Financing Some Tools
Although this is a little back lit, the three pieces of equipment that you see in this picture were all paid for by proceeds from Steemit. The top right is a soldering / rework rig that I really love. It comes up to temperature in about 25 seconds. I love it. It came with a selection of tips and be used to rework/solder SMDs. Or know as surface mount devices.
Just below the soldering station is an older used oscilloscope that is just fine for my needs. I had to buy test leads separate. Overall it was a good deal and allows me to do a lot on a tight budget.
Above the o-scope and to the left of the soldering station is on variable voltage power supply. It supplies voltage from 2.5 to 12v. This is pretty much perfect for all of the work that I do. It has a companion that is not shown. It was sort of a 2 for one sales price so I could not pass it up. Along with that I bought an Arduino Mega for this project.
I also picked up two 20 character by 4 line LCD displays.
In addition to this I got 10 rotary encoders to make the controls for the radio stack and the main autopilot controls. For hook up wire at first I tried to use computer cable that was much to brittle and it did not work out very well. So I took an old USB extension cable and stripped a ton of it off to make the hook up wire. Each rotary encoder has 5 connections the LCD has 4 and the 4 switches. This does not sound like that many but I will tell you that it too me days to get it all soldered and wired.
Thankfully the folks at already had a module for X-plane 11 so it made it much of a faster project than having to write my own. As you can see there are a few things that need to do yet like putting knobs on the rotary encoders. And a nice coating of paint labels would not hurt.
Normally to buy this much outside gear would cost nearly 400 bucks or more. I did the whole thing for under 40!
Your Support is Appreciated
Thank you to all of those who have been such loyal supporters. It has been years since I made any electronic stuff and being able to do both hobbies at once was very gratifying. Your generous endorsement allowed me to do it. Please consider both up voting this article and/ or resteam it. Special thanks goes out to @jackstep for helping me on the project
I have also used arduinos for interfacing to my sim.