What you see is a glorified DIY joystick controller with a LCD ('MFD') and plenty of RGB inspired by a VF-1 (Block 6) Valkyrie of the Macross franchise.
I use it mainly to play Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, X4: Foundations and plenty of other Space Pew Pew.
It's mobile and can be stashed easily because my battlestation is, unlike most gaming rigs, also my workstation and has to move a lot. It's also frequently occupied by my kids who also love clicky buttons and compete with me for stick time :D
It's completely DIY and made on a budget (no really). It's also Work In Progress, like probably any home cockpit out there.
For the PC it's just a joystick and an additional display. The magic starts to happen when I manage to interface with the games to display live game data and adjust the blinken lights depending on the current ship telemetry.
Am I crazy? Yes, probably. It's a hobby and when Corona happened indoor hobbies became kinda a thing again ๐ค
Edith says: Should have added this from the beginning: I do foster a project website that has additional details, pictures and videos: ๐ https://SimPit.dev (yes it's slow - hold the line :P)
Videos are usually mirrored to ๐น https://tube.tchncs.de/a/bekopharm or ๐น https://www.youtube.com/@BekoPharm (pick your poison).
Additional content may be found on ๐ https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/ or on โ ๏ธ https://hackaday.io/bekopharm
Yeah Frontier really dropped the ball with game design for E:D, the ratio of grind to content is just ridiculous.
I mean it's definitely a fun game for a while and it gives space a sense of scale like nothing else, but everybody I personally know who's tried it has ended up exactly where you and I did. It's a mile wide and an inch deep, and sooner or later folks realize they're just doing the same mission, seeing the same planets, visiting the same Guardian ruins, seeing the same spaceports, again and again.
The planetary procedural generation is somehow especially disappointing. While, yes, they're all unique in a mathematical sense and the fact that it's a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy based on real astrophysics is extremely cool, once you've seen one icy lump you've seen them all; the variety of planets you can actually land on is very small, they're all barren and have no weather, no oceans or anything like that, just rock or ice. And if you're playing as an explorer the "alien life" you can scan is limited to a handful of plants that all look identical except for some minor color variation. So the fact that the topography of this particular icy lump is different from that other icy lump is lost when that's the only thing that distinguishes them
I got bored of Elite Dangerous when I remembered I don't like trucking simulators.
Anyway, No Man's Sky is more fun.
Heh, personally I enjoyed the space trucking in E:D and don't like NMS all that much. E:D's more realistic aspects like the physically modeled solar systems and their ridiculous distances, let alone the distances between stars etc etc are what drew me to it and what make NMS a bit meh for me.
A combination of NMS and E:D that's closer to E:D, with the possibility of sufficient amounts of space trucking and wandering around planets gawking at the scenery is what I'd need ๐