I'm a flight sim enthusiast (FSX) with 29 years of programming experience, but totally usless as a handyman or electrician.

My aim was to build a motion platform prototype to test communicating with flight sim, work out the timing issues, and see if phidgets would do what I needed.

I bought an accelorometer and two bipolar stepper motor controllers from Phidgets, and two motors from digikey as suggested by the Phidgits documentation.

The accelorometer works fine - I just haven't worked out how to get the tilt angle from it - work in progress.

Instead I keep track of the platform position by using the stepper motors, setting and getting the current position.

I wrote a vb.net program which interfaces to fsx and gets the basics such as pitch, bank, onground, speed.

I then activate the stepper motors based on this. One nice effect is that my model vibrates while the plane tracks down the runway. If it goes off the runway, the vibration turns into rocking.

Once in the air (the fsx plane that is), my prototype mimics the bank and pitch in almost precise synchronisation. The model itself is extremely basic, like something from "Gilligans Island", but it has allowed me to resolve the issues and get it working.

The only issue I had with the stepper motor controller was the demo software and documentation being slightly misleading. I learnt that the .count property will only ever return one. You have to create a new object for every stepper motor. Also tucked away in the documentation was the fact that with more than one stepper motor, you open them individually using their id number.

Now I just need to get some mates over to build the real thing!

That sounds pretty cool - Post some pics or a video if you can get one built!

Here is the video of my project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFxCxwSQL_c

hi,

I am doing a project of making an analogue instrument which reads data from flight simulator. I am using Stepper Motor as Vertical speed indicator instrument and Phidgets Stepper Motor Controller for controlling it. X-plane I am using as flight simulator. Can u please help in interfacing both. I require a plugin program.

Thanks,
Hiren