You can’t build the entire home cockpit from scratch without any partners in the hardware and software industry. Let’s have a first look on the hardware partners I’m working with.

• OpenCockpits
• Conrad Electronics
• Simparts.de

OpenCockpits
You can find them at http://www.opencockpits.com. What they are offering you is just amazing: they have build hardware cards, which interact with external hardware switches. Their hardware cards are connected through a USB connection to the computer, where the software is running which is interacting with the hardware and the flight simulator software. Further more they also sell panels on which you can mount the hardware switches. The panels are as real as possible and very cheap and a very, very good starting point for building home cockpits. I have currently running the following hardware cards from Open Cockpits:

• Master Card
• USB Expansion Card
• USB Keys Card
• USB Servo Motor Card

Conrad Electronics
Just go to http://www.conrad.at and you will find a lot of switches, LEDs etc. that you will need for building your home cockpit. As you will see in the next weblog posts, you can build around 80% of your home cockpit with hardware switches from Conrad Electronics. But don’t tell them what you are doing with the bought hardware, they look a little bit crazy, when you tell them that you are building a Boeing 737-800 flight simulator with their hardware *gggg*

Simparts.de
I very interesting supplier I found in the last weeks. If you need hardware that you can’t find at Conrad Electronics, just try http://www.simparts.de. They have for example a dual encoder with a push button, which you need for the EFIS (EFIS: Electrical Flight Information System).

Here are the software partners I’m working with:

• Project Magenta
• Microsoft

Project Magenta
They (http://www.projectmagenta.com) are providing you the whole system logic for your home cockpit in the needed deep. The “problem” with Microsoft Flight Simulator X is, that you can access the internal functionality very easily from the outside world, but some functionalities are not completed 100%. And this is the point where Project Magenta starts. They provide you every hardware circuit and hardware logic which is available on an real airliner in software. So you can attach your hardware switches to their system logic and their system logic is working against Flight Simulator X. When you for example are pressing a button on the overhead panel, Flight Simulator X just changes the state of the associated variable inside it’s own software. But with Project Magenta they are also checking other variables and other environmental requirements regarding the official Boeing operation manuals. Furthermore Project Magenta provides you external software visualizations for the whole glass cockpit of the Boeing and Airbus fleet – very amazing.

Microsoft
I’m using the Microsoft Flight Simulator X currently on Windows Vista as the flight simulation system. Furthermore I use the .NET framework to program my hardware switches against the Project Magenta software. This means the following: I’m changing a real hardware switch => my programmed software obtains this hardware event => my programmed software changes a variable inside Project Magenta => Project Magenta provides it’s own simulation logic and finally changes the correct variable inside Flight Simulator X. In the next weblog post we will have a more detailed look on this architecture I have chosen.

-Klaus