Mar 27 2024
Not many words needed. I’m happy to show you some pictures of my first flight yesterday on 26 March 2024 with the newly rebuilt Flight Simulator Home Cockpit, now featuring a second flight management computer and the newly built aft overhead panel, and, and, and … also many thanks for the VACC (VATSIM Controllers in Switzerland) staff for this greate Geneva to Zurich coverage!
Mar 27 2024
After having almost completely mounted the Sim in a newly built wooden house including a curved 210 degree screen and three projectors, a small metal part of the mechanical rudder pedals broke. Since the B737 sim is mounted in a real cockpit enclosure, there is no way to access the rudder pedal from the front. This meant unmounting the pedestal, throttle quadrant, seats and the main instrument panel MIP first …
The good thing about such an exercise: each time I have to take apart the Cockpit things can be improved and the rebuilding process becomes easier. The broken part was found, but the supplier of this otherwise great dual linked rudder pedal assembly, SimuJabs from Spain, unfortunately went out of business.
I was very glad to find a nearby wood and metal workshop in 3008 Bern called LU DE WIG, who created a reinforced replica of the broken part in s short time (piece is now painted in black instead of green):
Rebuilding the cockpit (start in front and work your way backwards was a breeze (only around five hours in total):
Aug 16 2023
The whole thing has actually started in 2007 at my bachelor’s party with friends when we buried three rather expensive bottles for 10 years about 1 m deep in a forest in central Switzerland. Guess what: the wine has aged perfectly under really adverse conditions since the bottles were subject to seasonal temperature changes of 10 degrees Celsius or more and were experiencing changes in soil humidity from completely dry to soaked in ground water.
So: What about those who say that wine can only be preserved with constant climatic conditions?
There have been several instances during the last years where either I or a colleague did bury a fine bottle of wine, geo-tagged the site and motivated others to find it. Preferrably on Elba Island. The idea ha ripened for building a geocaching initiative where you can find “wine caches” buried underground. The idea would be that you could get a nice outdoor experience and have a good drink with wine you would have never bought yourself. The rules for such a game would need to be created. The main rule would be that you have to re-dig a wine of your choice once you have emptied a cache. The main problem with this game is that current geo-caching initiatives do not (geocaching.com or opencaching.de) do not allow to hide alcoholic beverages since they are open for everybody. The project “winedigger” (let’s call it this way for the moment, there is no such website to date) would therefore have to be an adults-only (18+ year old) game.
Please get back to me if you would want to take the initiative and start the project.
Wine-Cache No. 1: Verzasca Valley Switzerland
Located in the beautiful Verzasca Valley in southern Switzerland, this typical (but not most expensive) Merlot grape wine was buried by me on 8 August 2023.
46.346050 °N, 8.791470 °E 897 m.asl. (Precision: 3-5 m)
Here are some pictures for you to guess what to expect. Note that the bottle is located in around 70-80 cm depth and you may have trouble to get to the place in spring during snow melt and after heavy showers. You need a shovel to dig since you may be off by 1-2 m.
In case you get lost, here follow two pictures of larger stone formations in the vicinity. Actually, the bottle is located just in the middle of those two stone formations …
Wine-Cache No. 2: Elba Island, Italy
If you ever visit Elba, don’t miss out the southern part of Lacona. It offers fine food, beaches without big buildings in your back and … a wine cache. Also don’t miss out the restaurant Bagni Orano. You can enjoy fine fish dishes while massaging your feet in the sand.
42.759740 °N, 10.307220 °E 2 m.asl. (Precision: 3 m)
We also have included a few kid’s toys. But be aware: the cache is burried around 1 m deep in the sand. You will need a good shovel (an avalanche shovel is a helpful tool for sand digging) and you may need to get rid of daytime spectators before digging. Sunset or sunrise is a good time for wine cache digging. If you need a hint: the sixt pole shall it be and not more than 9 steps you shall walk towards the sea.
Wine-Cache No. 3: Pfynwald Wallis in Switzerland
The Salgesch Village in the Canton Wallis in Switzerland is known for its superb wines. If you ever happen to be there, please don’t miss out the Gregor Kuonen Wine Cellar for tasting a few of the finest wines of southern Switzerland. A few km south of Salgesch on the southern side of the Rhone river lies the Pfynwald nature reserve. I have burried a fine bottle of Gregor Kuonen red wine for you. Notably not in the nature reserve itself but in a agriculturally used grazing field just at the border to the forest. Depth is only around 20 cm. Have fun!
46.298690 °N, 7.583840 °E 560 m.asl. (Precision: 3-5 m)
Good luck with finding! And please let me know if you have replaced it with a bottle of your choice. And even more importantly, please leave me a note on the wine tasting ceremony!
Nov 13 2022
As I concentrate on programming and hardware work you are not getting too much news here from the project. You can always visit and see yourself.
What has happened:
What will follow next:
A few current images follow here … feel free to ask about any specific technical details.
Jan 25 2022
The journey has just begun, or as we say in german: Der Weg ist das Ziel. After adapting the nicely made upper part of the Boeing 737-800 MIP from SISMO Soluciones to the original Boeing 737-300 MIP stand below (see this post), the next task was to outfit the whole thing with proper electronics.
I have started with the MIP LCD displays and the FMC’s. Most cockpit builders use regular monitors and connect them to multiple regular PC’s. There are two uncessary parts in such a setup:
The solution was to buy monitor screens and HDMI driver boards instead of the full monitor. With the variety of sellers on Ali Express this becomes rather simple. I’ve chosen the following models:
For each of those displays I’ve selected a Rasperry PI (3B for FMC or 4B for the CDU’s) which runs XPOpenGC. First tests showed a very good performance within above specs. Rasperry PI’s use little power, are cheap, can be administered remotely and can be easily stowed in the center part of the MIP base.
You may find the following images helpful in case you build your own cockpit:
Jan 25 2022
The Integrated Standby Flight Display (ISFD) is used in all newer Boeing 737 jets. This instrument is thought to be a backup when all other (now digital) flight instruments fail. In the real aircraft it is a fully independent (in terms of power and sensors) and rather small replacement of the Primary Flight Display (PFD) with reduced amount of information. It will tell you altitude, attitude, bank, speed and heading. What do you need more? In the simulator, we can mimik its usefulness by e.g. turning off the PFD and keeping the ISFD on, simulating broken avionics. The ISFD has five buttons and a rotary encoder to set e.g. the barometric height, since its pressure is measured separately for the ISFD.
SISMO Soluciones sells a very authentic “dummy” bezel of the ISFD for a good deal. However, as the description says, the buttons are just decorative. I have removed the button caps and have mounted real buttons behind those caps and a rotary encoder into the dummy bezel. Apart from destroying a few edges of the nicely painted ISFD bezel, the thing looks pretty nice and also works. The key is to use as little space behind the bezel for wiring and screws, since the EICAS monitor will have to fit closely to the plexiglas of the ISFD bezel. Oh, one note: the original plexiglas of SISMO Soluciones is a smoke glas, which looks nicely, but unfortunately “eats” too much of the monitor brightness. The solution was to simply cut my own transparent plexiglas. For those of you who would like to repeat my work, please be aware to buy an additional inputs daugther card and connect it to the SISMO Soluciones master card via the 10 pin downstream link since the ISFD needs a total of 8 inputs (5 buttons, 2 for the encoder and if you want, one for the encoder button).
In case you look for a low height rotary encoder that would fit your ISFD. I can recommend the ALPS EC11E18244A5, as for instance sold by Farnell.
Now have a look at the process and the result and compare to the original above …
Nov 20 2021
I have wiped the Fairphone OS (a standard Android) of my 4 year old Fairphone 2 and replaced it with the Lineage OS 18 without any google play and google play services. The problem with this solution is that you have to search your apps by hand and many of the apps still depend on google play services even if you find their binary (APK) to sideload. It is a pity that our world is so much linked to the privacy-neglecting services of Google and Apple these days.
The upside of choosing an open source variant of Android like Lineage OS. totally ignoring Google: my battery life went up from 3-4 days to 5-6 days again, like in the old times.
What does this mean to me: the constant data exchange of my old Fairphone through Google Play and Apps that sent usage data to Google permanently sucked 10-30% of my smart phone battery! I cannot explain it otherwise.
Oct 19 2021
To be honest, I have a larger personal conflict between my professional engagement as climate change scientist, my private engagement on low fossil fuel usage on one side and my unbroken enthusiasm for aviation on the other side. I try to solve it by not owning a car, using things for a long time, repairing things five times and doing rather local vacation with my family.
From time to time, however, it would be cool to fly … not just in the home built simulator. Apart from the uncool carbon emissions, air travel has become non-enjoyable for most, especially with larger airports, security measures, waiting times and with a decreased uniqueness of the event of flying. Unless you upgrade for many bucks, but the increase in service still puts you and 360 others in a big metal canister after all the waiting time in the big airport. And I have never tried (and not even thought about trying) low cost airlines. The whole Corona thing has made me think about quality versus quantity when it comes to air travel.
So I thought about a possible solution and tried it out with my family. Lets revert back from mass transport with mass carbon emissions to personalized air travel and an adequate price tag. Price usually regulates demand and scale very well. A fair price includes service, uniqueness, fair salaries to pilots and maintenance staff and short boarding times. With a fair price for air travel the cost of offsetting carbon emissions is not of relevance any more (so carbon offset tax could even be much higher than it is). Which of course means that for a family of 5 like we are, such a personalized adventure will financially only be doable every 5-10 years … and possibly a long haul flight with such a service will not feasible for us at all. Which is good!
The opportunity was given by the charter flights offered this year by Belpmoos Reisen AG between Bern and Elba by contracting with Swiss Flight Services and using their King Air 350i aircraft with 8 passenger seats. They however did not offer flights at the date when we wanted to book the service. Thankfully they extended their schedule and we reserved 5 seats for the flight from Elba to Bern. They eventually found 3 more people to fill the aircraft. We went to Elba the classical way by train and ferry (well, the really classical way is by car, which is what 99.95% of all tourists do) and had a wonderful post-Corona holiday on the beach village Lacona.
And the adventure to go back from the small airport of Marina di Campo to Bern was really a great one with beautiful weather and very friendly staff of Swiss Flight Services. I wouldn’t want to miss it. It passed rather quickly but it was the opposite of the typical sardine box feeling of modern air travel.
Jul 15 2021
I have bought the high quality MIP with glareshield from SISMO Soluciones and wanted to put it on top of the original B737-300 MIP stand and then mount both things into the real B737-300 cockpit shell. Nice idea.
Of course the MIP stand totally changed from the -300 to the -800 (the FMC&lowerCDU bay is much wider now). And the really neatly build MIP from SISMO Solutiones would never fit into the really tight space of a real cockpit.
Also, and challenging everyone who argues that Boeing never changes a running system, the gear lever mechanics shifted by around 4 cm to the left in NG models.
By help of the circular disc saw and many hours of work later I can say that all those things are finally compatible and fit together. I also make sure that I can remove the MIP independently from the stand and independently from the glareshield/mcp in order to service parts once it is mounted.
See the photo story below …
