I haven't posted in a while due to the start of the new semester and a cool little project I've been working on. For a few years now I've been eying flight simulator hardware from companies like GoFlight and SimKits to enhance my experience with Microsoft's Flight Sim. The problem with commercial simulator hardware is outrageously high prices driven by low demand. I always thought that building my own hardware from scratch couldn't be that difficult and it turns out I was right.

I'm nearly finished with my effort to replicate every indicator light in the cockpit of a Mooney M20M Bravo. So far I've counted 83 individual LEDs and I have the whole thing mapped out to two MAX7219 LED drivers. The drivers are controlled by a Parallax SX28 running a USB-serial interface to the PC. Information is fed the the SX28 from the simulator through a bit of (horridly written) C# code using Microsoft's SimConnect API.

I need to order a few parts before I can really show off the project so stay tuned for updates. I'll also be building an MJoy16 USB joystick controller to handle the inputs.