Kickstarter for DCS cockpit modules

[pappavis]

Hi Guys.

 

I wanna start a Kickstarter campaign for DCS cockpitpanels. Wanna help?

 

Hardcore simmers cant afford a simulated home cockpits. An elite few has one at home. However its custom built. For exclusive personal use. Not mentioning prohibitlvey expensive, time consuming. The electronics involved is not for the faint of heart. Therefore, only to ultra few individuals.

 

Lets make modular home cockpits accesible to the general public using DCS-BIOS.

 

Personally the MiG-21bis is my choice, however we can do a A-10C or Ka-50.

 

ABOUT ME:

Loves the MiG-21bis, learnt Arduino & electronics from Youtube vids, works in the IT, wanna learn Kickstarter/Crowdsourcing.

 

"Job openings";

1. A technical savvy cofounder with experience & interest in building DCS home cockpits.

2. LUA-script coder, to add more DCS aircraft to DCS-BIOS.

3. Industrial designer.

 

Please mail me michiel@erasmus-ict.nl

website=http://erasmus-ict.nl

 

 

Example MiG-21bis panel (early beta!!!)

Edited May 11, 2016 by pappavis

[virrie]

very nice.i wanna built a mig-21 cockpit of my own but short a lot of things

[agrasyuk]

can you elaborate on what do you want to offer in a more specific way then "panel" ? because in your example you show a device without enclosure, it is not panel really until it is mounted behind a labeled panel :).

how are you setting up your pledge tiers? what exactly will contributor to your campaign get in return to pledging?

Edited May 11, 2016 by agrasyuk

[SkateZilla]

This community and kickstarter get along like beyonce and becky w/ the good hair....

[crispy7]

This community and kickstarter get along like beyonce and becky w/ the good hair....

 

.....you got that right!! ;-)

[agrasyuk]

Nothing to do with our community specifically . If kicstarter project does not look realistic and well though out, it will be ignored by pretty much any comunity.

[FSFIan]

Hardcore simmers cant afford a simulated home cockpits. An elite few has one at home. However its custom built. For exclusive personal use. Not mentioning prohibitlvey expensive, time consuming. The electronics involved is not for the faint of heart. Therefore, only to ultra few individuals.

 

Lets make modular home cockpits accesible to the general public using DCS-BIOS.

 

If your product is information only (plans and code), you won't have many people willing to pay money for your kickstarter, so I am going to assume that you plan to build and ship actual hardware panels, including electronics. Let's assume that you can convince people that whatever team you end up with is able to build the promised product.

 

You are targeting a very small market. Flight simmers are already few and far between, but many of them cannot afford a separate computer just to put into a simpit and/or they don't have the space to dedicate to it, so they are not potential customers. If you are lucky, you might be able to fund a hundred panels at once.

 

While you may save some money buying PCBs in bulk, there are several things that will increase your cost per panel significantly compared to a typical DIY solution.

 

Regulatory compliance

So you want to ship an electronic product within the European Union. You now have to deal with RoHS and WEEE compliance. Filing the paperwork for WEEE has to be done in each european country separately, I have seen an estimate of 30 000 EUR just for that alone. Then you have to deal with a random, non-zero chance that some government agency will call you and tell you there's a container of electronic waste somewhere and it's your job to dispose of it now (or more likely, pay someone else to deal with that for you). You'll also have to certify that the electromagnetic radiation of your product are within certain limits; testing that alone can cost 1 000 EUR or more. You need to self-certify CE compliance, which means your product is compliant with "any applicable laws and regulations". To find out what these are, you'll probably need to pay a lawyer.

 

Sourcing Electronic Components

If you are shipping products, you have to be certain that every component you put on a board is working, because dealing with returns from customers costs time and money. You also need a guarantee from your supplier that the part is RoHS compliant. Due to those reasons, you cannot buy your Arduino boards for $1.60 from AliExpress or your MAX487 transceiver for $0.20. An RS-485 transceiver costs about 1.30 EUR a piece from a typical distributor like Digikey, Farnell or RS if you order a hundred. No HASL finish with leaded solder either, that slightly increases the costs for PCBs.

 

Customer Support

Even if there are no dead on arrival products that generate returns, you will have people who are too lazy and/or too stupid to follow instructions. Since you sold them a product, you'll have to deal with them. This not only costs time, it can also be incredibly frustrating. And then you have those people who have a firewall, antivirus product, or even some unsuspecting third party crapware (Netgear, I am looking at you) that will interfere with DCS-BIOS.

 

Shipping Costs

The typical DIYer orders most of their electronics stuff from China with free worldwide shipping, which is subsidized by the Chinese government as far as I know. You will have to ship your finished product to your backers, which will increase the cost compared to the DIY solution.

 

Tools

If you are actually building and shipping dozens of units, you will need proper tools for soldering, inspection, and quality control, not to mention whatever you need to produce the cases to mount your switches in. The tools will have to be good enough that you can build many panels in a reasonable amount of time.

 

EDIT: I don't mean that a kickstarter campaign has to be unsuccessful, just that crowdfunding is no viable way to save money IMO. It can still be a way to save time, at least for the customer.

Edited May 11, 2016 by [FSF]Ian

[cichlidfan]

This community and kickstarter get along like beyonce and becky w/ the good hair....

 

Depends on the product. As I recall, quite a few members of this community helped fund Oculus.

[hansangb]

pappavis,

One thing to think about. Ever see one of those "what aircraft do you guys want next?" threads? I think just about every plane ever mad is represented there. You even said "I'm partial to Mig but can do a10, KA50.

 

You have to strike a balance of people who want functionality over authenticity. Unless you start making authentic looking/feeling product. Which then turns into "I want Huey, I want P51, I want this, that.."

 

The percentage of people who want this vs. those that are willing to pay for it, is - my guess - small. So you're pool of people who would help fund it is small.

 

So I think the challenge for you is to hook a large audience to your vision, while at the same time *not* killing yourself trying to keep up with every "I want this..." request.

 

On the flip side, the guy that started FedEx supposedly got a C- for the idea in Harvard business school. And no one thought Besos had a chance selling books, then ebooks, then *EVERYTHING* and look where they are now! ;) Best of luck to you.

[pappavis]

Ian;2775072']If your product is information only (plans and code), you won't have many people willing to pay money for your kickstarter, so I am going to assume that you plan to build and ship actual hardware panels, including electronics. Let's assume that you can convince people that whatever team you end up with is able to build the promised product.

.

 

yes, the idea is to build panels.

You mentioned earlier a few months ago about all the ROHS and compliance cr@p..

 

and seeing the complexity of building panels its a hugggge undertaking!!

Not for the faint of haeart.

 

On this forum certainly is the needed expertise.

 

 

On the flip side, the guy that started FedEx supposedly got a C- for the idea in Harvard business school. And no one thought Besos had a chance selling books, then ebooks, then *EVERYTHING* and look where they are now! ;) Best of luck to you.

 

TX!

Cockpit building is a specialised hacker job. I barely got a taste of it using my amateuristic MiG-21bis fuel panel ;).

 

My approach would be to build 20x cockpit panels. Going for 10,000 would be totally insane :P. With a limited number of users, the "Netgear'-router problems should be less likely. And no ned to try support that many.

There's this guy on Kickstarter making arduino header boards. He started small.. like 15 boards, now he has done >4 kickstarters, his latest "Pi2Grover" project hit 230% funded.

 

I wanna do it small, and scale-up.

Edited May 12, 2016 by pappavis

[hansangb]

Hell, go big! You can change the netgear problem to DCS problem. ED folks saying, why are we getting so many more ntp, I mean visits! :)

[chrisbrinzo]

I am very interested in this project as I have been working on the same idea. I feel that this project could be very successful in the near future. I have my plans locked up pretty tight at the moment but I am definitely interested in collaboration.

[pappavis]

I am very interested in this project as I have been working on the same idea. I feel that this project could be very successful in the near future. I have my plans locked up pretty tight at the moment but I am definitely interested in collaboration.

 

Maybe we can workout something.

Check your PM.