bekopharm

Wingman - An X-Wing Story | Star Wars Fan Film was released today. It's a Star Wars fan movie with 50 minutes length and plenty of pew pew.

What you see is a glorified DIY joystick controller with a LCD ('MFD') and plenty of RGB inspired by a VF-1 (Block 6) Valkyrie of the Macross franchise.

I use it mainly to play Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, X4: Foundations and plenty of other Space Pew Pew.

It's mobile and can be stashed easily because my battlestation is, unlike most gaming rigs, also my workstation and has to move a lot. It's also frequently occupied by my kids who also love clicky buttons and compete with me for stick time :D

It's completely DIY and made on a budget (no really). It's also Work In Progress, like probably any home cockpit out there.

For the PC it's just a joystick and an additional display. The magic starts to happen when I manage to interface with the games to display live game data and adjust the blinken lights depending on the current ship telemetry.

Am I crazy? Yes, probably. It's a hobby and when Corona happened indoor hobbies became kinda a thing again 🤓

Edith says: Should have added this from the beginning: I do foster a project website that has additional details, pictures and videos: 🌐 https://SimPit.dev (yes it's slow - hold the line :P)

Videos are usually mirrored to 📹 https://tube.tchncs.de/a/bekopharm or 📹 https://www.youtube.com/@BekoPharm (pick your poison).

Additional content may be found on 🌐 https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/ or on ☠️ https://hackaday.io/bekopharm

A glorified DIY joystick controller with an LCD ('MFD') and plenty of RGB.

• DIY headtracker with Opentrack
• DIY button box with LCD ("MFD") display
• DIY status indicators using a Neopixel
• Lots of plumbing with Node-RED
• Arduino Mega with a custom Rust daemon for driving the joystick and LEDs
• A custom “App” written in React to drive the MFD
• …and a Linux PC to power all the crazy 🤪

I did set https://simpit.dev/ live yesterday where I'm writing up all my collected SimPit clutter of the last 3 years in a more cohesive way. Feedback appreciated 🙃 More to come. (Oh yeah and ads and tracking free cuz I can't stand this ***).

I'm kinda blind on the topic by now after hacking away on this page for days so I'd appreciate feedback. Especially if something is broken.

Site may be slow af. I'm hosting this in my backyard. Videos are mirrored usually on PeerTube and YouTube though so pick your poison.

Did some test assembly today. Running out of buttons. I have to salvage my version 1 now which kinda sucks because I won't be able to actually play with it any more 😆 Still very happy with the result 👌

#Macross

Hej, I noticed an odd problem with my Gnome search recently. That thing that starts searching when the "super-key" is pressed (or the smart corner is triggered). When I start typing some text Gnome starts searching in all kinds of corners of the PC.

That is until my NAS system is not responding. It's automounted to ~/NAS/ and when that remote box is busy I get a complete freeze of my desktop. As in no HID device has any effect. Just seeing occasional disk activity (blinky LED) but that's it.

This takes about 5 minutes before it recovers. Only to start again on the next key stroke!

I guess some search provider checks the $HOME folder and waits for a timeout on the unresponsive cifs share. I want to know which one that is and if I can persuade it to search on local fs only.

Any pointers?

Colonial Viper Build has a new video up showing more progress pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfucWaZxjus

Today I printed the 3D plan of version 2 of my Primary Buffer Panel I'm working on for a while in Wings3D now. Jumped a lot of hoops to convert STL to SVG only to discover that Wings3D has an export for that built in xD

This is loosely based on a Macross Valkyrie cockpit (the rest of the world may know that as Robotech). It's still WIP and I'm still moving stuff around.

The print gives me the opportunity to get a feeling for size and proportions for the first time. Damn… that's huge 🤓

Asking because I remember similar from e.g. Okuna where a shiton of communities were created during the gold rush but many were left unmoderated for months until they eventually ceased.

And at what point would a transfer be considered by staff?

Yes, No Man's Sky does only support one gamepad. Single digit. This gamer doesn't care. Here have headtracking and HOTAS in NMS. Vanilla. No mods. Thanks OpenTrack, AntiMicroX and MoltenGamepad ❤️

Mebbe I'll do a proper recording someday: https://tube.tchncs.de/w/1NwcNBeyYEagNwZKGVQ21w

Wondering about that button box? Didn't use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/

How it's done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!

This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).

So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.

Doing so I noticed that NMS does "look-around" on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"

And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓

PS: I'm aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in "gamemode".

-- BekoPlayingGamesTheWayIWantPharm

I guess that counts as simpit too: https://tinandjar.com/2023/01/09/feel-game-gun-recoil/ 🤣

Hell of a DIY controller. Also no idea how that monitor survives this onslaught.

(https://beko.famkos.net/f/1CMFi)