y2kiah

nahh I don't know that much, I think it's more coincidence than anything. I've been programming since I was around 12, so that's about 17 years now. I guess it comes naturally at this point. Game programming has been my big hobby for many years, so I used to fool around with 3d modeling tools a lot, and that helped when it came to designing the pit. I discovered 80/20 extrusion when I was building my CNC machine this past year. Recently I've been really into Make magazine and the whole "maker/diy" trend, which kind of led me into pit building. As far as flying stuff goes, well in real life I'm a CFI, CFII, MEI with about 1000 hours. I've flown high performance, tailwheels, a few hours of aerobatics, and about 24 hours in a level-6 CRJ-200 sim. I instructed for a few years part time, but my full time job has been in IT, so I never really accumulated a ton of hours. I've been into PC simming since the very early days. I feel lucky that I've been around long enough to have pretty much seen it all grow from nothing into this amazing community. But everything I know about pit building I've learned from you guys and the other sites like viperpit.org, so I'm definitely a beginner in this arena. While we're on this topic, maybe others can share their backgrounds so we can get to know each other a little bit? This is probably too off topic for this thread though...your call.

it looks like 80/20 extrusion Look on ebay for the 80/20 surplus store

There are... http://www.allelectronics.com/make-a-store/item/ATP-50KS/50K-AUDIO-POT-W/PUSH-PULL-SWITCH/1.html I got a bunch a while back, linear pots though, not those exact ones. Their stock is always changing and they may get some more in the future. But since you won't be hooking up the rotation anyway it shouldn't matter if they are audio pots.

they do rotate though so if you got some pots with push/pull switch you'd be closest to the real thing

sweet just got the email, mine's shipping tomorrow from blt. I was around #80 in line so this is very unexpected I thought I was waiting another 15 days.

Make sure you guys are running GameBooster before you fire up the sim too. I've noticed it does improve smoothness a bit on my Win7 machine.

Looks great! In the end, you will have an equal flight experience compared to anyone else with a pit. All that other stuff is just for show :)

Hey pitbldr I know you directed this question at gus but thought I could help in case you're looking for a push pull switch like the real thing they are easiest to find built into a pot. You could either ignore or restrict the rotation and just use the switch. You'll need a bunch of them for the intercomm panel anyway.

my plan is to use .063 sheet metal and a box/pan brake I picked up at "the harbor" for 20 bucks. It bends a very nice crease so making a hollow tube will take 3 bends and some JBWeld work on the 4th edge. That will be strong but also let me run wires to the wheel. The ends can be capped with a solid wood block or something for added strength. No idea what I'll do for the wheel yet, if someone casts a good one I'll buy it from them if they are willing. P.S. gus your pit continues to amaze me

In my pit design, it measures 6.5 x 4 just like Feed estimated

I haven't been able to test anything because Export.lua does not seem to be working yet in Beta 1. I've enabled it in Config.lua but that still did not get it working. I haven't read about anyone else getting it to work yet either... hopefully in Beta 2. edit: my bad, you're probably talking about mousewheel vs. keyboard for rotaries within the sim?

nice work! looks like a perfect cut to me.

AMD owns ATI, I thought newer cards dropped the ATI branding? Not sure, I've always used NVIDIA :) And for your question, no they can be different chip series, just make sure the driver version you install goes back far enough to include all your cards. I'm not sure if the latest drivers still include the 8 series, but I would expect so. Someone else more up to speed on the cutting edge care to chime in? If you run Windows 7, you shouldn't have to worry about installing drivers at all though, it will be handled for you.

no you don't need the same card if you're not doing SLI, though I would recommend that you stick with the same make NVIDIA or AMD so you don't have to install both sets of drivers on your machine. Remember DCS is a D3D9 level application so you are best off ebaying for an older generation card, say in the 8800 series, because it will be much cheaper for a higher end GTS or GTX model. You'll get very little benefit from DX10 or 11 support on a newer card, and you'll pay more for a lower level card and may actually get worse performance. Personally, I acquired two used EVGA 8800 GTS's for 50 bucks each from a friend at work to give me a total of six monitors on 3 cards. Those cards are very fast for DX9 even if they are a few generations behind. I need to upgrade my power supply before I can run them all though.

I don't understand why you think that. I've been following Outerra on gamedev.net since its very early days, before all the hype in the flight sim community started. I've never seen anything but constant improvements coming from that team. If they had to target their engine toward military flight simulation, they could do it.

No it doesn't, but that's not what we're saying. You use rudder during stall recovery to initially correct for uncoordinated stall. If your left wing is low, don't use right aileron, use right rudder. Deimus has it.

Not just limited to the F4. That's how we teach stall recovery to new pilots, to use rudder. If your wing is stalled and you lower the aileron on that wing you further increase the angle of attack on that portion of the wing, causing a deeper stall.

nice design, it looks really accurate. Did you fit it to the edge of your screen with that small bevel?

I totally agree brydling I would really want a working CDU screen but all is not lost, we can still fall back on the CDU repeater on the MFD. Anyway, Export.lua does not appear to be working for me at all in the beta. Yes I enabled it in Config.lua. I guess waiting is the only option at this point.

I'm a RL hog pilot and I'll be taking questions for the next seven minutes only not really

I was hoping one of you would say "oh it's simple you just...blah blah blah" I'm not sure what level SCSim's official relationship with ED is at, but if anyone can have pull with them it would be those guys. So here's hoping that they can convince ED that it's good business to include CDU export. I'm not going to rely on hope alone so I will continue to pursue a solution.

Hi fellas, So I'm sure most if not all of us have been busy with the beta lately. I've been looking into the possibilities for CDU export and the outlook at this time is grim. I've tried a multimon setup using "CDU = {..." to set up the viewport but that didn't work. My searching of the beta forum did not yield any results on this topic, but I suppose I could have looked harder too. Does anyone know if this is possible now, or planned for later? Being "feature complete" I'm thinking this would not be included in the product at launch if it's not already there. Second, I'm trying to get an export of the CDU text so we can build our own view in a BSVP-type app, or in my case, ship the text directly to the microcontroller that is running my LCD. After investigating the lua files that run the CDU, it looks like ED is building the CDU and MFCDs CDU repeater views on the fly, meaning they are creating "string polygon" objects and populating them into view rather than building up a large string buffer and rendering the whole thing at once. There could still possibly be a string buffer somewhere in memory that stores all CDU text in an organized way, but whether it is exposed to lua or not is unknown, but not looking promising at this point. The CDU_commands.lua file has nothing useful listed at this time either. So what I am left with is an idea for how to do this that will be kind of sneaky but it just might work. This would involve editing lua files that ED does not intend for end users to be editing. If I modify the "AddText" function to include some logic that builds a string buffer on the fly along with the string polygons, we should be able to access the buffer each frame to export the text. I'm hoping that all Lua scripts run in the same lua_state within DCS, but I'm not sure they do yet. If different states, I'll see first about storing the string in persistent memory within the sim, and if that doesn't pan out, exporting it to a file or through a socket directly from the AddText function. Sorry this was probably a rambling mess, but maybe if someone from the ED team comes across this they can comment on some of the unknowns that I've mentioned.

I don't think it would be cheaper to operate an airliner than an A-10 to drop LGBs in any circumstance. The only advantage would be longer loiter time, but we have armed UAVs for that.

Yes 10 line. It's 3.5" the real one is 4 but those are impossible to find and it still looks good in the panel. It looks a lot sharper in RL those pictures don't do it justice, resolution is 320x240.

Speaking of CDU displays, here's how mine is coming along :) This does not require any connection to PC, it's driven from the microcontroller which also talks and listens via ethernet. Reeeeaally hope ED provides the CDU lines as text so I can do it this way. Sorry the pictures are lousy.