Hello !
I’ve been in the world of air simulation and home cockpits for a while. My last personal cockpit was based on opencockpit cards, run by several PCs, using my own instrument visualization programs.
I found the use of many PCs cumbersome and expensive and decided to look at today microcontrollers technology for a better way to do it. You can now find for a few bucks Arduino and RaspBerry Pi boards, which are fairly powerful, compact, and potentially offer all the elements to develop a full home cockpit system. I started to develop such system and I will report here my choices and results.
The system is based on hacked opencockpit cards (Mastercard and modified USB expansion card). It uses an Arduino DUE board to control all the hardware equipments (inputs, outputs, analog readings and servomotors), and several RaspBerry Pi 3 boards for openGL vizualisation of the instruments : PFDs, NDs, system and engines screens.
In the menu above, you will find some pages describing the main blocks of the system, like the hardware setup, the hardware configuration tools, the instruments displays …
In the course of developing my system, I am facing problems for which I had to find some solution. I will share these in articles named “Tech tips”, hope it can be useful to someone…
The system is under development, but once it is “reasonably” finished (it’s never really finished …), I imagine I could sell or share it, we’ll see …