You Can Now Build This Insane “Real Life” Flight Simulator Rig

You can now build Michael Rechtin’s amazing motion rig, which works with both flight simulators and real-life drones.

Cameron Coward
2 months agoDrones / Gaming / Vehicles

FPV (first-person view) setups revolutionized the hobbies of RC airplane and drone piloting, as they give you a view from inside the aircraft. But that is solely visual — you can see from the drone’s point of view, but you aren’t fully experiencing the flight. The same is true when you play a flight sim on a console or PC with conventional controls. Last year, Michael Rechtin built a DIY “real life” flight simulator rig that changes all of that and now he’s releasing the files you need to build your own.

Rechtin’s first video about this project, which we covered at the time, now has about a million views on YouTube. That’s really impressive and it is easy to see why it was so popular: this rig is every hobbyist’s dream. It is, essentially, a motorized chair that can tilt to match the roll and pitch of the target aircraft. Rechtin designed it for use with drones, but now it works with virtual aircraft in flight simulators, too. Either a TV mounted in front of the chair or FPV goggles give the user a first-person perspective while they feel the motion of the aircraft through the chair.

As part of his efforts to make this whole thing more accessible, Rechtin streamlined the electronics and they’re probably simpler than you think. A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer coordinates everything. Under its direction, a Teensy 4.0 development board controls the motors that move the chair. Those are beefy steppers paired with gearboxes and controlled through closed-loop drivers. The pilot’s controls are off-the-shelf USB devices (standard fare for flight sims) that connect to the Raspberry Pi. It then outputs a PPM signal to the “trainer” input of any compatible RC transmitter to send commands to the aircraft.

On the aircraft (a drone, RC plane, or anything else), an MPU6050 gyroscope/accelerometer measures orientation and movement. That data goes back to the Raspberry Pi through a conventional transmitter/receiver, so it can move the chair to match.

And in the event that you crash your drone and new propellers aren’t going to arrive in the mail for a few days, you can use this rig with virtual aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator and several other sims. Just connect the USB cables from the controls and the Teensy to your PC. Once configured, the behavior will be the same as with a drone, but with a vehicle made of ones and zeroes.

Rechtin is even selling a PCB on Amazon, which will make it easy to wire up everything to the Teensy.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist. Check out my YouTube channel: Serial Hobbyism
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