this is a DIY motion simulator I built to fly RC planes using Telemetry from the plane it replicates the real movements that the aircraft makes and it even allows you to control it using realistic flight controls combining this with fpv makes for a really immersive experience dude you're like a fighter pilot bro I feel like a fighter pilot that's so wild oh my God I am so immersed dude this is nuts and sometimes it's so immersive it's actually a little terrifying oh there you are a when we were going straight down like I'm going to die dude oh my god dude I was going I was good and then we just smed and I my mouth hurts oh my gosh over the last few years I have fallen in love with flying RC planes building a plane and seeing it Fly for the first time is so rewarding but as a pilot I still feel a little disconnected from the aircraft so my plan is to solve this with engineering by taking the Telemetry data from the plane in the air I should be able to make an RC feel like they're actually in the cockpit by just simulating the movements that the aircraft makes in this video I'm going to build and test this motion Sim as well as take it to flight Fest which is one of the largest RC events in the world to see what other people [Applause] think I got turned a bunch of plywood into a DIY motion Simulator for an RC plane and I got to do it all in like five weeks light fest is like next month I'm so screwed to start I broke down some plywood on my CNC router this chair is made up of two sections the base and then the upper chair thing the base is actually a pretty complex shape so is very helpful to have everything C and C cut and pre-drilled there's also no reason that this Bas should need to come apart so everything gets assembled with plenty of glue after the base is assembled I mounted the actuators these are some beefy nema23 closed loop stepper Motors and then they're mounted to a right angle 10 to1 gearbox this combination should give me almost 30 newon m of torque to turn this torque into actual movement of the chair I'm going to use this control horn which is pretty similar to what you'd see on a Servo except this one's made out of 38 aluminum this was also cut of my CNC router and I made sure to add a couple extra holes where the linkage could be attached to make everything adjustable the linkage is made up of some threaded rods and heim joints this connects the actuator to the upper chair assembly since I'm only using two actuators Each One controls its own axis the motor in the front moves the chair in the pitch axis whereas the motor on the side controls the roll axis although these motors control the actual movement of the chair most of the weight is actually supported by universal joint this makes it much easier for the actuators to move and allows them to move much faster to actually fly a plane with this I needed some controls in this case a joystick and a throttle I could just buy these but they can be a little pricey so I decided to make my own I found a model of these A10 style controls online and then resin printed it on my elu Jupiter which is just a giant resin 3D printer printing these in resin works great cuz they don't need to be structural parts and the small layer lines make it really comfortable to use after everything was printed I added some buttons in switches which are mostly just for Aesthetics but can definitely be mapped to different things in the future and then to finish everything up by printed these plates which cover up all the electronics closing everything up with some screws meant that this thing is ready for some finish and at this point we were only like 10 days away from flight Fest so I needed to be quick I rounded over some of the sharp edges and then did the minimal amount of sanding possible sanding is literally my least favorite thing to do adding some paint to this contraption definitely made it look a little less homemade and honestly I think it's starting to look pretty cool after the paint was dry I could do the final installation of electronics a lot of the work for this project was actually just the electronics in the software and honestly it's a bit of a chaotic mess I know some people will be interested in this so I'm going to quickly speedrun through how this works the plane runs an ARG pilot flight controller which transmits Telemetry data with this 900 MHz radio these data packets are received by the same radio on the ground and then are shown using Q ground control on a laptop the Telemetry packets are also forwarded to an internal UDP Port where a python script can read them and turn them into position commands for the chair those position commands are then sent over serial to a microcontroller the microcontroller converts the position demands into step and Direction signals for the actuators this allows us to actually move the chair correctly but we also need to be able to control the plane the joystick and throttle both have potentiometers which are read by a different microcontroller the position of both the joystick and the throttle are then converted to a PPM signal which goes into an elrs transmitter as a trainer signal using the buddy box mode the person with the transmitter can change whether they have control of the plane or if they want to hand off control to whoever is in the chair this system has a lot of things talking to each other and they all have to work perfectly to keep the plane in the air so will it work there's only one way to find out to test this out I fitted all the Telemetry Hardware as well as an fpv system to this plane I then had my very lovely girlfriend try to launch this but I definitely needed some more up trim because it just immediately NOS dived however by just jamming the throttle and just skidding it along the ground till it took off I was able to get it in the air we're going to try to put into a loiter here see if the GPS works okay it wants to go very fast but it is going in a circle so that's that's something it is loitering so we're going to get in the chair and then oh I need the fpv go the fpv goggles hold on it's chaos it's chaos the thing is zooming all right here we go switching back to fly by wire switching over to trainer mode oh my God I have control of the plane going try to come down in altitude this feels so cool this might make me sick all right here we go low pass coming in steep not going to lie it's actually pretty immersive it's also pretty dark out cuz we're flying in the evening so the fpv is a little hard to see but I can very clearly fly it and I feel like I'm in the plane to be honest pull up that's incredible all right one more low [Music] pass and then we'll call it a day sign crial or do I try to land it in the chair is that a bad idea all right I'm going to try to land it without seeing the plan it's kind of hard to gauge how fast you're going so that's definitely makes this challenging but overall I definitely feel in control so that's [Music] something oh God it's sketchy and we're down Telemetry last that works so well I was not expecting it to go that well that's awesome so when we got to flight Fest the first thing we did was reassemble the chair it breaks down into just a couple large pieces so this wasn't too hard there was also tons of people around that volunteered to help us out which was really awesome after booting up my laptop to check a few things and then plugging in the electronics everything should be ready to go as you can see the chair is following the movements of the plane which is exactly what we want at the last minute I did add an extra mode which allows the person in the chair to control the chair's movements with just the joystick and this proved to be actually really useful for demos all right so let's see what other people think first up is a good friend of mine Nick ree all right here with Nick ree Mr Dream flight himself what's up so he's going to try to fly this thing and we'll see how he does uh I'm very scared I have no idea how this going to go I let try it out here first all right you move the stick ground Sim mode yeah you'll seees and rolls go oh my gosh now Nick was definitely a little apprehensive about how this was going to go this is so scary but at some point we just had to try it out so we went ahead and launched a plane here we go okay we're flying we're up there is a stiff breeze oh are you flying into the wind right now yes I will uh turn us around and then I will give you control Mr re all right all right you are in steady level flight okay and you have the stick I am in control how's it feel W this is W that's so weird Okay do a right hand turn there it is very nicely done okay going into the sun it's a little hard to see let me know when I should turn you're good going straight keep going straight how's my altitude you're dropping a little more power beautiful you're doing it once we were in the air everything worked surprisingly well and after he got used to the feeling of the chair he was able to control it very comfortably and fly it around the field the other fun thing about this chair is it's really great for spectators to watch I had the fpv feed pulled up on a laptop so everyone could see what Nick sees as well as the Telemetry data and they could also give him some encouragement oh yeah let's go nikk this is nuts that's so wild oh my God we also noticed that the plane likes to turn right a lot more than it likes to turn left I think this is because the rudder was out of trim so the next time I fly this plan I should probably fix that my favorite part about this chair is the fact that a lot of the people that tried it have been flying RC planes for over 10 years but you could tell by their reactions that this was just a totally new feeling and everyone thought it was awesome so maybe this type of setup is something that'll become more common who knows what's your what's your review Nick this this gets a 10 out of 10 this is like next level that's insane I am I am immersed I am immersed I am IM I been immersed into this I am so immersed now Nick was definitely getting good at flying this thing but before before he got too motion sick I wanted to give somebody else a try luckily Peter stle was also at this event and he was busy building this monstrosity of a plane that has like 15 wings but I pulled him away from that really quickly so he could try flying this so using the buddy box system I took back control of the plane and let them switch spots in the seat I'll back yeah thank you so much good luck good luck bro you're going to need it with Peter in the chair I hand control back to him and see what he thinks do I have it Winer you ready yeah I'm ready all you whoa dude this is nuts left turn slug oh it's really sluggish going left turn left okay we're going right oh the video is so it's over the trees all right I'm turn it back I'm bringing it back this is nuts I want this but I want to do a boat on scale 1 to 10 how immersed are you uh I'm I'm pretty pretty lost in the sauce all right I'm going just going to turn right we're going right the banking action is hilarious like I love how it leans if you want to bring it in for a landing in the corn go all right I'm going to land it oh I'm I might redo my Approach I'm going to turn around re-approaching all right got throttle backing off throttle turning uh base to final all right runways in sight Landing right Landing we're down put it funny of a job dude that's awesome thank you that is insane where's the crash it's suppos take excellent job how was the L did it look pretty bad no no I just like hit the corn and did one of these I saw that now while building this motion chair I've actually been working with the flight test guys the entire time and it's been a little bit of a collaboration so while I was at flight Fest they also tried it out their reactions to feeling the true motions of an RC plane were awesome and for Josh's full reaction make sure you check out the video on their Channel towards the end of the weekend Stefan from flight test also tried out the chair and he was going to fly it in combat combat is an event pretty much only done at flight Fest where there's hundreds of RC planes in the air all at once and they try to take each other out last man standing wins and this year the giant RC plane that Peter Built as well as this crazy spinning contraption that Nick built were also in the event Stefan's goal was to use the motion Sim imator to fly this ft twin otter and then use the fpv system to Target one of the big planes and take it out right as combat began we launched the RC plane and then I handed the controls over to Stephan oh my gosh all right in the air we're in the air dude I see it bro you want control I'll bring you around and give you control all right 2 one you oh man I can't see anything oh come on back I'm I'm out I'm going out I'm off I'm off all right you're over the trees dude so far over the trees oh my gosh oh my God through the tree dude I landed in a tree oh my god oh my god dude I was going in I was good and then we just fed and I my mouth hurts oh my gosh I'm in I'm in the tallest tree so far away it is so far out there I can't even I don't know where I'm at I felt like I was going down in a real airplane now while we were doing this we had a lot of radio issues and that almost took these planes down a couple different times however this instance I think is actually from stalling the plane I can't reiterate enough how different flying in this chair feels from just flying with a normal transmitter your instinct is just to pull back on the stick and you have no frame or reference for how fast going this makes it super easy to stall planes now luckily even though this plane was way off in a tree we were still getting Telemetry data from it this meant we had the GPS coordinates of the plane and also the elevation said 0o ft so very likely it was on the ground and luckily one of the volunteers offered to give us a ride on a golf cart we're going to recover the plane hopefully fingers crossed it says it's at zero ft so it might be on the ground hopefully if not it might be the trees playing now I totally forget this guy's name which I feel really bad about but he was awesome and huge shout out to him it was like 95° out and he really saved us by like driving us into the woods with this golf cart we're exploring the capabilities of this golf cart right in theory it should be like right in this area I'll try to spin the motors up everybody listen oh wait I hear beeping we're going to find this thing poison ivys for the week all right we're hunting for it in the Woods I hear it oh there it is there it is on the ground honestly almost entirely in one piece dude look at that safe and sound she might even fly again there's Thorns everywhere we got it honestly very little damage I uh I am pleasantly surprised after the plane was recovered we did a little bit more flying off camera and then checked out some of the other awesome builds that were going on Nick built this giant spinning Contraption which was just unbelievable to see in person so definitely check out his channel there was a guy named Carl and a guy named MV who I'd never even met before but they were awesome and gave us a helping hand all weekend going forward I'd really like to get more people in this chair to test it out cuz it's genuinely a really cool experience so let me know what you want to see next there's no reason we couldn't hook this thing up to a boat or an RC car or something like that so let me know what you guys think would be cool make sure you subscribe for more projects like this and I'll see you guys in the next one [Music]