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Flight simulator for our museum!

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Brass_Machine:
That's a lot of buttons, knobs and switches!

Wouldn't know what to do with them. Looks cool tho

Eric

John Hill:
Thanks for the comments, most of the knobs and switches can be ignored!

John Hill:
Another bit made for the simulator...


This device meets a few requirements at our museum the most significant is that it starts the simulator when the museum lights are turned on and has the simulator PC do an orderly shut down when the lights are turned off!  It also starts the various components of the simulator in a sequential fashion so avoiding the heavy current rush of many switch mode power supplies switching on at once.

The device is controlled by an Aduino which is an open-source microcontroller board based on the ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by Arduino.cc.


In the dead state the mains input is blocked by an open relay while the circuit from the museum lights is connected to the Arduino.

When the lights come on the Arduino starts and immediately closes the mains relay and switches the lighting circuit relay leaving the Arduino to be powered by mains. Closing the mains relay also directly powers the PC.

The switched lighting relay activates a low voltage sensor circuit (simple resistor pair) which the Arduino monitors.

The Arduino then closes up to 16 mains relays in sequence to energise the power board sockets.

The PC boots and starts the simulator.

A small program on the PC displays the state of each relay and provides a means for manually controlling each relay or control by software on the PC.

In the simulator running state all power to the Arduino and to the PC is via the closed mains relay while the state of the lighting circuit is monitored by the Arduino.

When the museum lights are switched off the loss of voltage on the lightings circuit is detected and a shutdown process begins, first the Arduino signals the program on the PC (via the USB link) which issues a shutdown Windows command.

The Arduino monitors USB voltage during the PC shutdown stage until the voltage falls indicating the PC has 'turned off' at which time the Arduino opens the mains relay isolating the entire simulator from the live mains circuit and leaving the Arduino in a state to start when the lights in the museum are next switched on.

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