The history of my flight sim building started in 2003, when while living at home I came across Michael and David Lehkamp’s fantastic Delta Flight simulator project they were working on. That pretty much lit the fire in my engines for wanting to build a simulator.

I had flown a few times with a friend of my brothers, and enjoyed going to Magic Edge in San Jose when I would drive up there, so I think flying and sims have been in my blood for quite some time.

My first attempt at a sim was spontaneous to say the least. After talking with Michael Lehkamp on the phone, I spent over $1,000 dollars and ordered all the EPIC interface cards. I contacted Peter Cos at Flight Deck Solutions, and ordered the Boeing 747 MIP panels.

Then I contacted Ted Deller at CIS and ordered his easy setup wiring cards. 2 weeks later I had this

massive amount of wired MCP panel setup, MIP setup in a captains only configuration and this enormous box taking up pretty much all of my bedroom. (And the Project Magenta you see there was photoshopped in, so I could get a feel for how it would look!)

The CH yoke worked, as did FS2004. I bought the Boeing Glass Cockpit software from Project Magenta and was off! The MCP and EFIS were pretty, and they lit up, but were not functional.

I tried desperately to figure out how to program these EPIC cards. Michael Lehkamp had emailed me some programming code of his to modify. We tried. I even got my brother, who is a developer, to call Ralph! But alas, the programming (And trying to understand Ralph’s techno babble in between watching TV with his wife) pretty much ended my ability to have a jet sim.

So then I got married and moved into our apartment with my wife. Space certainly wasn’t as abundant, so I took the parts of the sim I had and adapted them to fit. The sim bug was still in me and I even started to build a crazy center console just so I could have something that looked half way like a jet sim.

And then soon after that, my wife became pregnant!  Of course, in between work and the weekly visits to the doctor, I still wanted that sim. And lets face it, when your wife is tired and sacked out on the couch sleeping, there isn’t too much more you can do to occupy your time! That is when I came across SimKits.

These guys basically make a controller board that connected to your computer via USB. From there, they had analog gauges you could buy and those would plug in with a ribbon. NO SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING REQUIRED, WOW!

And that is what spawned the cessna simulator. In short, the hardest part was just building and saving the money for all the parts. From 2004 until 2007 I worked on that sim. Here is a couple photos showing you the early construction and the end result.

And then around 2007, I dismantled the Cessna sim. Our child was continuing to grow and I spent time just doing other things.

Then in early 2009, our child, now four, saw an old movie in 2006 of her flying the cessna sim. She came to me and said “Daddy, I want to fly the airplane.” Well, I can’t say no to my child now can I!

I certainly had all the parts left over, and I could have built another cessna sim. But I really wanted to go back and try the jet sim again.

This now, six years after my first attempt. I checked out Flight Deck Solutions and, thank you Peter Cos! FDS had full on interface hardware called SYS cards for pretty much everything! What I loved about the plug and play SimKits had offered, is now fully available for your entire jet sim using interfaceIT!

Overhead, no problem. MIP panels, no problem. Throttle, center console, no problem. Wire your hardware to their SYS cards, and the card to your computer via USB. Open interfaceIT, find the input (switch) or output (LED) automatically, add in the preprogrammed xml file. FSUIPC info or other assorted programming and thats it! Done.

Wow finally! EASY PROGRAMMING! And it all works with Project Magenta!

So I’ve started building my dream airliner, the Boeing 737NG-800, the king of the short haulers!

My first attempt at a home built MIP (And speaker box pedestal to boot!)

After I saved up some cash, I purchased over time the FDS MIP, CDU Bay and Glare Shield. I added a projector and a 28″ LCD for a software overhead.

Captain Riggins below testing out some new tweaks to the sim!

And that is pretty much the history of my sim building experience! Definitely check out the sim sites section for all the useful information I have gathered over the years.

Blue Skies!

Captain Matt Riggins
My737Sim Airlines
VATSIM Pilot, USA-W
Pilot ID: 908853
My737Sim Multiplayer Server ID: Capt Riggins