10 replies to this topic

[Corleym]

So time for Corleys pit thread(or as my wife calls it, the Wendy house), i've been dreaming of making one of these ever since i played mech warrior 4 but i was stuck in a small flat and was restricted, so all i could do was wait and collect things!

Long story short we moved house a few years back and mechwarriror online sparked my desires for a pit once again about a year ago.

I'll posy my pics and logs here for all to enjoy, comments and motivate!

Here's my latest pic as of 7 October 2013




Heres the log

I started by destroying half of one of our rooms for the greater good

[Foust]

Very nice. You do understand we are going to require more details right?

[Loc Nar]

Always nice to see another mechpit spring up like this... moar! Do you have more shots that fill the gap in progression pics? Taking meaningful pics (or rather making spaces neat enough to try) is one of the biggest time-sinks for me in this process myself, so I understand when they just don't get taken...

[Corleym]

more pics to come i got loads of photos its just i don't have much time to upload at the moment

As i didn't know how high to put the sides or anything or do any real planning i kinda bodged a few things and put pieces in temp places to see what was comfortable - you can see me using loose pieces of woods and bricks to stack stuff!







in this pic i actually bodged things into place and played the first ever games in my pod using the HOTAS - exciting times



in this pic i actually put most of the sides and the roof on the cockpit, amazing how it affected sound for the better with the bass. It also strengthened the frame so it wasn't as rickety and added a tonne of weight so i could no longer move the pit about anymore

Edited by Corleym, 08 October 2013 - 12:41 PM.

[Corleym]

Ok next update.
So at this point i also purchased the Couger MFD which I absolutely love and reallys adds to the immersion, i then started to set these up and experiment in game to check it all worked. After this i started putting the basics of the interior in place so you will see some angle sections added to the back of the pit.


I then cut out a large piece of wood to sit on the angle pieces i made earlier and then cut the middle of this out for a small monitor to sit in.


I then started to hack a few controllers and wire these up to some switches. These switches now control the "switching on" of the cockpit such as overall power on, PC on, monitors on and sound on, and I must say this is just awesome going through my “startup” procedure.




Last picture, shows everything connected up and me wiring everything up

Edited by Corleym, 12 October 2013 - 03:14 AM.

[Thunder Lips Express]

so cool! i want to build one so bad but i think we are selling our house and moving to a new one soon enough so i might as well wait.
is the wiring difficult for someone who has zero experience doing it?

[Corleym]

hey Ecliptor i had the same thing i really wanted to do this a long time ago, but because we were in a small flat and i knew we would move at some point i just waited, collected a few items and did some research

Regards to the wiring its not to difficult its just having the confidence to hack and wire up things to your PC, controllers, keyboards etc. I would recommend if you do not have much experience to seek advice frome friends or ask questions online before you do anything that could cause damage, you dont want to blow your motherboard because you messed up!. If you need any advice feel free to ask and ill do my best to help and pass the experience i have picked up.

If you have any old pc, keyboards etc that you dont mind playing with experiment with that first.

[Zashel]

Ecliptor, on 12 October 2013 - 04:39 AM, said:

so cool! i want to build one so bad but i think we are selling our house and moving to a new one soon enough so i might as well wait.
is the wiring difficult for someone who has zero experience doing it?

that 2nd to last picture with all the wires is all soldered on. if you have zero experiance with soldering i reccommend a trip down to your local radio shack or equivelent. they will have blank boards and resistors and all sorts of stuff you can use to practice will until you feel sure about doing it on a functioning piece of hardware. the two hardest things about wiring is keeping your wires straight (physicly and in your head) and soldering. At least in my experiance working on A-10's that seems to be the case.

Corelym:

where is your hardware? do you have it in a conventional case or is it mounted somewhere in the pit? it would seem easier to me to just do the latter since you're already in for a penny. liquid cooled? any plans for multimonitor?

[Corleym]

Zashel, on 14 October 2013 - 08:25 PM, said:

Corelym:

where is your hardware? do you have it in a conventional case or is it mounted somewhere in the pit? it would seem easier to me to just do the latter since you're already in for a penny. liquid cooled? any plans for multimonitor?

Im still in the process of uploading pics in order of the build so far but i will try get a new one showing where the PC is better.

The PC is still in a case but i have modifiied and created a wiring loom that goes to the mother board. The wires you see in the 2nd to last picture are from this wiring loom directly from the motherboard such as PC on/reset, LED on and Hard disk drive activity LED.

I have a fairly new PC overclocked at 4.5 GHZ but its running fairly cool at the moment so i have not gone down the water cool option. Because the PC is in a separate section of the cockpit you cannot hear it or the fans which is nice! but i do an have external temperature sensors/probes so i can see if the PC or the area its sitting in overheats and in general the more sensors and displays add to the immersion and realism which is the goal here.

I'll try get a picture of what i am talking about uploaded with more progress of the build.

[Gevurah]

Very nice pit man. Love the clean interior.

[Corleym]

Ok as promised a while ago here is a pic of my PC/hardware inside the pit:



Also check out the huge wiring mess at the back which i really need to sort out!



I am really struggling to decide if i should go for a 3 monitor setup, i have put some blanking wood the same size as my existing monitor in place for now but i am still unsure.

I completed a cheap keyboard hack to give me more buttons and functionality to play with and started wiring a few buttons in which work really well.

I also created a mock up foot pedals out of scrap wood to see how these work in game and it all seems to work fine. Its quite bodged but for now i cannot afford a decent set of pedals so this will do whilst i trial the setup/positions and enjoy using more buttons I actually started using these pedals for other games to give me buttons to use and its really cool!