Boeing 737 Home Built Simulator - First Complete Look

everybody good uh good afternoon here in the UK I've I've been asked for quite some time now to post a video of uh my simulator and the building of my simulator um so if I get straight into it my simulator I'm really fortunate that I live with a with an office outside so looking right ahead is is the office and uh the only thing in this office really if we go on through is is the simulator itself so we'll go through and uh you have a look well there it is it's uh it's a full size markup really it's a km 737 um and if we start with the outside well there's a lot of wooden panels um these beautiful lights that's just a curtain pole and if you have a look inside you see they've just got strips of three 12vt LEDs that run off a PC set power supply the graphics up there I've used km because that's the flight model I'm using I haven't asked km's permission but uh this is for home use only so I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem um I may do in the long run um if anybody says anything down the sides I've got again some some km uh branding and just a couple of uh three strip LED 12vt LEDs just to give that a bit of a bit of um character in the evening so up here in in the office outside I've got a um an ethernet hub that uh distributed all the way around this office really fortunate the office is completely electronic um the base of the simulator base of the simulator is just a 3X 2 m um wooden thing that I've you can see underneath there's there's a step under there so that we can put stuff under the simulator should we need it came in handy when I was resetting uh sorry setting down the the Yol itself into the floor which I'll talk about very shortly um well there you can see the whole thing um whole thing's sitting there on the ground I think we're at Edinburgh there on Runway 30 right at the end um pre-eng engine start but what I wanted to show you this is in response to a lot of people asking me how I put this all together so what I'm going to do I'm going to take you to the dirty end so I'm going to take you behind the simulator itself and we'll go and have a look down the side and the back so the sides need finishing right now this is I'm just going to put some panels up just to to box it in really and stop any light coming in from the windows but it's uh just about finished these these obviously need just pushing in and uh and finishing off but if we go around the back you'll see there's a lot of carpentry um there are some speakers up here for the for the outside world a little bit of this is an old building so there's a little bit of dump coming through I've got some anti- dump stuff down there and the walls walls are du for a new paint I apologize for that um so right now you can see basically it's a wooden mockup um a lot of carpentry gone into the the mounting there of the the overhead panel um you can see that the only way we could we could really Mount the panel was we positioned it in the right place using strings and then we kind of built the frame around it uh myself and a colleague in the village and it really is um secured onto the roof itself um so a lot of woodwork basically um small panels from from our local DIY there's a speaker down there uh speaker on the other side and basically there's speakers all the way around to give it that uh that surround sound here's the main speaker unit power supply up here is for the overhead so I run a separate power supply just for the overhead itself there's a cabling coming down from the overhead power going in um I've also got some power going into um some back Lighting on there that you'll see in a while and uh basically it's a single USB that comes down on the back very neat I hope you'll appreciate that I've tried to put a lot of effort into keeping as as we can and labeling as much as I can um basically we've just got some power extenders major power units uh down there providing the whole simulator um for the front Screen Graphics I've got three big monitors 24in monitors here and to Black it out I've actually put some some um some gray uh translucent finish which is used for car blackout or or car to make your cars um wind screens dark um they work very well uh particularly at night I've got a light up here it all looks beautiful in the evening but uh for you to see with a camera it's much easier if I keep the lights on for now and everything wherever I can is is actually is is made black so if you do happen to look through those side windows right now which do not have monitors they will in the long run then you'll see uh very little through those monitors even blackout this is actually blackout curtains these things here are blackout curtains that I purchased from a local DIY Shop um and I got them on offer obviously everything here is on offer everything's done as cheap as possible um looking down three main computers this is uh the main computer for the outside world and uh and drives FSX itself um and drives all the io boards that I'll talk about in a second the middle computer drives the the main primary flight displays for the co-pilot and pilot and the third computer drives the center pedestal and the um lower MFD um the flight management system itself TDU and uh and a few other peripherals if we look at um the control boards that we have here we've got all IO um boards I bought from open cockpits um so I've got two USB output cards I've got one Master Card down here and a Master Card extender for all the inputs um a little bit of DIY but hope hopefully you can see that most of them do have labels on and I keep a spreadsheet of where every single switch goes to uh in case I have to rip it to Pieces behind the panels themselves for the co-pilot there I've got one uh 19in monitor that's going to be changed shortly uh so it'll encompass just to the left there is actually the co-pilot's clock and I want the screen to be extended I've done it on the pilot side but not on this side down below a lot of wires going into the pedestal itself um and then I've blacked out the back of the co-pilot's pedals as well and over to behind the pilot P1 SE another monitor and strips of of gray leather um just in case to stop any light bleed through a couple of um USB hubs here to power a lot of the peripherals one major 800 W power supply now that does the pedestal um center pedestal and it does all of the backlighting and uh actually it does all the trim wheels and the motors for all the servo units as well in the pedestal that I'll show you in a moment so that's basically it as I said I try and keep it as neat as possible um just to let you know this one Powers um three monitors this computer the center computer for the left and right pilot and go pilot main instruments um drives two PCS uh sorry two monitors and as do the the third one which is the center pedestal and the CDU MFD etc etc so that's behind um the overhead um is a cheap and nasty one from pole dragonet um but I've done a lot to it to to change that um this is just a logi Logitech um audio system and I'm going to turn off the lights for a moment when we go around the front so back around the front to the uh unit itself quick look again as I said styled in the form of in the shape of a km 737800 um the seats themselves well I'm waiting for some proper seats but in the interim um I got these seats from a car Breakers yard they're from an Alpha Romeo uh 147 and uh as you can see I've I've even heated these so in the winter keeps it nice um we'll start with the center pedestal right now we're we have no power on anything up up here on the overhead so we we're just on battery power at the moment so um center pedestal we have got if I turn all these on at a time we've got um two radios again uh all of this stuff is from open cockpits nav one nav two we've got a um a transponder there um we've got a fire panel here uh we've got a com system the only thing I've I've lit up on the coms and that'll come on with put battery power on I've done um all the IDS and the idents for each of the naves are all enabled but the com system itself is not fully enabled down here we've got adf1 and adf2 um Roder trim and we have some some panel lights now for the panel lights for the LED lights behind here I've got three lots of LED strips 12vt strips purchased from applins um and I power those I got these little because um turning brightness down on LEDs is actually quite difficult um so I got some pulse wave modulated um LED control little circuit boards for about three UK each from eBay which is a was a good deal and I use the same up here on the overhead with the panel lights themselves rather than try and do that from software a lot of the front um LED switching and um display brightness is done through software through an IO script from open cockpits so that's the pedestal I do have a an intercom system here that um is a is a real aircraft intercom system purchased in this case I purchased it from from transair which is a a flight shop in the UK um that I used to have on on a little aircraft I flew um down here we've got the cockpit uh door entry lights they are enabled um so they do real things the weather radar is uh is dummy it's not modeled at this time the Fire Control Panel is um made from and I'll show you that when I put Power on that's straight from open cockpits again a lot of my stuff is from open cockpits um very very good system and uh really working well so if we just take a seat oh sorry down here this is um where I keep uh I've got a a friend who's a is's an airline pilot and uh these book he gets me when they get out of date I know everything's online now and you can get electronic charts but these are extremely useful so I have uh made a little chart booklet holder if we move in you'll see immediately there is uh there's no Yol on the right hand seat there are pedals but I'm still waiting for a yolk similarly the only other thing that's missing there's no uh MCU on the right uh sorry MFD on the right and there's no uh CDU either control and display unit for nav Etc and similarly the lower du is not working just about everything else is is there there's no nose wheel steering either so they are the things I need to do um couple of things I've I've put in there's a a little um Pilot's chart holder there also I made a little chart holder for the front of this PFC yolk um with a little light system I got from a an an LED um unit that was originally designed for for books and uh just a book reader night book reader so at the back of that I've got a little battery pack uh for this extremely useful um and very very cheap so I've not spent a lot of money on this as I said before the clock on the on the first officer's seat is actually a dummy but the one on the Pilot's seat is now up and running and uh when I put Power on you'll see that as I said the three screens come through you'll see the dark effect sorry find his webs here the dark effect from uh just putting that blackout stuff the Blackout's also on the front screen so once you get light coming through it's actually beautifully enabled and looks proper um for the windows and the window this is just um some leather I got from a car a car um ballet and car upholsterer which is local to where I live I got some foam and then just covered it and uh and actually it's it's done a really nice job um again I'm on a tight budget so this has been going on for a couple years now um and it's really worked well so I'll just put a little bit of power on this will be the last bit of this particular video just to show you how everything uh works in the short term so we've got the p pul dragonet overhead and the after overhead if I just turn the lights on the light up there that you can see that's just again purchase from a local DIY Shop uh I replaced the small filament 6volt bulb with a an LED and then I've put a different resistor to change the brightness from the overhead here so bright position off dim position uh reflects on that light so the rest of it is basically untouched apart from the back lighting some more LED strips I just put behind and uh I showed you the power for that earlier on so I just put some battery power on um I'll unpause the simulator itself all right so we're unpaused um hopefully you can hear the noise all the lights are coming on um and we'll put some power on there okay and uh what I'll do I think just to complete this is is to uh you see there straight away we've got the um the co-pilot sorry the captain's instruments are coming up but what I'll do I will put power on and just show you it all powered up and show you some of the features so um let's start the Apu the gauge for the Apu I have enabled um and it's the only gauge in the overhead that I feel I need to enable so if we start that there's a little um Servo behind there an open cockpit Servo again and yeah some crafty scripting gets you some some really good results hopefully you can see that the exhaust gas temperature is rising for the uh for the Apu so that should go through about 940 de and then drop that into about 440 450 and then we should get power available once I get power available I'll put that on and I'll show you some of the other functions on Startup there we [Music] go so power's coming sorry um temperature's coming back down I have full checklist but I'll go through some other videos on on how we do this but put some lights on wheel well put some Wing lights on I'll uh put some logo lights on and uh EXT external lights I'll uh I'll put on the emergency exit lights and some Hydraulics once I turn the generators on so the generators are on the Hydraulics are now on and I'll put some fuel pump on because we do take uh fuel for the Apu from the left hand tank so looking up if we look up I'm going to turn on the Window heat and turn on the uh pedo probe and I'll give some air conditioning in the back of the aircraft U from the Apu bleed a and then we are all good I'll I'll turn on some trim air and put the galley power on so we can have a cup of te um but what I wanted to show you now was that everything lit up um now we've got our CDU so we can put a position in we're at uh Edinburgh so egph I put that in and what I will do just at this stage is I'll just start up the inertial nav system so we have two ins so we should wait for an align light here we got an align we'll do the same on this side and the line and then I get prompted immediately down in the CDU for input of a correct position and now we should start getting some alignment while we're doing that let's just have a look so down at the fire panel again so now we've got some fire panel checks enabled we've got a fire test enabled down down in the uh cargo hold um what else have we got that I could show you um we got trim enabled now so there you go there's the trim wheel spinning far and a and uh we've got now these are all motorized so for the trim wheel itself I use a 12volt motor from a fat punto would you believe um which I've uh geared up inside here similarly for the servos here I use air traffic control sorry um I use radio controlled servos from an aircraft model shop and the same for the speed brake as well um so they're all fully armed um and fully capable if we go through the uh ground proximity Warner you should hear the standard calls wind windar windar terrain Terin pull up bre pull up don't too low terrain too low gear too low FL F slow B angle B angle approaching minimums minimums 2500 1,00 500 400 300 200 100 50 40 30 20 so as that rumbles on I'll continue doing some tests here and I can show you that um all these recoil switches work um these were quite difficult all I got here was the cover uh again from um no this time I got these from Paul dragonet but there's no circuit board behind them nothing behind them to power them so I had to little build a little circuit board I used some little switches some Springs and uh and mounted that behind such that um they work on both sides and uh similarly the all of these work as well so and when I when I press the fire warning you'll see yeah we get fire lights as well the E on both sides again um that one and that one come from open cockpits as does the uh mCP the main control panel for for flight um fully functional and done through a scoc script if you're not familiar with these terms I apologize um right we can see now everything's up and running um the um main pilot PFD all controllable by these these switches so we can change the configuration here throughout everything's enabled um so and if you can see down here by doing that the only monitor that I don't have as I said is is this Center one a little bit difficult to fit um I'm working on that with uh my colleague who's helped me build this whole thing um the eist system is fully swept up um everything works um we can change the configuration we can go into flight P modes um we can change just about everything on this system um and it is fully functional the standby instruments are done by a monitor at the moment the flap gauge um flap gaug is uh again this is geared and uh and the flap system is completely geared um and uh yeah it works fully up here we've got a flap indicator panel um ins panel now alive um um down here we've got the electrical system so everything thing is up and running as it would be on a b 737 um the one thing I have done which annoys my wife intensely is I've got the attendant call here um that actually goes to the kitchen and uh we'll Bing Bong in the kitchen which is awfully sad anyway that's the end of uh this short video I'll just show you the test functions that we've got before I do do that so if we do a full light test and up here on the thing hopefully you'll see but it's uh it's quite a system um it's taken about 2 years to get to this stage um but as I say it's never done and uh I won't really be happy when it is done because it won't give me anything to do in a lonely rainy evening in the UK so I hope you've enjoyed this short video um the next one I'll see if I can do a little bit of flying and show you how the simulator flies thanks a lot for watching bye

Channel: Neale Hargreaves

Views: 1,322,737

Keywords: Boeing 737 home built simulator, flight simulator, Look

Id: FV8PMwbGh08

Length: 23min 33sec (1413 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 20 2015