I’ve been interested in aircraft memorobilia for a while and have picked up a few bits and pieces on visits to random business parks which sell these parts.
This project is an alternative flight simulator, from a passengers perspective.
The first part of the project involves a PI Zero, PC monitor, a control panel from a cockpit of an old plane and a florescent strip light. The PI Zero controls the control panel LCD through I2C, takes button inputs from the control panel, turns on the flouroescent lamp and, most importantly drives the video on the PC monitor.
A simple Python script was used to do this – the PI doesn’t run an X environment but instead uses the omxplayer tool to playback video. The videos themselves are taken from YouTube and especially cut down to fit into the aspect of the display.
The second part of the project is the passenger control panel which is all driven by an ESP32. Since ESP32 has capsense capability, it was relatively easy to get the touch switches working with a relay board. The fan is controlled by a board similar to https://www.digikey.co.uk/en/products/detail/dfrobot/DRI0002/6588473, but since the ESP32 has native PWM ability using ledCWrite function, it’s not much work to control the speed.
Finally, the sound is provided through ESP32 I2S using a MAX98357A board – I managed to fit all of the sound files into PROGMEM so no internet/external storage is required.
I aim to post source code soon – it just needs tidying up a bit before I do.
It will be on my public repo at https://github.com/shakso/ soon.
