HOOK, LINE AND SINKER

[Adrian_W]

Hi Guy's,

as a newbie, it's nice to know that one is not alone out there, that their are others just as crazy as me. does anyone have the phone Nos. of those institutions that lock you up in a straight-jacket  and throw away the key ?

I want to block them on the phone, so that when the wife finds out what I plan to do, she can't call for the men in white-coats to take me away !

I've just spent the last couple of day's looking back through the forum,  taken it hook, line and sinker !

         I'VE GOT TO BUILD ME A SIMPIT!

Like yourself John I have a soft spot for the 146 / ARJ having flown in them quite a few times between France and Britain in the last few years with Buzz, Flybe, KLM UK and Cityjet. Your Simpit is great and shows just what can be done with simple materials like MDF etc.

I think the RJ option is probably the easier (more digital glass stuff and less analog) and have already started to look at what suitable stuff I have from the old model railway/railroad days, input /output boards etc.

Just a final question to John as he seems to have some experience with VB, my programming skills go back to the old 8 bit Z80 days back in the late 70's and early 80's and I have only recently got back into computing, is VB fairly easy to pick up if you've been out of it for this long ? ( yes I know, a lot of you are going to say "What's 8 bit and Z80 ? " , it was the best we had in those days  - 8 bits, 5 mhz, 64 k and programs loaded from cassette tape)

Thanks to John for posting on Matthias' site I would probably not have found this one otherwise and still think I was the only crazy guy out there, the French already think I'm a little bit strange, when they find out what I'm building in the cellar they'll be feeding me with pink ones, yellow ones, blue ones ....... and I don't mean M & M's

See you soon guys

  ..........Adrian W

[JBaymore]

Adrian,

First of all........ welcome to "The Dark Side".    Never underestimate its power.

Keep us posted on your simpit efforts...... both words and pictures.  And if you need help with a question... post it and hopefully someone will have an answer or two for you.

My pit is based VERY loosely on the BAe 146-200.  The external view will be the Jon Murchison model... and the internal "workings" of the plane are from the BAe- Panel Project.  The layout of the pit and the looks are not exactly like the plane.  I stole from many different aircraft designs things I liked .... and created my own cockpit design.  To recreate a specific plane exactly... that is the BIG MONEY approach  ;).

The Z-80!  I cut my teeth on Z-80 machine language.    Ah yes....  the good old Sinclair ZX-81.  Cassette tape storage.  16 (whopping) K of RAM with the upgrade module.  Yes sir,... those were the days.  They don't make them the way they used to.  Had a flight sim for it too  ;D.  Also built a Morse Code interface for ham radio for the ZX-81 ..... (I'm KA1HLI...General class) .... it copied and translated Morse both in and out.  Modified the living crap out of those machines.

As to Visual BASIC.........

If you were comfortable with assembly language... then you'll do fine with VB.  Machine code is FAR more difficult to deal with than a high level language like BASIC.  But the background THINKING is the same in many ways.  Programming is programming.  ;)

Visual Basic is based on BASIC.  Some aspects of it are VERY easy to use........ getting info on screen and input into the program is a snap.  That's the "visual" part.  The rest of the operations coding of software is still pretty much like BASIC.

I use the professional development version of VB6.  It allows you to create .exe files and package up msi installer files and such.  It ain't cheap.  I have it because of another application that I am writing for the ceramics field.  

So..... another one headed down the "primrose path".    Welcome!


best,

....................john

[Adrian_W]

Thanks for the welcome John,
                                                it's nice to know I'm not the only dinosaur around here, and when it went colour with 128k and a floppy weren't we in heaven !

Don't worry about the questions, there'll be a thousand and one.

See you soon......

                         .......Adrian W