Sim Icarus Boeing 777 Handmade Flight Deck

ShadowsMV writes "Three technology students finishing up their degrees at the DuPage Campus of DeVry University spent a term designing and building one of the most nifty flight simulators yet. Named the Sim Icarus Flight Deck, it accurately recreates the primary flight accessory controls of the Boeing 777, and interfaces directly with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. They have tons of pictures and lists of everything you need! Previous flight decks featured on slashdot include An awesome homebuilt and wideview with 13 Monitors And 9 PCs."

I was Building a 757 and gave up lack of $.

[BrianHursey]

I reserched for a year I wanted to build one. I even got the software woking with 6 computers. But after the evaluation of the cost of building the quality sim that I wanted I concluded that it would coust me about 10-15 thosand dollers.

Icarus?

[Anonymous Coward]

Icarus crashed into the sea.
Hell of name for a flight simulator.

from wikipedia ...

the nearness of the blazing sun softened the wax which held the feathers together, and they came off. He fluttered with his arms, but no feathers remained to hold the air. While his mouth uttered cries to his father, it was submerged in the blue waters of the sea, which thenceforth was called by his name. His father cried, "Icarus, Icarus, where are you?" At last he saw the feathers floating on the water, and bitterly lamenting his own arts, he buried the body and called the land Icaria in memory of his child. Daedalus arrived safe in Sicily, where he built a temple to Apollo, and hung up his wings, an offering to the god.

Manufacturing ?

[cyberfunk2]

I'm glad this got posted.. now hopefully some enterprising company will hire these guys. It looks like they did a real good job of something pretty hard, skunkworks style.

If I was an employer I'd wanna have them working for me.

3D idea for this setup

[boomgopher]

You know what would be cool is to:

Rig up a dual projector setup in front of this sim
Have the projected images overlap one another
Place a polarizing filter over each projector
Adjust each filter to be 90 degrees out of phase with the other

Slap on some cheap 3D glasses, and tada, 3D flight simulator.

(I think) Anyone know if this would this work? I've always wanted to try this.

Re:Shine You Guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, nobody trashed DeVry. It's been 20 minutes, and the only thread before yours [slashdot.org] said only good things. You're the only one who suggested your degree may be improper.

inspiring..

[thanew]

after seeing what nascar drivers do, and seeing this (granted they are two different things, but essentially the same), this inspires me to recreate the interior of a car, like those cheaply made ones in the arcade.. like that f355 challenge game, for the release of gran turismo 4 next week

X-Plane

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't they use X-Plane [x-plane.com] as the flight simulator??

Re:Their admin must be a complete noob.

[Yakman]

Boeing is taking the Toyota route and making the Prius of airplanes, longer range (?and better fuel economy?).

Actually the 777-200LR is more expensive to operate than the A380 (per passenger). Tickets on a 777-200LR flight will probably be more expensive than on a "regular" flight, however they're betting on the fact that some people will prefer to pay extra to avoid a stopover.

For example this plane would be able to do London-Sydney in one hop (Note that it won't be able to do Sydney-London though, I read, because of headwinds). Although this will mean approximately 20 hours in the air on a single flight, I think i'd rather the stop over (nearly) half-way in SE Asia.

Re:3D idea for this setup

[Sebastian Jansson]

You'll still have one problem left: Focus. That's the hardest to overcome problem with 3D emulating. Your idea should give very cool results, but they will feel a bit wrong.

Re:3D idea for this setup

[Rolker]

This setup does work. We have such a system at work so we can show stereo stuff to a large audience with cheap polarized glasses. (Instead of more expensive LCD glasses).

The trick is to have a videocard that supports clone mode stereo, such as a Quadro card, and software that supports stereo.

Why always MSFS

[Bastian]

Not meaning to bash MSFS, but I'm curious why you always see simulator mockups done with it rather than X-Plane. It has a much more realistic flight model, and it seems to me that people willing to spend so much money on a flight sim would care enough about realism to also choose the more realistic simulator software. Are there technical issues with X-plane that make it unusable (no support for multiple monitors and graphics cards, for instance), or is it just another example of MS being the default?