Cornell Student Builds a Realistic Flight Simulator with a PIC32 and Google Earth

Anyone who has ever played a flight simulator knows that realistic flight controls are incredibly important for a faithful reproduction of the flying experience. There are, of course, commercial controllers designed specifically for flight sims, but sometimes you want something a little more custom. That’s what Cornell student Sheila Balu built for her student project, using a PIC32 microcontroller and Google Earth.

Sheila’s build features all of the flight controls required for a realistic experience, including a joystick for pitch and roll, foot pedals for rudder yaw, foot switches for brakes, and switches for flaps and landing gear. An IMU (inertial measurement unit) on the joystick detects the stick’s position, and the other controls appear to be simple binary switches. Those are all connected to a PIC32 microcontroller that sends control inputs to a computer running her custom-made flight simulator.

That flight simulator is written in Python, and runs within Google Earth. Pilots can choose a plane and which airport they’d like to depart from, and the software will place them on the runway. Then, using the custom controller, they can take off and fly around a true representation of the world. The frame rate and movement looks surprisingly smooth. As Sheila demonstrates, however, actually flying can be pretty tricky, but that’s to be expected with a realistic simulator like this. We think you get an A+, Sheila!