Hi I'm at World Flight headquarters here in Sydney and this is the world's most expensive do-it-yourself full-motion 747 flight simulator. and I've actually done a comprehensive video on this and but it's over on my Eevee Discover channel so I'll link that in down below and at the end you definitely have to go watch it where we get a full tour of this thing and also we go flying across the US as well in this as part of our World Flight 2019. But the world's most expensive, but do-it-yourself full motion simulator wasn't good enough for the owner so it's actually quite old. so right over there what you're going to take a look at in this video is the brand spankin' new one which they haven't finished yet.

but we'll get a comprehensive tour of this because it uses all original 747 cockpit parts whereas this one's a combination of some original parts plus some sort of replica type stuff. But the other one? Whoa. you're gonna love this. So anyway, check out the video for this one after you watch this.

This is going to be fantastic. Let's go check it out because we've got the designer of the hardware and software system which actually interfaces and controls and handles all of this flight simulator technology. Let's go check it out and here's the new one which we'll go inside and check out. But here's our ride Red one which ever who you've seen in the previous video and here's the designer of the hardware and software solution that interfaces with this whole thing.

Just tell us about this new cockpit that we've got here. Oh Thanks! Dave Back in about 2013, Matt came up with the bright idea of I Think the old Sim needs to need to breath a breath of fresh air, needs a bit of new life. The old Sim was started before the year 2000, so it's over 20 years old now. The old Sim was built out of tube steel, some aluminium and steel sheeting on the outside, various types of plastic and perspex on the inside.

The only genuine parts in the old simulator come from 747 classics, So the control columns, the set pedestal throttles have all been modified out of a 747 classic so that could be a 200 or 300 versus the new one behind me which is it's as authentic as you can get. So the aircraft or the cockpit was from a X United Airlines aircraft November 193 Uniformed Alpha was the airframe that it came from. It was chopped off in Tupelo Mississippi where it was popped into storage for a good couple of years. because of logistics of getting the cockpit here to Australia are quite quite something.

It's too big to fit into a shipping container. it's too too wide and too tall or too long to get into a shipping container. So after they did a little bit more trimming to it, it was packaged up. It was shrink wrapped and there will be some pictures that will show you of the shrink-wrap their cockpit as it arrived here on the back of a truck and it came out from the US as deck cargo on a roll-on roll-off ship.

It was brought out here as a wide load because obviously it's too wide to fit on the road. so the process to get it here was not was not insignificant and probably cost cost more than the actual cockpit did. To have it removed from the aircraft doesn't surprise me. Yeah shipping is everything absolutely.

Then when we got it here there was a massive project to strip out all of the old Boeing wiring. Boeing use a very lightweight wiring some of its copper, some of the tell you minion and it's got this awful Kapton insulation around the wiring. oh why is that? Why don't they have kept on our fire fire retardant? It's light so there are many positives for using that in an aircraft but also when you're trying to work with that in a simulator that can be a can be a nightmare to try and strip those wires, solder those wires and join those wires. and also Boeing's redundancy system where single switches are connected to two and a three different wiring looms.

So the amount of wire that came out of the cockpit was huge. The amount that's gone back is significantly less. So when this projects finished we estimate will be about five and a half kilometers of new wire that we've put in. There will be something like a hundred and fifty connectors that we've reused in their lovely cannon plugs, which will show you a bit later on.

Absolutely. and we'll have crimped over a thousand new pins onto those cannon connectors. And yet we worked out the easiest way to do that was to buy a pneumatic crimping tool, which which saved a huge amount on the on the hands and the wrists over the years. The solution that it's running is using the Sim Stack system and Sim Stack is an I/o solution designed for aircraft cockpits.

It's also it's what we designed and built. So when Matt first came to us and said hey boys, I've bought this cockpit, can you make it work John and I sat down and thought yeah, this can't be too hard. You know people have been building simulators for four decades. You know there's got to be a simple process for this.

We sat down and we looked at what we'd used in the old Sim and the old Sims using LED lights and it's using very simple buttons and switches. may be the odd rotary encoder, seven-segment LED displays. That stuff's all pretty simple, not authentic, and you know the old Sim probably draw us about I'd say 10 amps, maybe 15 amps total DC Load The backlighting in the Sim that you're looking at behind me draws about 70 amps alone. just just the backlighting running at 5 volts.

That doesn't include all of the other 28 Volt incandescent lamps and everything else that goes into it. So all of a sudden simple solutions that had been created by people for simulators since the I/o systems just wouldn't work with the bigger, newer simulators. Then we looked at some of the other controllable logic stuff PLC's and Pokies and some of those other boards and products and what we found is they were good for a specific problem or a specific use. They would drive relays or a different board would drive LEDs a different board with driving can Desson bulbs.

Then you had a different solution for 4 inputs, different solution for rotary encoders. So all of that got to the point where it was a bit. that's just a bit complex for what we're looking at. Much of it was also USB and anybody who's dealt with the USB product knows that you've got to unplug and replug, especially when you've got USB hubs when you've got USB cables running over 20 meters because that's what it takes to get from the panel to the computer.

So many, many problems with that. So what we decided to do was we decided to develop our own solution that used an Ethernet interface. It was a stackable and scalable solution that did things like handles three amps per output channel. We've got up to 16 outputs on one card.

You can stack eight cards together, so that gives you some pretty impressive current drawing. Everything is PWM based for the for the dimming, which means we can dim incandescent bulbs. We can dim LEDs We can very quickly and easily switch between switched supply and switch ground and a lot of the indicators and annunciators. And the aircraft cockpits are diode protected and you've got to feed the supply side which will feed for light and in order to get a single light to illuminate, you have to ground one low side of the light.

You can't invert the voltage because the diode will stop that process from working. Then there were also some of the other fun and games that we had we encountered: ARINC Four to Nine Eric Four to Nine is a very interesting aviation protocol. It uses an optical label and binary data with a checksum at the end. but of course the octal label comes at the end of the string, not at the beginning of the string.

There's Bnr and I think BCP or BMP and multiple difference, multiple different ways to get the same data across. And of course, being an aviation standard, there is no standard. it's so loosely applied so there was a number of instruments which we'll look at inside which were airing 49. We've also worked now on ARINC 7:39 and ARINC Seven-four-zero which are just different flavors for different parts and different different instruments and panels.

and so we had to develop a solution that would handle all of this stuff. Then you throw in those fantastic analog things called synchros and resolvers. Yes, we might have another video coming up on that in the future. So there's hours of content on those four, just just by selves.

But the short answer is it's a beautiful analog device. And as you know, when you try and digital digitize something that's analog, you have all sorts of problems, especially with the Humble Synchro which all three all three outputs are floating and they have no ground reference. So when you try and move those from an AC output into a DC input to work with an ADC, you run into all sorts of interesting problems. Then you have to generate the 400 signal that goes to them and there's a whole series of other, you know, other gotchas with that.

The other thing we've got in the aircraft cockpit behind me is we put different supply voltages. Some of the instruments work on 28 volts DC Some of the instruments work on 115 volts, 400 Hertz AC to instruments right next to each other. We'll have two completely different power supplies supplying 28 volts. It's easy supplying 115 volts at 400 Hertz is a little bit more complicated, but Eva is a fantastic tool to find all sorts of interesting power supplies from there.

So you develop this custom solution which then other sim. It's a universal solution so that other advanced simulators owners can buy your solution and whole community. Absolutely. So we just we started to develop this as purely as a hobby and then more and more people came along and said oh that's a great idea can we get a handle of that? So what we ended up with We had three Foundation customers, one in Sydney actually two in Sydney and one in India and so they were the the first production run of boards.

Went to those guys and from there the the interest is grown. Now we've got Sim stack running in train simulators, in plane simulators. We're talking with some people about some car simulators, ship simulators, you name it. It's a very, very simple Io solution that's stackable and scalable and works at a software end to a whole different whole different list of software simulator software.

So this isn't just a sort of like a do-it-yourself enthusiast level thing. this is for professional simulators really. Although, if a enthusiast had enough money like we've got, yeah, this is just an enthusiast, Absolutely our market. We describe their market.

It's a prosumer market, so the professional and high-end consumer. there is some configuration work to do with SEM Stag. It's not a simple plug-and-play solution, and we found that because as soon as you make something incredibly flexible, trying to make a simple interface to to use that with is very, very difficult. Also added to the fact that because we're using microcontrollers here, you have to put software or I have to put code onto the microcontroller itself so it's not like a USB interface where everything comes back to the PC and you can have a simple piece of software driving that so you've got to have something sitting on the microcontroller.

And because you've got limited memory, because you've got limited processor capacity, you have to be quite smart about what you do. So there's a whole series of hurdles that we've had to overcome and some of the other cool things we can do is we can program an app mill three to eight P processor over Ethan it so we don't need to plug a serial programmer into it, which is fantastic when your board is buried somewhere deep inside a simulator. I mean this one's relatively accessible, but it could be very deep under the bottom. Well go for a tour under the bottom as well.

So take you for a journey around the simulator and you can see some of the cool bowing over engineering and the thing to remember is that the cockpit behind me is the same size and shape as the first 747 that ever rolled off the production line. The cockpit size does not change and what we found over the years is people have bought Seven four seven classic cockpits and discovered that so much of the 747-400 components will actually just bolt straight in because this is it looks like this outside paneling. but if you look I'm not as will see this is actually cut cut out of the actual plane itself. So or it was bolted in right? so they just undo the bolts out.

No, no, they get out there with a big demo saw. yeah, one of those giant concrete cutting handheld concrete cutting saws and they will cut all around. They'll cut through the floor, they'll cut through the ribs, through the stringers, they go up the walls, across the roof, then that you've got it removed, then you have to lift the thing off. And they're not easy to get to because there's some, you know, several.

Yeah, there's something like forty or fifty feet in the air. Other little things like the windshields. Each pilots windshield weighs 90 kilos so that's something to to get it out. and that's something to get it in.

triple-glazed and they actually have a layer of very very thin fine gold mesh in them, which is what they use to heat the windshields so that they won't ice up and also it reduces that makes the glass a little bit more flexible and with the heat that goes through there at at 36,000 feet when the temperatures minus 50 degrees, absolutely Then you've got the pressurization. You've got birds. You've got other things that you might run into. So yeah, triple glazed windows and three layers of glass.

The gold mesh and some nice thick plastic as well and sandwiched in the middle there. Alright, well I think we'll go before we go inside, which might have to might have split this into two videos. the inside might be a separate to our end underneath. but we're gonna check out your customized hardware here and you're going to tell us if it all about the hardware and software solution that controls this.

Let's go. Alright, so this is the configuration that's used inside this one, right? You want to tell us about this? Absolutely. So what you can see here is all of the Sim stack cards that control the overhead panel within the simulator and we'll have a look at the overhead panel shortly. You can see that there's little codes written on some of those boards hyd the hydraulics panel ice if I are for the fire panel, fuel lights, etc.

So each board as you can see they look slightly different because it's the different stacks that we put on them. We have a Foundation board which does 16 inputs, 16 digital inputs, 8 outputs and it also does some analog inputs as well. and then on top of that we can stack output boards which just do outputs in input boards which just do inputs and also hidden in there on the start panel is a special customized proto board that we can use where we have to do some interesting things and in this particular case we had to interface with a 10 turn pot which required 14-bit resolution and the onboard ADC that we've got. It's only good for 10 or 12 bit rental resolution, so we needed a few more extra numbers there and so we had to find the solution that would fit into the stack.

And so we just put a fairly simple proto board together. Which means that we can be incredibly flexible and that's that one down there. I'm looking at now. Little dip socket done some hack in there.

Nice. All right. So here's the modular close. So this is your Sim stack solution which you develop.

How long did it take you to develop the how long have you been refining it? We're still refining it and we're still developing it like any good electronics project. I think the first one rolled off the production line in 2015. Okay, so to keep all the industry alive, they're all manufactured in Australia Nice, which is fantastic. We've got a little manufacturing plant that we use.

Yeah, so so yeah. Very, very small volume. very very niche market. So what you can see here is a picture of a Sim stack.

You can see that we've got some pretty funky din rail mount on the side which allows you to mount it quite easily. For those, for those viewing at home, you'll see that there's a small at Mil processor on board there. It looks very much like an Arduino Yeah, and I'm sure we can start to talk about what constitutes an Arduino Exactly Yes, that has the footprint of an Arduino Pro Mini but it's got a custom boot loader and custom firmware on board. and yep, I Know there's some bent pins on there, but this is just a demonstration model so you'll notice there's components.

We're seeing it, all sorts of other interesting things on there. So you did that because you originally used in the Arduino at first to develop it and then you realize that we need a cone to roll. Oh yeah, look we. We looked at what the best processes were to use in the three to eight.

P was the one. which shows. One of the reasons why you see them on in this form factor is purely because we can buy a completed board for less than the cost of a process I of course. yeah, so that makes sense.

It's exactly the same with the Ethernet module on top. We can buy an Ethernet module for less then we can buy a wizard chip for. yeah. So so that's one of the reasons the term Sim stack comes from the ability for us to take a another board and just simply keep stacking boards on top until we reach a theoretical limit which is about a hundred and twenty inputs and outputs combined.

As you can see here, we've got different different input solutions. We have the fantastic spring headers which are fantastic for for development and very very quick and easy to change. Seems don't have to screw in no screws, absolutely. And one of the reasons for that is that over time and heat cycles the screws tend to back themselves out, especially with vibration as well.

Where these spring-loaded connectors, you put a little bit of tension on the wire that's not going anywhere until you break the wire. Yep, Then we've also got these other headers here. They're also spring loaded and they're pluggable headers so we can set an entire sim up with those. And would you believe that they're even keyed so you can break these fingers off? You can put a little key on here and you can key them and I think you've got ten fingers there.

Up to ten keys. you think about the permutations and combinations you can have on a single step. So the advantage with that is that you've got multiple board side by side which you will then and you've got the wires and the looms hang out here. You know that this connector plugs into this absolutely and not only place that it will visually key each one of them? Absolutely Yeah.

And we've we've taken a taken the line from some of the aircraft connectors that you'll see shortly with the different combinations of keying and numbers of pins on those. So yeah, so that's our, that's our product. We've got an SPI header on there as well as well as various other risers that run through the board to allow us to connect the whole variety of different boards on there. Okay, tell us about the drivers on here.

The MOSFETs Yep, sure. So the MOSFET drivers on there. They're Fairchild Solutions and what we were looking for was a MOSFET that would handle the current loads that we Neal that we knew we would have to deal with with a very, very low RDS on value. And so they're the ones that we chose.

So I think there is an eight, four, four six, and a seven four fourth. I Think that I could be mistaken and they're designed to obviously be possible. Controls: Pulse width modulated, controlled and we also use a multiplexing chip on the board which allows us to daisy chain those boards together and the multiplexing chip is controlled through Spi, so we get good good speeds with that and all of the other resistors, diodes, and a small mosfet on there. It's just to help us with the switching and to ensure that we can get the right frequency LEDs coming along at the right at the right PWM value.

And as I said, each one of those MOSFETs is capable of handling 10 amps. We restrict the board to 3 amps per channel and that's mainly due to the cooling requirement. Yes, those MOSFETs can do 10 amps, but you need one square inch of copper as a heat sink for that, which means that the board becomes fairly large if you're doing that as part of our testing, we did run 10 amps through the board. we bridge the fuses.

The board got a little bit warm, but surprisingly, even with some peak Pwm values where you'd expect the most heat to come, the board was still not melting and still not falling apart unlike your very first examples. Our very first testing where we had MOSFETs falling off PCB soldering themselves. Yep, you'd spend five minutes with the soldering iron getting them on me only to have been falling off anything. What? Why won't this circuit work? What's going on? So so we had a lot of wonderful help from David Griffiths Our electrical engineer who runs a little company called Digital Graphics and he has been a fantastic help with us.

He stuck by us with the development and he had the vision as well to work with us and to see. You know what we've got and and helped us bring this product into through it. Bring this product to fruition. Sorry, it's a plane on top of the circle.

Absolutely well. You know if someone could understand the logo it means you've got the right logo so that's good. That's awesome. Yep, you said you can update the firmware on this because you've got a custom bootloader via the Ethernet.

It can you explain how that web celeb? We have two pieces of software that we've developed to run with these Sim stack boards. One is something that we call Sim Stacks which which is a software switch. So Sim Stacks which allows all of the boards to connect to a single piece of software and that piece of software will then connect to the upstream simulator and that helps us regulate and control the flow of data coming from the simulator into the boards. Obviously being a microprocessor, if you send garbage to the microprocessor, it's just going to throw it to ends up reboot and say I know what just happened, you know? So we need to put some software controls in place to make sure that that doesn't happen and to improve the control of the boards.

Now that software switch will also send a reboot command to the boards and it will also open up a TFTP port which is accessed by the other piece of software we have which is called Sim Step Motor Sims Tech Loader is an IDE that we've developed because we have a it's A. We have a C++ style A code which we've got some macros and some codes in to help ease the ease the writing and ease the creation of that code and SIM Stick Loader allows you to write, change, update, and compile your code and then you hit the upload button. It talks to Sim Stacks which sends it out through the TFTP port and it uploads it straight onto the board. After it reboots, God and the process to upload a new piece of code to a Sim stick board takes about a second.

Nice. And you don't have to plug anything, You don't unplug anything. It's absolutely fantastic. Alright, well let's take a look.

Can we have a quick look at the software? There's some screen grabs here and just send those straight to you as well. So this is the Sims Tech Switch Instance: What you see is you see all of the 29 Sim stake boards and in other places around the simulator as well. You see the board's connected and you also see the IP address of each, forward a description and an ID to help us help us with what goes on there. We can also control boards, we can kick them off, we can reboot them and we can do also look at the data that's flowing backwards and forwards through the board.

change the config amongst other things with the Sims decks which program got it? So wait, go into too much detail on the software cuz it's it's not that exciting. I'm sure software. it's everyone's interest in the hardware. so let's Well, that's yeah.

so that's the Sim stack hardware. We might. This might be another video so we'll have a look at em underneath this beast and around and then go inside and talk about all the goodness. Absolutely.

it will pop one of these panels out. Yeah and we can have a look at the the exciting stuff. So these connectors here induce fasteners, don't turn it on taken apart as we say on the EEV vlog.