Universal Cockpit Builder from Munich, Bavaria

Hello to all!

My name is Sven, I'm 46 and a flight simmer since the FS2 for 8086 came out in
1984. Then in 1987 I saw a promotion of F-19 Stealth Fighter in a pc magazine.
Ordered it in the USA, installed it and since this time I was a Microprose
junkie, bought every simulation they brought out. Same happens a little later
with the Jane's series, Falcon and so on ;-) Must be a kind of virus I think.

I'm building my cockpit now for decades, really! First prototype runs in 1998,
but then I decided to do freelance work. So no more time for building, just
collecting tons of material was the only satisfaction for years. Have built some
parts in that time, but they where never really finished. So now I own a lot of
crappy old flightsim hardware, but I love this old pieces.
After some years I became very ill, so I had to go to invalidity pension.

Now I decided to come back to my hobby again. Now I have much more time but
there for I'm a bit low on money. Also things get really slow, cause of my
disease.

I'm building a unversal cockpit. I'm a fan of fighter planes since I was a young
boy. So my pit is oriented to the F-18C. It is not my favorite fighter, but I
think it has one of the most beautiful cockpits. The challenge is to get all the
aircraft and helicopter HOTAS under one hood.

At the moment I've built different HOTAS for F-16, F-15 & F-18, AV-8B, older
ones like F-4 with B8 grip, one MIG grip and a grip for the Apache attack
helicopter with a collective. All those are based on the old as the hills FLCS,
TQS and the Suncom gear F-15 Talon & SFS Throttle.

I modded the Suncom to TM PCB's cause of their superb programability. The axis
of all controler run through a BU0836A board. The MFD's are the old Quickshot
Masterpilots from the stone age of flight simming. But onced they are programmed
with the help of an old Pentium I laptop, they do their job on a new machine
without any trouble. Later I want to put a 7'' TFT to the back of every of the
three MP's. At the moment there is only one 6,3'' TFT in the pit and the MFD's a
backlit fakes.

For civil flying I have modded an old CH Flight Sim Yoke and built a 4 lever
throttle by my self. The overhead panel is a modified Saitek Dashpad in touch
with a steelseries Merc Fang, some switches, rotaries and selfbuilt lever for the rotor
clutch and brake in helicopters. All main controls are interchangeable, but only if the
computer that controls the cockpit itself is shut down. Sadly no hotplug'n in a
sim. That's the drawback using the old PS/2 (AT) based hardware. If I win in
lotto the next years, I will rebuilt all, using TM Cougar and some Warthogs :mrgreen:

The pit itself runs with the use of 6 Arduino Mega boards. Many thank's to Jim
for his excellent piece of software link2fs!!! It's a cheap and perfect
alternative to other most much more expensive solutions. There is so much
work to be done. Have to paint the whole thing to look a "bit" more like a pit
and not like a collection of technical scrap :lol: But at the moment the functionalty
stays in the foreground.

So happy building to all,

yours Sven