On Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 9:43:09 AM UTC+3, JJJ wrote:
Okay, thank you Scott, Bruce, and Jonathan for your encouraging remarks
about sims. I'll think more about that now. Can it simulate a Grob
103?

-- Minimum equipment is as large a screen as you have access to
-- and a good joystick with twist control for rudder and sufficient
-- buttons and/or levers for airbrakes, trim, quickly changing
-- the direction of view. Optional: buttons for flaps/undercarriage.
-- A lot of people (including me) use Logitech Extreme 3D Pro (about
$35)

I would definitely need a bit more investment. All I have are five
older PC's that I'm absolutely certain could not support any modern
graphics-intensive app.

Condor is actually pretty old at this point. Their site says you need a 1 GHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB video card with DirectX 7.

Of course more is better :-)

Does a decent set-up of joystick and pedals include realistic tactile
feed-back? It seems to me that would be essential in order to develop
any kind of "muscle memory". That's another reason for real pedals too.

I don't think that's important. Simple spring centering is enough. It's not like real glider controls give you steering wheel kick back from road bumps. Speed-sensitive spring force might be useful, but there are also plenty of gliders where the control forces don't change a lot (e.g. the flying tail types such as Cirrus, Janus). It doesn't hurt to be able to fly them without relying on control force as a cue.


-- At my club we have an old Cirrus cockpit with all the standard
controls
-- (stick, rudder, trim, airbrakes, tow release, undercarriage)
connected
-- to Condor, a small LCD display as the instrument panel, and a huge
-- corporate surplus projection TV for the scenery.

Now there's a thought! That sounds neat-o. My club has a Blanik L-13,
the only function of which anymore is to keep its trailer from blowing
away in the wind. I should suggest to TPTB that we look into getting
a set-up like this.

Are there really computer interfaces available to connect the real
controls of a real glider to a computer? Or was it a home-built job
by some electronics engineer in your club? (If the latter, well, we
probably have that talent in our club too. One of my instructors,
for example, is a retired physicist/programmer.) And can Condor
interface to all that?

All mature PC flight SIM programs (e.g. Condor, MS FS, XPLane) can interface to external controls and instruments. Usually via a serial ("COM") port, or simulated serial port over USB.

A $25 Arduino Uno has six analogue inputs (converts a voltage between 0 and 5V to a number from 0 - 1023) and a dozen digital inputs/outputs to read simple switches. It can talk to a connected PC by USB serial. It's easy to program, even for someone who has never dealt with microcontollers before. Just read the inputs and send to the PC in the correct format 10 or 20 times a second.

For me, the mechanical part is the hard part! Finding a way to connect linear or rotary potentiometers to the aircraft controls, and centering springs to give some feedback.

If you don't want to take the time to DIY, someone on this group is selling a ready-to-go setup, though without a real glider cockpit:

http://www.gliderbooks.com/training-sim.html