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by vmh1928 1294 days ago
Would be cool to build an analog gauge cockpit for a flight simulator program. You would really appreciate the workload required by the pilots of old; before software ate the world.
2 comments

It's a doable and fun project. I did it a few years ago, designing a small set of instruments in Fusion 360, 3d printing them, using stepper motors and an arduino to handle movement, and using Mobiflight[1] and FSUIPC[2] to handle the firmware and communication with MS Flight Simulator.

DCS-BIOS[3] is a similar project for interacting with DCS.

There's something really, really neat about seeing real physical instruments spinning around in response to a computer game. And they're actually often a lot easier to use than the instruments in-game, too.

[1] https://www.mobiflight.com/en/index.html

[2] http://www.fsuipc.com/

[3] https://dcs-bios.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

There are several of those projects on youtube that people build scale accurate cockpits (mostly from scratch) as hobbyists for a variety of flight simulators.