747 builder

[romek]

Hi All,

Romek Delimata is my name, I've been building cockpits for 20 years; I started a 747-400 about 12 years ago based on a 747-100 CPT, if I was as clever as Matt below I'd have kept it as a -100 but doing glass cockpits is obviously much easier. The most notable things about my sim are it's collimated visual and dynamic control loading. The last big thing to do is upgrade the overhead panel from a -100 to -400. 

Great to see so many interesting sim projects here.

Romek

[vidarf]

PICTURES, dude! Welcome! Always good to see more builders join the nutty club.

[romek]

Here's a picture...

[vidarf]

OK, forget I asked. Now I HAVE to do something about my own setup!

Fantastic setup you have there, mate! Would love to know more about your setup. It looks stunning!

[Kennair]

Yes Rom, nice setup!  It looks like 12 years well spent, and nice visuals.  Is that 3 projectors via TH2GO on a single PC or a 3 PC setup?

Ken.

[romek]

Thanks guys,

The visual is collimated, so it's three monitors reflected into spherical mirrors which focus the image at infinity, and make the vanishing point follow your head movement- like looking out a window- a collimated visual adds enormously to the realism of the out the window scene because it makes it seem distant rather then a few feet away. It also conveys a very strong illusion of movement, people often think the sim is on rams. 

The server is running all three screens using TH2go and geforce 590 card, I get about 30-40 FPS so not too bad,  the clients are doing the usual WideFS / PM business. the FMC's have been replaced with FDS ones since that pic was taken.

Rom

[Kennair]

Thanks Rom, yes most of us drool over the possibility of a collimated display but the expense and technical nightmare of alignment seem to be quite a deterrent.  How did you manage it and with what hardware, or do you work for CAE? 

Ken.

[romek]

I bought the collimators from an aeronautical university in the US in 1999, I can't remember the name of it or where it was as the sale was done through a broker. They we're $4000 for the front two including all the structure, and beam splitters which I thought was cheap as the price I was quoted before was $22000 per mirror! When they we're delivered to Ireland I discovered to my horror that all the glass had smashed during shipping, luckily I had insured them for a lot more then I paid and was able to buy replacement used mirrors, which fitted the frame.

When the replacement mirrors arrived they included an extra set of mirrors and beam splitters which I hadn't expected. So I built the frames for the side views copying the angles from the front ones and installed the two other mirrors and beam splitters on them. 

There is quite a bit of geometry / perspective knowledge required to set up the views, but this wasn't too hard for me because I do technical illustration as my day job which requires a good understanding of perspective. Aligning them perfectly is quite tricky but anyone could do it with a bit of patience once you understand the principles involved which are actually quite simple.

I may be selling the collimators soon as I've managed to get hold of two wide collimated systems, I'll also be selling the other wide system. I'll need to relocate the sim to a much bigger place somewhere as a wide system is about 20 feet wide and 18 feet tall!

rom