Alex_rcpilot

No problem. My pleasure.

Thank you man. We're also trying to make more stuff accessible, hopefully we will meet somewhere in between in the future.

The full image is huge so I've put it on my site https://www.neoengress.com/downloads for download. The following preview should offer an idea of how it looks: When I started planning on my cockpit build last April, there wasn't a whole lot of info for my reference. It took so much painstaking cross-referencing till I came this far. Now if you're also in search of a dependable poster, this one might be of some help. I did a render job straight from the actual CAD model of my prototype-proven cockpit so it's totally original. A bit of courtesy would be appreciated if the copyright text doesn't get removed. This thread is solely set up to make the poster accessible to more people, for anything else regarding my original project please refer to other pages on my site or my pit building thread. Have fun.

Thanks bro, I'm also trying to find more ways to further bring down the cost.

I've managed to build a site https://www.neoengress.com which is live now. It's not much, but enough for a start. As an update on the seat, here are some render jobs and pics. That lengthwise rail is bit of a hassle, to use it I had to feed the cables to the seat through a drag chain. Aluminum sheets are joined with flush rivets: More info can be found on the site, you guys are more than welcome here. Thanks for your support along the way. https://www.neoengress.com/naces-ejection-seat

Sure, and thanks. I'll announce it before long. Just replied, glad to be in touch again. That's the Winwing throttle I've purchased to fill the spot. This project has been so tedious that I hadn't been able to finish my own throttle unit design. I'll post updates once it's finished.

Speaking of which, it's actually high time for me to haul ass with production if I'm determined to make a Christmas delivery. lol Nope, that NACES came as part of this project. Also built from scratch. Here's a video of how you adjust the seat bucket height with the switch box: I thought it'd be cool to have the entire aft portion of the cockpit on the rail, so I've adopted a dual toggle version of the switch box from another NACES variant, and used the second switch for lengthwise adjustment. I'm optimizing this feature so it won't increase the shipping cost. Thank you both and welcome to my project :thumbup:

Thanks so much for the attention. I'll be attaching a video in this reply. Actually I've been getting so much encouragement lately that I've finally decided to start a business and manufacture some cockpits & ejection seats based on an upgraded version of this project. Meanwhile, there are so much cockpit wizardry lying around my lab that I haven't disclosed yet. This business will provide the funding I need to develop more cockpits, modules and components for the flight simulation community. Despite my engineering background (mostly as an employee), for the past decade I've only been casually involved in the simulation hardware business. At most I would help some of my friends make their own solutions. Now I will be directly involved in this new business, I hope this cockpit will be a good start. Here's a demo video of this cockpit in action. Some of you may have already watched it. It's branded NeoEngress Simulations. It's meant to symbolize a gamer's novel ingress to a virtual combat world. I only wanted to highlight the control mechanisms with this video because they are the most anticipated features one would ask for with a physical pit. Curved projections, navigation and tactics can wait a bit. Hope you will enjoy this one for now.

Thanks man. That's so kind of you. :thumbup:

No probs and thanks. I'll try and reach out to him for that matter.

AoA indexer and RWR mask Just dropping by with some latest findings. First things first, you guy's have done a stunning job with the new Helios and profiles. I've edited the scripts so my hardware can tap into the reports. As I recently upgraded to Helios 1.6 and adopted Captain Zeen's latest profiles for the Hornet, I discovered that my AoA stopped working. It took me some time to compare the code with DCS BIOS which fortunately is still working, and I found that ED/Belsimtek has changed the export value type for AoA lamps from integer to float. And when these lamps light up their values are all smaller than 1, which would always read as 0 if probed as integers. So in Helios_F18C.lua from the Mods folder, I changed the format argument within these lines: Helios_Udp.Send("483", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 4)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_HIGH > "Caution Panel", "GUN UNSAFE", "Lit if gun is capable of being fired." Helios_Udp.Send("487", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 5)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_CENTER > "Caution Panel", "OXY LOW", "Lit if oxygen gauge indices 0.5 liters or less." Helios_Udp.Send("490", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 6)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_LOW > "Caution Panel", "SEAT NOT ARMED", "Lit if ground safety lever is in the safe position." from "%.1d" to "%0.1f". Without the changes Helios would have thought these lamps remained off and never refreshed them after the initialization. For a moment I thought maybe we could adapt the DCS BIOS approach which treats anything less than 0.5 as 0, as shown in their following code: if dev0:get_argument_value(arg_number) < 0.5 then value:setValue(0) else value:setValue(1) end But then it occurred to me that the AoA Indexer is actually dimmable, maybe that's why they switched from integer to float? As I turned down the AoA brightness knob on the HUD panel, I found that the "ON" value of these three lamps also dropped from 0.9 to 0.1, (but the in-game indexer didn't seem to be dimmed, maybe it's still a WIP) So for these indicators we clearly can't use 0.5 as a threshold. It wasn't a problem for me, as I processed the float value in my own software. But thought you guys might need to know and decide what to do with it. I'm not a professional programmer and I would never have come up with something like Helios. But at least I could try to help improve it. On another note, I see what you've done with zooming in the latest profile editor GUI versions, now I can hold down Ctrl and use mouse wheel to zoom in and out, which feels much more convenient than the older versions. It'd be even cooler if the zoom could be implemented with the mouse cursor as center. I'd like to show you a small touch I've made with my F/A-18C profile. I've noticed that the legacy RWR viewport doesn't come with the greenish filter mask, so I've made one for myself. I just put an empty panel over the viewport area and loaded a png image with alpha settings. Here's the raw png file I've made: End results looked close to what I was going for. I'm sure Captain can make a much better one if he is interested. Thanks and keep the good work guys.

Thanks Robin, it does feel pretty cool to sit inside. :pilotfly: It's been a month since I cound find time for this project. The updater had been acting up too, so I was only able to finish a major update yesterday with a 10GB+ download. I spent several hours replacing my old Helios 1.4 with the latest 1.6 version and its files, loved it. I've modified the new sample F-18C profile to fit my pit, all the gauges and viewports are working. Even the blurry RWR is looking normal now. It was actually my own fault, the width setting in my monitor config file was too wide and I never noticed it till today. Everything felt better except for the AoA indexer. I can no longer seem to get it lit up now. No value is registered when the AoA is active. I spent the last few hours trying to pinpoint the culprit, wish it was something I could fix, but it's starting to feel like a DCS bug to me. Helios uses mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( ) to fetch indicator status. The parameters for AoA indicator lamps are 4,5 and 6 according to the latest scripts. I thought ED might have changed their definitions, so I went to my DCS Installation folder\Mods\aircraft\FA-18C\Cockpit\Scripts\MainPanel\lamps.lua and confirmed they remained the same: -- AoA Indexer Lights create_caution_lamp(4, CautionLights.CPT_LTS_AOA_HIGH) create_caution_lamp(5, CautionLights.CPT_LTS_AOA_CENTER) create_caution_lamp(6, CautionLights.CPT_LTS_AOA_LOW) In Helios script it says the following: Helios_Udp.Send("483", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 4)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_HIGH > "Caution Panel", "GUN UNSAFE", "Lit if gun is capable of being fired." Helios_Udp.Send("487", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 5)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_CENTER > "Caution Panel", "OXY LOW", "Lit if oxygen gauge indices 0.5 liters or less." Helios_Udp.Send("490", string.format("%.1d", mainPanelDevice:get_argument_value( 6)) ) -- CPT_LTS_AOA_LOW > "Caution Panel", "SEAT NOT ARMED", "Lit if ground safety lever is in the safe position." So I'm supposed to get something like "483=0" or "490=1" when I pitch up and down during approach. In the F1 view I could clearly see the in-game AoA flashing wildly, but these values were nowhere to be found. If anyone has encountered the same problem please let me know. Thank you.

It's been a busy week. The seat and side consoles are almost complete. They make up the aft portion together, and there's an electric cylinder which moves them back and forth. We've thought about attaching the stick base to the seat too, but found out that it has more cons than pros for us.

Hope I'd still have my good eyesight at that point, lol That'd be a cool build too. The older the aircraft, the more mechanical parts there are. Hence more fun.

As far as I can see, whether I switch to HUD-only view (Alt+F1) doesn't make any difference on viewport export quality. However, I also feel that my HUD contrast is not high enough. It gets difficult to see against the bright sky under broad daylight. I've turned the HUD brightness knob to the max but sometimes still need to rely on the HUD view on the MDI. It didn't occur to me the symbols on the HUD could be thinner than they were supposed to look.