CUSTOM INSTRUMENT PANELS
SimSamurai’s greatest asset is our core principle of design flexibility for flight simulator instrument panels. We now offer digital design files of any panel shown for just $24 or can quickly custom design anything you have in mind for an added $12. Yes..wow!
If you purchase the panel set along with a Cockpit Plan Set purchase you will see that we also give you a price break for the panel add-on and optional customizations. Building a full SimSamurai cockpit has never been more affordable.
With your purchase you are buying a single user license to create 1 single instrument panel for use in your personal home cockpit. You can use the files to attempt to cut the panel yourself or will need to find a fabricator in your city that can cut one for you out of aluminum or composite material of your choice. This DIY option helps you save on our costs of materials, labor, and shipping. A fabricator would typically charge you a set up fee of at least $80 to $100 so using our low cost file instantly saves you money in the process and gives you a professional quality design to start making the cockpit you’ve always wanted.
Or as always, if you do not wish to fabricate a panel locally we can always build anything for you.
Why Fly SimSamurai?
All of our stock / default panel designs are created to house a wide variety of equipment from the most well-known “off the shelf” flight simulator control hardware and sim avionics manufacturers and or can use a wide variety of our in-house “full digital display” solutions which we widely employ to help people save money.
For example, just a single hardware gauge or control unit that is standard home consumer “gaming” type equipment routinely costs at least $150 or more and pro-level equipment usually starts at double that cost for even just a single gauge like a heading indicator or radio tuner unit. Comparatively for that same price you can buy a 24″ touchscreen display and various software that performs the same exact function, just without the tactile and or 3D like appearance. Go figure!
Our point here is that the end results for training are the exact same but you will pay literally 100% more per each hardware item to do the exact same thing! And in addition to these high costs the main disadvantage is that you immediately restrict yourself to flying just one aircraft type. Lastly, when building any “hardware only” type panel, the computer used is fully restricted to serve the panel and or cockpit and so it cannot be used for any other daily computing functions. Just ask any of those deep pocket 737 home cockpit builders about this. They probably use a laptop or their phone for email because they certainly can’t use their computer(s) for anything else!
This is why in 2005 SimSamurai set a new standard for affordable flight simulation by using large displays that can still provide 1:1 scale accuracy for software based gauges and avionics while also allowing you to continue using your simulator for all other daily functions such as home and office computing and even playing any other games. And who doesn’t want to play some of the great game titles out these days! Flight simulation is great but it certainly shouldn’t limit all the other possible uses of a computer!
Because computers are now so expensive, especially video cards, it only makes sense to build a simulator around a PC that can be used for every other purpose in addition to flight training. Whether this be at home, in a school, or even a formal training environment, the primary use of software combined with touchscreen technology is the ultimate flexible solution and is by far the most cost effective when compared to costs of all gauge and avionics hardware.
Regardless, whether you still want a custom panel for full hardware implementation or wish to use any of our unique hybrid solutions we can offer any design shown or can quickly create any custom panel design based on your needs and goals. If you don’t see what you want,…contact us!
Most importantly, most every instrument panel set we offer is made to fit into any of the different cockpit shells we offer. This “cross platform approach” allows our customers a much greater ease of upgrade-ability if they ever desire to switch from one SimSamurai cockpit platform to another while still desiring to keep the instrument panel. For example, our DK desk series of instrument panels are intentionally the same exact width as the dual seat GA series cockpits (CS-1, CS-2, etc) and therefore these panels are easily interchangeable. This means any single seat DK-1, DK-2, or DK-X panel can be interchanged and they will also instantly fit into a CS-1, CS-2, or HX-1 cockpit shell and vice versa. Likewise, if you ever wanted to use a CS-1 panel in any of the DK “sim desks” you can easily do so! Only the DCP panels, the CV-1 Chariot and the AirlinerX are unique to themselves in size and width.
It has taken us many years of design refinements to offer what we feel are the most thoughtful and intuitive platforms for cost-effective yet comprehensive flight simulation training.
Since our beginning we chose to employ the use of larger sized LCDs for the instrument panel because we saw how quickly both general and commercial aviation were moving full steam ahead into a new age of the “glass cockpit” most of which is now becoming large LCD touchscreens. Even the modern Garmin units such as the G1000 and GNS 530 have been eclipsed by newer touchscreen based hardware such as the Garmin GTN 650 / 750. If you build a panel based just on one type..you won’t be able to train on the other!
By staying in the realm of pure software based avionics in simulation and by sticking to a mantra of implementing more software solutions than hardware, it truly offers the customer the greatest ability learn all of the many various types of avionics in today’s cockpits as well the ability to use your simulator to fly multiple types of aircraft.
In case you’re looking for one word.. it’s called freedom!
When flying your panel using various software and hardware, either from us or other vendors to provide the aircraft instrumentation, our hybrid approach yields the greatest flexibility without ever sacrificing realism unless you are still stuck the mindset that your fingers must always be set on a knob instead of a flat surface. But by using a more modern approach you can train in a Cessna 172 for one hour, then fly a twin prop or regional jet the next, all while checking email between flights!
To complete our hybrid approach of flight simulation we offer a variety of “2D-VIP” (Two Dimensional Virtual Instrument Panels) which are software based solutions for Lockheed Martin’s Prepar3D. Now that Prepar3D v4 has matured we will begin to offer many more 2D virtual panel sets for the flight sim community. Check out the 2D-VIP Page for more details.
Furthermore, our panel design chapter in our now famous UGTAFS tech manual actually details the exact methods we use for designing these “VIPs” so that you too can build as many sets as you like in the future and continue to build upon what we have already established for the flight simulator community over the past decade. We chose to do this and “giveaway the keys” because each panel set takes time, sometimes weeks to complete, and because there are literally thousands of aircraft that people may want to fly. We simply cannot build every virtual panel set for you but we can give you all of the tools to do so! The UGTAFS explains every step in great detail!
SimSamurai is one of very few companies who still revere and cherish this older style of software based 2D instrumentation. It was the norm for many years but as of 2012 most all sim aircraft developers had fully switched over to the “3D Virtual Cockpit” style of simulation which started with FS2002. Unfortunately though, they do not provide the professional level of training that most real world pilots require. For formal procedural training all gauges need to be in true 1:1 scale and not have an entire cockpit stuffed into view. But in sticking with a hybrid solution that is mainly monitor based as we do, it still allows you to fly all those 3D cockpits for a best of both worlds experience.
Even as virtual reality is becoming more popular, it too has many large hurdles to overcome with cost of equipment, graphics quality, low frame rates, and things such as this before it can ever be a high quality professional training tool. Therefore having a wide variety of large 1:1 scale 2D panel sets that reflect every nuance of a real aircraft is still the best training solution and will remain so indefinitely.
By being able to implement an unlimited number of “2D-VIP” panel sets makes your simulator have endless possibilities! So whether you choose to build your own panel, buy a panel from us, buy just the 2D-VIP software sets from us, or even by items from other vendors that can work together with our instrument panels, we hope you see how SimSamurai gives you the best choices for ultimate flexibility.
