Intro: Right well it's finally time to make a post about my mega-project SimPit on here because it's now in a usable state. There's a couple of discords I hang around in that may have come across some of this before, but I'm going to put up the thread here now to show the wider world and discuss some of the things I've used to make this work. Those of you who've been around the flightsimpit world will recognise some of this courtesy of designs adapted from TheWarthogProject, an Aussie with an amazing A-10 simpit. Hopefully I'll be able to throw in any pitfalls I've come across (more like chasms) in my mission to make SC work in such a rediculous way. You may bump into me in game as xMrFishx or in Twitch as fishathome. Here's a couple of photos of what it's like as of Sept 22. It's still very work-in-progress. Other authors note: I'm doing this from memory, there may be some mistakes (!) Description: So here's the important bits about the projection screen and stuff. There's probably bits missing but these are the bits that either matter, or people are going to ask about. The screen is massive. It's very hard to describe just how massive it is. Imagine your big TV, then sit right up against it. It's bigger than that. If I sit in the middle, it fills beyond my perhipheral vision all the way round. The PC is an Ebay/Amazon Warehouse bargain hunt and it works perfectly (except the GPU was a temporary transplant). It was probably the cheapest part of this whole thing. The license dongle for Fly Elise software was frustratingly expensive. The projectors are also the cheapest short throw projectors I could Ebay (from a reputable manufacturer - there's a lot of very questionable listings on amazon). I wanted something that actually broadly met the advertising specs for as little as possible. Screen stats: 2.4m diameter. 1.2m height. 0.6m height off floor. Projectors (~£300 each): 3x Acer H6517ST short throw 1080p 60Hz Screen Materials: 18mm MDF ribs 2mm White hardboard sheets 24mm wood batons Peripherals: 2x T16000 HOSAS Logitech G903 mouse Tobii Eyetracker 5 1080p 14" freestanding display Steelseries wireless headset Software: Windows 11 Fly-Elise Immersive Display Pro Ultimate Fly-Elise Immersive Calibration Pro PC: Intel i3 12100F RTX 3070ti 64 GB RAM 500GB NVME storage NVidia Surround resolution (as seen by Windows): (19201080) (x3) = 5760 1080. Compensated resolution (adjusted for overlap): 3840*1080. Construction: Right so this has been a woodworking adventure. Last time I did woodworking was 20 years ago, at high school. However, I know enough to learn the rest, mostly. I made a load of photos as I went so I'll talk through those. Again, TheWarthogProject was my inspiration and reference, but I adapted the size to fit my house, which is smaller than his so I had to do a bit of work and lots of sketching circles. My screen isn't perfect. There's some sub-optimal joins where it's not perfectly flat. I may fix those one day, I may not bother. You'll see as we go. I'm gonna drop this photo in early so you can see the structure, to give some context for the construction photos below. This is not intended to be a RestOfTheOwl post. Here's one of the big sheets of MDF I brought. I got 3 of them, because I totally miscalculated how much space I would need for cutting the curved ribs as I thought I'd be cutting them as 45 degree pieces from the longest edge. Because maths and better fitting, I actually needed just over one of these boards to do the entire stack of ribs, and that includes the few practise cuts I made a total mess of. The Cutting Jig First things first, I needed to be able to cut out 10x 45 degree radius pieces. This is to make the curved screen in sections. In order to move it around, I decided to make it as a 90 degree piece and a 125 degree piece. Anything larger was probably unmovable on my own when complete. In order to cut the curves, I needed a way of cutting circular pieces and this means a jig. What I did was cut a large rectangular section that was longer than the circle radius and then make a fixture for the router and two holes for the pivot point representing the centre of the circle. Also note, I had to measure the outer and inner cutting poisition relative to centre of the router cutting centre. There was a lot of measure-three-times-cut-eleven cockups as I reminded myself to actually get it right. Other things I ran into. 18mm MDF is 1) heavy AF. The sheets I brought, I had to drag around. I could barely move them. 2) 18mm! This is fine for router sitting on one piece, but if you sit the router ontop of a jig made of 18mm MDF, you run into the problem where the router's cut depth isn't deep enough. With a bit of bad toolsmanship I made the router bit hold into the router chuck without working its way loose and barely cut deep enough. I couldn't get longer router bits. 3) Dust. oh god the dust. I sometimes forgot to shut the house doors. There was dust for days. I think there's -still- dust in here. I did wear a dust mask and glasses. PPE is your friend. PPE does not stop dust going into your house if you leave the doors open. 4) Cut MDF in multiple cuts. I did it in 3 passes because it seemed to work. I am not an expert. You can tell, because I brought 18mm MDF which is so overkill, it's silly. The third picture shows how I used the jig. I would pre-drill a hole in the big sheet and then shove a screwdriver through the hole as a pivot. This worked well.