Decision time
After some thinking I decided against building the complete software stack from scratch. It is just too much work which will take time and I don’t want that time taken away from the flying experience. I know that I can build software and don’t have to practice on that anymore ;-)
I’m focussing on building the cockpit for the time being. I might revisit the plan when the cockpit is done, but I will have my hands full at the hardware part of it all.
For the software I will probably use Air Manager. I will need that for the instruments anyway and it also offers some sort of integration with Arduino for hardware buttons et cetera.
I’ve investigated FCUIPC today. It works really well and got it running in no time. I will spend a bit of time on it still, just to get the experience.
I received my ordered Dremmel Workstation and milling bits yesterday, so I’m ready to build my first proper hardware enclosure. It will be a radio panel that I can put on my desk to handle the radio frequencies, something the honest bothers me very much doing with a mouse in Flight Simulator. It will give me some experience in building a more complete hardware set up.
Next two weeks will be dedicated to the floor in my cellar. Not much else will be going on, apart from flying and learning VATSIM.