DIY Home Cockpit Tour Part 1 | MSFS 2020 Citation Longitude | Microsoft Flight Simulator

hey everybody skytation here coming to you in voice over format I am prefacing this uh home cockpit walkthrough with the fact that I am going to do this via a voiceover from the video I took because after I had started doing the video I realized that I had something on the 3D printer and I could not cancel it or stop it and so um that was a lot of noise in the background and I just decided you know what I'll just do a walk around video it and then come back later and uh just kind of talk about a few of the things that I uh that I've got with this home cockpit so I call this the skytation home cockpit it is based off of the Cessna Citation longitude and Microsoft flight simulator 2020 Loosely based off of that it's not an exact replica I did build it basically for I guess you would call it Business Jet purposes so um it can really be modified to fly about anything in the game but it really works well for planes like the the citation and and other ones like that so as I go through here you may see the video stop loop back um I may start talking about something a little more in depth and uh didn't give it enough time when I was just walking around taking the video so I may just have to make a few modifications to the video so it may not flow perfectly well but uh it'll make a lot more sense as I'm talking about it so I'm just kind of showing the exterior here um it's not pretty on the outside but it's not meant to be everything important is on the inside and that's all I cared about and so the outside was just the raw material you can see what I used to build it a lot of two by fours two by threes one by twos a lot of paneling a lot of MDF kind of an insane amount of cords and hoses going through here the cord control is not great so for all of you out there that care about that my apologies it uh it's a mess right now and I don't know I may clean it up but again it's on the outside I never see it while I'm flying so I don't really care too much the computer sits on the right side it's where everything runs to this all all does run off of one one PC and I'll have those specs down in the description I'll have everything down in the description I tried to link as much as I could of what I used to build this um and so I will try to get all of that put down in the description um if it's on Amazon I'll link it there to Amazon they will be affiliate links um but yeah you can kind of see just kind of how I have wiring and everything like that a lot of the stuff on top has to do with overhead panel and some exhaust fans that are up there some lights that are up there you'll see all that once we get inside but uh yeah just kind of a walk through around the outside here this blower actually does work it does blow air inside the cockpit to four different vents that I have on the dash you'll see those inside a it's a blower I bought off Amazon and then I 3D printed a manifold there to kind of connect it off into four different hoses to blow inside I have an Arduino under there that runs a couple of things inside and so uh yeah without further Ado Let's uh let's get inside here so I have these curtains pulled down my wife picked them up at Target for me I have them they're backwards for a reason I wanted the gray they're gray curtains I wanted them the gray to be on the inside I plan to do a lot of videos in the future of just flights using this home cockpit and so I wanted that to be in the background if I do have a camera shot that picks that up I want a nice gray curtains very similar to what the real citation has in there but uh yeah behind the curtain you see the uh the cockpit it is a full two-person cockpit um I have three main screens that give a main windshield and two side window type of a view there and uh yeah let's start with the seats the seats are on Rails um this took a little a little while to figure out the best way to do this I decided on these linear rails again they're linked below they work pretty well it was a little bit of a chore trying to figure out how exactly I was going to attach these homemade seats that I made to them I did figure it out in the end I'm just getting the the little sliders that came with the rails attached to the bottom of the of each seat worked out pretty well and then the next thing after that was figuring out how do I keep them in place once they're in the spot they need to be found a couple of these toggle clamps um actually I think I found these at Harbor Freight but I have a link for them on Amazon but yeah once we get into place you just take that and clamp it down it just puts some pressure down and down onto the bottom carpet there and keeps your chair in place so that you uh you don't slide back and forth once you're locked in and they're real easy you can just use your feet to do them too you can reach down there and push it down or you can just use your foot use your heel and just kind of kick it down into place but uh yeah starting over here on the pilot side you can see a very inoperable but very necessary breaker panel there that is a handmade breaker panel with 40 different breaker buttons in it um none of them like I said are wired up it doesn't work it doesn't do anything you push the button nothing happens but I wanted to have those in there just for realism's sake and so I also have a little container there to keep iPad and Xbox controller for moving camera around if I need to um there's an armrest there's a cup holder the little red button you see there's a push to talk button I'll get to more more on that here a little bit later there's a tiller wheel there that actually works and steers it while you're on the ground taxing spot there on the dash for the apple pencil I use that to take notes on the iPad when I'm talking with ATC and then yeah here's just a an overall view of the dash runs off of mainly stream decks two regular 15 button stream decks and then a stream deck plus with some encoders uh encoder knobs and then you will see there's a push to talk button on the co-pilot side their cup holder as well they don't have a steering tiller over on their side um their arm rest there is on both sides a little outlet with a couple of different um USB connections as well as regular plugs on there as well and then I also wired in the Jack for the headset into each one of those I drilled out a little hole and mounted them in there so that it just wasn't randomly sticking out of the the side panel somewhere they also have a breaker panel on their side as well as their headset and then yeah here's just kind of a look at the sides in the top that main overhead panel there you can see has two five inch LCD screens that contains uh V pilot for when you're flying on the vatsim network I uh I keep that up there so that I can see you know if a controller pings me on it you do need to have access to V pilot also if someone is going or um sorry if someone pings you you can have it on there and then also you can see all the frequencies and everything for the different locations you're flying in and out of so it's good to have that up there so I wanted to have that for both pilot and copilot and then in the center is a Amazon Fire tablet I think it's like a 10 inch one this I was just going to use an iPad for this however this it can be removed and you'll see that a little bit later in the video I do take it down off of there and how I have it mounted up I'll go into that a little bit more the reason I went with an Amazon Fire tablet was because it right now to my knowledge it's the only tablet on the market that can be wirelessly charged and while this can be removed for the most part it won't be because I do have an iPad that I use when flying to pull up navigraph and other things on I mainly wanted this one to always have navigraph up on there to where I could reach up there change it you know switch out Maps pull up different charts if I wanted to but never really need to take it down it's nice that if I do need to take it down I can but mainly it just stays up there but I wanted it to then be able to be plugged into a charger somehow and I know with an iPad I could have gotten a little side charger in there and probably hit it pretty well but again if I ever needed to pull it down it would have had to have been unplugged and brought down and all of that and so I just simply looked online tried to see if there's any tablets to do wireless charging that one did I thought let's go for it and found it on sale and then created a mount that allowed it to stay up there magnetically while also being on the wireless charger at the same time so it's always going to be under full power so this overhead panel here just a four button switch panel I found on Amazon and I probably could have built one of these but I found it on there I think it was 35 bucks maybe and I thought I'm going to go ahead and go for this because I like the look of it with the big red toggle buttons and I needed something to basically control the LED light strip that goes around which I put my CD E and F here just mainly from myself so any real Pilots or aviators out there may laugh at me when they hear how I determine what these stand for but the C I just consider that cockpit lighting that is the LED light strip I'll usually leave that one on maybe you know if I'm flying maybe here and there if it's a Night Flight it may go ahead and shut it off but I consider that to be quote unquote cockpit lights uh the D is what I consider dome lights which is the two LED lights I just turned on there and they really light up the entire cockpit so those are handy if you just need you know a whole bunch of light in the cockpit and you need to flip those on for a minute the E is what I consider exhaust and that is going to be this little AC Infinity fan you see up here at the top and it's a powerful little fan again linked below it basically is just sucking out any of the hot air that's being generated from these monitors and anything else pulling it right out of the top and and getting it out of the cockpit and then um the f is what I consider fans basically and that is the ones that are in the dash the four um Ford little like I don't know what you would call those button button style vents um but uh they're fully adjustable you can aim them any which way you want to and but that is what that blower on the outside and those four hoses that come off of it go into each one of those again I don't have the sound on the video maybe I'll cut it in here and see you know just so you can hear it it does work I kind of stuck my hand up there to be like look it's actually blowing air which you really can't tell if it is or not a pressure streamer or something up there but yeah no it is blowing air and it blows a lot of air it I have it running on low it it does have adjustable speed I started on high it does not need high at all low keeps it plenty cool and so um yeah that's what that overhead panel does down here on the main Dash like I said everything sort of runs off of those three stream decks um oh down here I'd jump real quick to look at the uh the floor with the rudder pedals um got pedals on both sides I already had one set of these thrustmaster router pedals so I just went ahead and grabbed another one then I saw it on sale at uh I think b h but uh got some um 3D print files for some more realistic Rudder pedals than what came on there so I went ahead and just grabbed those printed off a set for each uh each one and I really enjoy them I like them better than the ones that come on those router pedals and so I don't mind them they work really well and they kind of look the part now so I'm I'm pretty happy with them but uh two honeycomb yolks to uh to control this thing both work One Pilot One co-pilot I did have to extend these mainly just to make them work for the dashboard and the way I had everything set up um obviously the way that I have them mounted I wanted really the the reason I went with the Honeycombs is because I love the way the yolk looks and the yolk handle part of it it really to me looks pretty authentic in terms of of you know citation type Yokes and handles and uh I really wanted to go with those but the rest of the honeycomb I really couldn't care less about you know the the red LED light you can actually see it shining back in there I know there's a button on the back to shut it off but I believe every time you power it on and off that will always come back on and so I had kept it off but at this point it really didn't matter to me if it a little bit shines through that little grommet hole there or not but uh yeah no I did none of the switches or anything like that I'm using on it I was really just mainly interested in the handle and so by the time I mounted it back behind the dash and the way that it's mounted in there um the Yoke handle wasn't long enough if by the time you pushed in all the way and then tried to turn the Yoke you would have been hitting one of the screens on the uh on the main Dash there and so I just went with a little bit of an extender here this is all linked down below which I think it's a 12 millimeter steel rod and then a 12 millimeter coupling there and uh really I just took the honeycomb apart a full disclaimer once you do that you are avoiding your warranty so if you do decide to do the same thing here just know that if you start taking all of this apart you uh you're pretty much giving up any chance of uh honeycomb making it making it right if something happens to your yoke but uh I mainly just took it apart took the entire handle apart um and then unscrewed the handle from the shaft there and then I took the uh the 12 millimeter Rod cut it down to the length I needed to and had to tap out a couple holes in it so that I could screw the Yoke handle back into it and then put everything back together and tighten down the coupling and ended up with uh with my two yolks here and I was worried that maybe the little um little coiled up ethernet cable there wasn't going to work wasn't going to stretch all the way across it did it works fine I don't think it's putting any pressure on it whatsoever so that worked out well for the GTC here I have this was a little bit tricky because the dimensions that I went with on the on the cockpit I tried to keep the two seats within the the width of my main monitor which is a 49 inch Samsung curved monitor I didn't want the seats extending really outside of that because it started would have started looking a little weird and distorted I think at that point and so once I made the seats about as narrow as I possibly could that left me with a certain dimension for the center pedestal and I knew all along that this GTC was going to be put on the center pedestal just like in the real thing and it basically left me with seven inches of width that I could deal with at this point and so I started out with about I think it was a 10 inch touchscreen and really wanted to use that by the time you separate out two of the GTC controllers onto that panel they're pretty good size everything's easy to see and touch and all that kind of stuff but that 10 inch was just going to be too wide for my for my use here I was able to get a seven inch one that fit perfect once I 3D printed this bezel to put around it and so with that bezel it makes it look like this is two separate Garmin touch controllers but in fact it is just one touch screen and then I have the two I have one of the main touch controller from the game and then one of the the pilot side touch controller and I know there's really four in the real aircraft there's two main ones and then one on each pilot side they're basically I think after the newest working title update the two main ones can work independently of each other or the two pilot ones can in the end for my uses all I needed was One Pilot side and one main one and so that's what we have here is on the left side you have basically the pilot side GTC and on the right side is one of the main ones and so everything's controlled from there but yeah I just took that seven inch touchscreen 3D printed a bezel for it designed and 3D printed one here to make it look like it's two different screens and then yeah you can see they're fully functional um you know they control everything like they're supposed to and this is all using the pop-out panel manager software which is amazing software to make all of this pop out stuff work for home cockpits which is just great um the developers out there that make this stuff are just insanely talented and and uh and all the stuff is obviously free I mean which you just can't beat that so um the rest of it here like I said everything's runoff stream deck so again these are two just 15 button stream decks they're flipped up vertically and basically there's one on the pilot side and co-pilot side they just match each other and these are where I control pretty much ever all the buttons and switches and everything you would see in the regular longitude in the game you can you can access everything you need to fly the airplane from these from these stream decks and all the other controls in the in the cockpit here there's no need to use a mouse or keyboard or anything once you start the flight to do anything in this aircraft the stream deck plus um I may go over all this stuff in another video because it can get stored a long-winded with how it's set up and and how I'm using it and all that kind of stuff but the stream deck plus basically I knew when I saw that come out on the market I thought that's my my autopilot panel it's got the knobs that I need it's got you know nice big buttons there it's got that touch screen where you can add multiple pages of stuff you have 4 four encoder knobs but technically you have an infinite number or however many pages they allow you to have of you know because once you swipe to a new page using that touch bar those four encoder knobs can now do four completely different things and what they did on the first page and so I knew that that was just going to be the uh the solution for handling you know all the autopilot navigation buttons flight director you know all the all the speed knobs altitude heading knobs everything like that um I was able to make that work and using the X's and O's software again I could get all into all this in another video which I may do that's what I'm using to make all of that work and make it control everything in the aircraft and so that's how those uh those stream decks are doing everything again with those I just printed some bezels up to make them look like they're fit in there you know like they're meant to be there and I think it all looks uh looks pretty good and so for throttles again I have a honeycomb Bravo throttle quadrant that I did use prior to this when I would just fly normally and flight simulator at my desk but again that seven inch limitation that I had to uh to meet for the center pedestal that just wasn't going to work I tried different ways to mount it in there I thought about teared tearing off the trim wheel on it to save me a few inches there's just no way I could make it work with sucks because I love that thing I love the way it feels I ended up going with these thrust master I think thrustmaster TCA it's the Airbus Edition ones along with the two accessory ones for flaps and speed control um of course I took them apart ripped out all the stuff that I didn't need I knew that I would just need throttle levers and I knew on the other two I would just need the uh the flaps handle and the speed brake handle so all of the other stuff you know I pulled the button the switches and knobs off of them so they would fit underneath of it here because all those knobs and things sat up pretty high but uh all that's underneath can't see it I don't have any of that mapped or anything none of it works the only thing that works are the levers the two buttons on the sides of the throttle levers for auto throttle and go around those work as well and then obviously the speed brake and the flap handles work and uh but yeah I just took them apart painted them you know got rid of the the Airbus blue that they were and just tried to make them look like they fit in this aircraft for right now they work great in the future I mean when I started this project I I've you know all the research and everything that I did I saw that people were making um you know motorized ones that would move when you had it on auto throttle and all that kind of stuff mainly for like seven thirty sevens and stuff like that those kind of airliner home cockpits but I thought you know I could do something like that for the citation make it look like the the throttle levers and everything from the longitude but if I would have tried to have done that this project never would have gotten finished so these will work for now they're working great I love them and so I don't love them but um they they work great and they do the job and so I'm happy with it and they can they'll stay where they are for right now for a while so um but yeah that's that's what controls all of that I've got a little nameplate there for the uh for the skytation it's always been November 316 Bravo popping it always will be so made a little plate there put it in the middle so that way if I got co-pilot flying with me and they're communicating with ATC and they need a little reminder well there it is so um but yeah that is mainly the cockpit I'm just watching the video here making sure I don't forget anything let's see what I'm doing here um I've got Vegas pulled up here where we're sitting and uh yeah they're the V pilot screens like I said um navigraph up on that main screen on the uh the tablet and uh yeah I think here in a second we're gonna just go for a little ride around oh actually no I'm gonna pull down the tablet and show you how that works so you can see you just pop it out of there and then right here I have basically just again designed and 3D printed a holder essentially and right there in the middle is the wireless charger that came with the tablet and then on the two sides there you can see are just two big heavy duty magnets that I put in there and uh they're just recessed into that to that mount and then on the back of the tablet I don't think I showed it yeah I didn't oh you can see there when I put it back in how it showed 100 so that's the wireless charger engaging on it but uh on the back of the tablet there's just two little metal rings that are stuck onto the back of it that way it can uh it can grab onto those magnets but yeah it's not never going to fall out of there it holds it in tight and so I was pretty happy with how that turned out but uh yeah so just kind of a little panoramic view here looking around um we got Las Vegas loaded up and I think I'd go for a little taxi here just to kind of show it anyways I don't take off and fly here again every flight I do from now on I'm going to start doing those a lot more on the channel will be from this cockpit so you'll see it in action plenty of times but I think here I just started taxiing just so you could see it uh see it moving and stuff but uh we'll get to that here in a second I think but yeah with uh with all the research I did with this and all the other Home cockpit Builders out there the one thing I always kept seeing was that uh when you think you're done you're never done so there are still a few things I want to do on this one of them being basically a complete overhaul or redesign of the glare Shield I'm happy with the top of it and the overall shape of the front of it there where it sits on the dash but I hate that I didn't bring it down along the sides and I couldn't figure out the best way to do that and I just thought you know what it'll be fine with a slight little bit of rounding on top um but I do want it to come down the side so it just doesn't look right in my opinion and so I'll probably be doing that sooner than later so you may not see this Dash the next time you see a video on this but we will see but yeah here we go I just started uh taxiing forward here and yeah you can just kind of see how how it looks from the uh from the inside of the cockpit pretty realistic that you're uh you're sitting in the copyright of the Jet and it's just rolling down the runway I know sometimes when people do these certain camera angles from these home cockpits the sides and stuff can look way off or way distorted or not look right I promise when you're sitting in it if I'm looking at it right now these don't look bad at all really everything seems to line up pretty well but now when you're sitting in it you look left and right everything is pretty well lined up when you take off Horizons change and move up and down like they're supposed to here I'm giving you a little look of the steering tiller showing you that it actually does work um this is run off of using Moby flight and then I have a potentiometer underneath that big wheel that that wheel is basically sitting on top of that it's uh it's turning as I kind of go left and right down the taxiway here I think it was I was trying to go back and forth showing you the me moving the wheel and then you could see the actual jet moving back and forth but um I don't know how well I did there there I think I brought it to a stop yeah just kind of give you a look there you can kind of see a little bit of the huh not too bad it I think it's the 49 inch monitor in the front that really if there's any mess up in the way that things kind of flow from the front view down to the sides it's the fact that that Ultra wide is trying to spread such a wide field of view across there that um some of what you start to see on the edges of it will start to get stretched out a tiny little bit before they then make their way onto the two side panels and so I am using the render window experimental option whatever that is and in Microsoft flight simulator to add those two side windows I'm not just stretching every one one window across all three things here so it does take a hit on frames in terms of performance and all that again when I do a flight or maybe I'll do another video just kind of talking about more of the tech specific stuff of this like with the stream decks and how all that's set up and then I can even talk about the the steering tiller and how I built that and everything but um it gets about I would say 35 to 40 frames per second pretty smoothly every now and then I'll get a stutter here and there but um running on a I think it's a 12 900k CPU and then a 30 90 GPU um for it to get that after I break out all the windows and break out all the panels and everything and every all of this just running off one computer I'm pretty happy with that so um but yeah keep a keyboard down there just for um to start everything up and then um you know if you're in V pilot or if you're on flying on vat Sim and there is something that pops up on V pilot that you either need to go up there and click something on one of those screens at least you got the the keyboard there to use if we need to so yeah just going around here looking at that blower one more time um basically I just have that hose dropped down there so that the coldest air is going to be on the bottom anyway so just picks up air from the floor there and kind of pointed out toward the the door to this guest room so that if there's any cool air it's probably coming from that area and so that's where it's going to pull it in from but uh yeah this is basically the skytation home cockpit and so um if you have any questions leave them down in the comments depending on how many questions there are and if there's a lot of the same ones and things like that I may answer them in the comments or I may just give it a few days see which ones are more prevalent you know what there's a lot of stuff people are interested in knowing and then I may just do a follow-up video where I answer a lot of those questions in the video so I'm not having to do it on every single comment that sort of thing so um yeah as we just take a few more looks at it around here I don't think I missed anything but if I did again leave me a shout in the comments and uh otherwise I think that is going to be it for this video I think I covered everything I wanted to and uh yeah all right well thanks for watching look forward to some flight videos coming here hopefully in the near future using the uh the new home cockpit here so thanks a lot for watching we'll see you guys later

Channel: Skytation

Views: 6,488

Keywords:

Id: 4jM7yHkrVXg

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Readityesterday2]

Magnificent ! Looks great!

[u/SanMichel]

Nice video and cockpit!

Have you done anything regarding the “perspective”?

In MSFS, if you physically move to the left, it feels like you’re crabbing or taxiing at an angle, I’ve found. It can be somewhat fixed by moving the camera to the left as well, but then it also makes it much worse / misaligned for the co-pilot, if such is there.

[u/PR34CH3R42]

And now I suddenly need something similar for Star Citizen!

[u/JimRNJ]

Fantastic job, elegantly done. What are the side panels made of? love the way they really sell the illusion that it's a window, not just a screen.