A minor interlude…

Yesterday (19Dec09) I had the privilege of working with an independent filmmaker.  The beginning scenes in the movie involve a couple of guys in dire straights after their F-15D suffers a catastrophic engine failure.  He was lucky enough to get access to an F-15D that he could use to film the actors, but he still needed to see the correct emergency lights going off and some shots of “switch magic” where the fire supression system is activated and the relevant warnings appear on the Master Caution panel.

Here’s a picture of the Master Caution panel in “test”:

This is the first time the MCP has been illuminated while installed in the cockpit.  There are 74 24v lamps in that panel and it got pretty hot for the 10 minutes or so I ran it so he could get static shots of it.  HD video was also taken.

On the SFS front, I managed to ruin two blanks when they moved while being machined.   I had to lay up two new blanks and wait another 24 hours.

Until next time!

Working towards the SFS

Today I finished hunting down the missing 5 1″ oil & hydraulic instruments I couldn’t find last weekend.  Of course, they showed up in the last box I could search.

Here’s the result of my search & sorting operation:

The design for the Stick Force Sensor box is completed.  The SFS box is just about 1.75″ thick.  Because I didn’t want to build it from acrylic or a block of aluminum, I needed to laminate four layers of 1/2″ Baltic Birch plywood together.  This will give me a raw material thickness of a little more than 1.9″.

The block is 24″ long and 8″ wide.  This will give me enough raw material to build two SFS boxes.  One will go into the F-15 and one will go into my Me-109E/X cockpit.

I’ve got some new cutters on order and as soon as they arrive I’ll get the ShopBot to work on making the SFS boxes.

How’s THIS for a fancy light?

The AWG-20 PACS

My friend Dave is both a god of both graphics and avian photography.  He’ll be writing the software that will show the various screens on the AWG-20 PACS or Programmable Armament Control Set (also known as the MPCD or Multi-Purpose Color Display)

Below is a test display he wrote for me and I’ve put my “spare” MPCD button collar frame around it so you can understand what it’s all about.

I rebuilt the MPCD that I have with a 7″ monochrome green VGA monitor.  Within a couple of months of that feat (it’s not easy shoe-horning a “standard” CRT into the original enclosure!) I discovered that the MPCD is a COLOR display.  Cue facepalm.

You cannot buy a 7″ color VGA display for any amount of money.  I’ve tried.  Repeatedly.  For five years.  The original display is a 5″x5″ color vector tube and while I could find a replacement, they wanted $5000.00.  EACH.  Cue 2nd facepalm.

I finally found a 6.4″ LCD kit from Earth LCD to the tune of $350.  Painful, but no where near the pain of the original.

So what I’m doing is replacing a 1:1 aspect ratio display with a 4:3 aspect ratio display that “mostly” fits.  The important part of the real estate that the LCD covers is the 20 buttons that surround the frame.  With a little adjustment, it properly covers all the space that they “occupy” on the screen.  I’m going to place a layer of 1/16″ or 1/8″ smoked plexiglass between the LCD and the MPCD button collar.  When the unit is enclosed, no light will enter from the back and you won’t notice there’s a huge air gap above and below the LCD.

The original display had a resolution of 512×512.  At 640×480, I’ll have the width I need, but I’ll be short 32 pixels (shy 16 at the top and 16 at the bottom for all practical purposes).  This will make things a bit tight – there are some MPCD pages that are pretty dense, but I’m sure we’ll get it figured out.

All the bits so far…

Here’s a set of pictures that show everything that I have (minus some parts I can find!) installed in the cockpit.

The glare shields are not installed, nor is the windscreen in place..

Enjoy!