB a bit lower down. Until I get the real PCB made this is just a copy of it dimensionally from acrylic to check things out.

You are after a rotary switch, which works differently from an encoder. so dont get a rotary encoder. They come in different number of stops and you can usually adjust a little pin to limit its movement. They also come in different numbers of degrees of rotation per stop. I think that one is probably 30 degrees. http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en/switches/rotary/1114210?k=switch

Hi Linden, it works no problem. If you see my thread you can see from the front that it is centered fine. Here is a picture of the faceplates turned around. The LCD fits nicely in the space. and there is still space for the cutouts of the buttons. You could move them farther away from the lcd but then you will get clearance issues with the sides around where the dzus fasteners go. Also, when you do a pcb it's an ideal thing to mount the lcd of the LCD on to. I will be adding 4 mounting holes so that the lcd card can piggy back on it.

Hah, no fail at all. We are talking about your first pit which I dare say is not much different from a lot of first pits and I can tell you when I got in to sims and wanted to add just a little bit more to it my pit looked very similar. I now have more space, more money and more equipment to make better cockpits but we both started with the same ideas, if I had photos of my first attempts to make something functional you would be feeling better I am sure :) That keyboard is crying to be cleaned though ;)

It's nice seeing the text on it isn't it? :) Is that from the same place I got mine? It loos like it. Now after seeing Deadmans pictures I am wondering if I should keep my replica as is - how it looks in the game or how it looks in RL. I can tell you, it's a tight squeeze in some places to get those 67 switches in there. I am putting in some omron tactile switches rated for 1.000.000 cycles. This week I plan to send out the gerber files to have the custom PCB made. What are your plans for the electronics?

Thanks deadman, very interesting with the CDU. it shows how high the buttons really sit and I did not know that the white sripe sectioning off the numeric and alpha keypads is a raised section. Not that I will be changing mine to replicate this right now but very interesting to see it.

Thanks all. Kuky, I will sell you one but I don't know the price on it yet. It all depends how much I can refine the process to keep the costs down. As you can imagine having to make everything thing takes up some time so if I can get better processes that might help. Flim, I am using the ipi laser material which is e same as the rowmark lasermax you are using. I used some Weldon no.4 to glue some of the grey on to another sheet of acrylic which I then engraved and cut out. The trouble is that the black stuff is cutting really well and the grey is not. I believe this is because of the higher power I need to cut through it and the acrylic sheet it is bonded to. I am going to try it in two passes. One to get through the first layer at low power and then higher to get through the whole lot. The other alternative is to mill them after the engraving. This gave the best results of all. The buttons have come out well as they are I just want better and most people wouldn't care but if you are going to sell something...

Thanks Peter, I will really be smiling when I can use it :) Right now though I would prefer to be a bit closer to you. Hockenheim I think :) I will see you there pie!

Right, today the buttons material finally arrived and I cut some buttons! Now I can really see what it's going to look like. These are the first buttons I have cut, they are sitting in place, a couple of the numbers are not straight I see but they will be and cannot spin around when the switches are installed. I was planning on painting the sides of the buttons as what you can see is white on the sides instead of gray but now I see it I am not sure it is required. You dont really notice and it's a lot of work. I really need to get a better camera! Although I admit in my haste to see what it looked like I didnt properly wash the parts after the laser was finished so maybe the bad camera helps there a bit :) I still cant take a photo/video without the text blooming and looking bad on the cdu screen but it looks perfect when you are looking at it! Here is a quick youtube and here is a pic

It sounds like you have got it how you want it now. Yes, full screen will crash because there is no full screen resolution of 1920x2160, thats just a made up one. The only way to go fullscreen is using softth which will create that resolution based on the electic mix of monitor resolutions. I have noticed just recently that the windows taskbar does not hide anymore. There must be some change in DCS world as it was never a problem in A10 standalone. I had to tell it to auto hide to get rid of it.

I have always got the problem that when in MP and you scroll the names for the slots dissapear. A real PITA as you then have to trial and error until you get a free slot that puts you in a cockpit.

I played a lot of 1942 and BF2/ desert combat. I bought bf3 and only played about 4 hours of it. Doesnt have the same feel I used to like. I dont have time for the COD audience. It seems for me that this genre of games is gone past where I liked it. I did buy red orchestra 2 and had a bit of fun with that but two months after it was released all the servers were empty. Now if I want a blat at FPS I just do a bit of time in TF2. Hah! Just looked at the BF4 page. No news, no screenshots, in fact they say they have nothing to say about the product yet but they do have the preorder buy now! That spells bad news to me, a money grab.

Ahh, I just saw that your monitor layout is specifically for the f16. Have you thought about running the main displays on helios so that you can runn all the different gauges for the a10 and f16? It also comes in handy when you are playing anouther game that doesnt export gauges etc. Here is another quick vid running with a 22" touchscreen in the center for games that dont export their gauges. you can still touch the controls, flick switches etc.

Your other option if you want to drive so many displays is to spilt them over multiple machines. Gauges could be on a secondary less powerful machine while the main machine will still need to drive the outside view, mfd's, rwr, hud. It's pretty ambitious though and I would think you could get away with all of them except for the HUD and use the in game HUD. That would have the main machine driving 6 displays, 2xMFD , 3xviews, 1xRWR. I would think that your frames would be OK but the rest would have to be exported via helios to another machine. Are you sure that they would all hide behind a facade OK? I doubt you would get the same layout as the real A10 and there are no engine gauges? Thats

The eyefinity 6 card is the best way to go I think, that will give you your five screens for now. Add another one later if you need to. What are the other three screens? I can't think what two of them would be? Edit: displayport hubs might not be that far away so with an adaptor or two you could run more monitors off a single card with one of those.