tinmith

I agree. The keyboard is fantastic, it is the best smallest keyboard I've ever used. Debian 13 works out of the box and there are no screen rotation issues.

I have a Chuwi Minibook X and the keyboard is amazing. Its the best smallest keyboard available anywhere, I can type on it just as easily as my other larger laptops. I think there must have been something wrong with the reviewer's hardware, mine works great.

You need to use https://github.com/smurfix/buildscad which can convert OpenSCAD to Build123d, then you can export a STEP file. It has a few limitations, but for simple OpenSCAD files it can generate an equivalent representation in OpenCASCADE.

https://waynepiekarski.net

The people who build proper home cockpits inside real aircraft, especially interfacing with old aircraft hardware, are always very impressive. This takes a lot of time, dedication, and reverse engineering.

But it is also easy to get started at home. Using some 42 inch televisions and old Android tablets, you can replicate a lot of the immersion very easily and have fun, see if you like it. Check out my open source projects and free apps for X-Plane and more details on building your own immersive flight simulator experience: https://www.waynepiekarski.net/projects/xplane.htm

Although be aware, these projects tend to turn more into an adventure building than actually flying much :)

I loved the original Glider game on the old Mac. Back in 1997 when I was in undergrad I made my own port using ASCII art to run on the VT100 terminals we had at the time. When I started learning Android, I ended up writing a VT100 emulator with the NDK to bring it back to life on modern devices: https://github.com/waynepiekarski/android-glider

Unfortunately I don't have any more space below the center monitor to put another display :) or it gets in the way of the yoke. I tried to fit a smaller LCD display in there but it just got in the way and slowed X-Plane 11 down with an extra display to render.

The C64 had such a tiny amount of memory, you could probably easily sync the entire state of the machine over the network :)

Thanks for sharing my article here! I didn't realize how popular it would be! :)

The left and right FS4 instances are paused at startup, while the front view is the master. The FS4 renderer seems happy to have the XYZ HPR values overwritten behind its back and it refreshes the display constantly with the latest values. So the gauges don't work on the left/right displays - ideally I'd get rid of them, but removing the instruments causes the left/right 3D view to not align with the front display any more.

I imagine with more studying of the memory locations, you could sync over the instruments too. Or if you really wanted to, you could just grab the video memory for the instruments on the master and blast that over the network too. Displays were so small back then that you could easily compress and send this.

I built the set up in January to work with X-Plane 11, which I wrote up here: http://www.tinmith.net/wayne/blog/2017/01/immersive-flight-s...

But I wanted to see if it was possible get the original FS4 working on this, because it seemed quite impossible.

Yes, you can hide the instruments. But then it changes the projection and then nothing lines up across the displays. You need to hide the instruments on all or none of the displays.

This should be possible with any emulator for old school systems, like 286 with DOS, C64, Atari, etc. All you need is the ability in the game to "look left" and "look right" somehow, and tune the field of view for correct projection. If the game can't do that, then it might not be possible.

Also, the hacks in the blog post won't work as well for anything newer than DOS, like Windows games, since there is an OS in the way and writing over memory locations gets a lot harder. You would need to approach the problem differently.

Haha, glad you noticed the C64 and 1541 :) That was my first computer :)

It only took me a few days, maybe 20 hours total? ... I started this back in January but it took me a while to capture the videos and write it up since I've been reworking the physical frame to make the monitors fit closer.

1/4 of the time was spent running GDB trying to find the memory locations and work out the encoding scheme.

1/4 of the time was spent getting familiar with DOSBox, building on Ubuntu, and syncing the data around via UDP.

1/4 of the time was spent trying to automate the start up so I didn't need to press a hundred keys manually to configure all the displays each time I restarted it.

1/4 of the remaining time was capturing nice videos and writing it all up :)

I've done hacks like this before ... back in 2000 I worked on the team that built ARQuake but we had source code http://www.tinmith.net/arquake/

Actually the projection is correct, but the camera is not exactly at the center of projection, so it appears that the lines are bent across the monitor edges. However, if you place your head at the exact center of projection, they look correct. I'm actually doing three separate projections, instead of just stretching one image across three displays. The GoPro field of view was not able to capture everything, so I had to pull it back a bit, and so its not perfect. A spherical camera would have done a better job here.