tuomas

Yeah, ideally I'd love to get just encoders with fewer detents, thus having fewer pulses. 72 pulses for radio knobs is pretty insane anyway :) Thanks for the clarification, it was pretty much what I assumed too. I'll try looking for something that has fewer detents. The beauty of using encoders directly is that one doesnt really need any extra hardware in addition to the joystick interface. //Tuomas

You are confusing a bit here. You can use phase-shifted rotaries directly with a joystick card and only FSUIPC - the advanced documentation explains how to do this. It requires you to add conditional settings in your fsuipc.ini and it is not very simple to do, but possible. http://www.ELFA.se carries the ALPS sensor, elfa part number 35-884-64 for example. This has 3 contacts, A, GND and B. Turning left, gives pulses between GND and A, turning right gives pulses between GND and B. Thus this is easy to wire into a joystick card or something and assign the function to FSUIPC. But the original poster has the same problem as we do as well. There are several cheap joystick cards available (usbaxis from opencockpits.com being one) that would make a very nice basic solution for an autopilot panel or radio console etc.. Our problem is, the encoders do work, they produce pulses and work fine, when turned very slowly. But if one turns them at "normal" speed to tune radios etc, fsuipc does not keep up with it. We tried to set the refresh to a very fast value, but it still was not fast enough, and it started to affect fs frame rate also. Are we doing something wrong, or is there a practical limit, for example how many pulses the switch should give per turn in order to FSUIPC to keep up with the speed? My alps'es have 36 pulses per rotation which is a lot. Turning fast probably just floods the input line with signals.. //Tuomas

Simboards is probably http://www.flightdecktechnology.com/ (appears to be down right now) - and yes, it's their software and their support you should ask questions from, since that's where you put your money into as well :) How are you liking the hardware by the way? The software looks very nice from what I tested it quickly without hardware. The price is a bit steep for me, but it looked quite polished. //Tuomas

You need fsconv by Nico Kaan - Level-D uses their own set of offsets not compatible with the ones in FSUIPC by default. http://home.planet.nl/~nwkaan/ Click FSCONV - but prepare to study things quite a bit - you still need to play with offsets, fsconv just gives you bunch more that work in LDS. //Tuomas

Chris, build a small 5-axis control using the USBAxis card from http://www.opencockpits.com and 5 slider pots. You can have a bunch of buttons too. Get a small slim aluminium box from an electronics store and cut holes for the sliders on top - basically it could look like a small audio mixer table, with some buttons. Then map one or two of the sliders for throttle and whatever you need. 5 axis is quite useful and it all connects with just USB without extra drivers needed. You can make it look REALLY nice if you have the top panel done with FrontDesign (http://www.schaeffer-ag.de / frontpanelexpress.com) - you can have the holes precision-cut for the buttons and potentiometer sliders. And it can have engraved text legends and such. It'd look very pro, not so geeky.. :) //Tuomas

This also is quite close to what Enrico is working on the Project Magenta GA panel. http://www.projectmagenta.com //Tuomas

For FS2002 there was Thermiek (http://www.fszwever.com/thermiek/thermiek.html) which created those BGL's for you, but I am not sure if it works for FS2004. Of course another idea is to try SilentWings etc - a sailplane sim which supposedly is pretty good too. http://www.silentwings.no //Tuomas

Ugh, that application on the palm pilot has to be the ugliest GPS app user interface I have ever seen. Who on earth came up with those oval shapes? :) //T

Couldnt you use WideView with the gauges on *master* PC, with a super small visual 3D view so it doesnt eat much cpu, with most visual options set to zero (I think one has to have one visual view open) - and use WideView *slaves* for the real visual view? This way your master pc runs the gauges and slaves the outside view? Isn't this what you are looking after? Wouldnt this work? //Tuomas

Yep. http://www.schaeffer-ag.de - pretty good tool they have :) Well, it fits just barely :) The switches are Bourns rotary encoders on the pcboard that have a hole through them: And I have them on the pcboard, epoxy glued a 5mm brass tube on the hole. Then there is a regular encoder with a pushbutton behind, using a 3mm brass rod as a shaft, that goes through the tube. It's crazy, but it's awesome too to actually see it starting to work.. At least the Reality XP GPS has an option to copy the GNS flight plan to the default GPS on FS. I dont know much about that yet though. //Tuomas

The RealityXP GPS is a *fs2004 gauge* - thus is has to be in the same PC. http://www.reality-xp.com The screen is a small 5" LCD (originally manufactured for the Sony Playstation ONE, driven from the TV out of my videocard - as a second monitor in Windows) - the GPS gauge panel is undocked and moved to the LCD screen and scaled to the full size. //T

This is not a real Garmin, but my "mockup" panel - a front panel that has the Reality XP garmin gauge running in a small LCD screen. //Tuomas

By the way, I luckily found the document. Pete, I sent you a private message . It's pretty awesome how cool things can be achieved with a silly €50 game.. If the GPSMap 396 wasnt so abysmally expensive, it'd be fun to think about supporting the NEXRAD weather stuff and METAR information and the traffic display data sent from FS.. :) But then again, one can use the nice GNS530 gauge from RealityXP and build a frontpanel bezel for it using a small LCD screen and some buttons and.. blam! I must be insane to tinker with stuff like this... :shock: 8) //Tuomas

This should get you at least somewhere - though it supports only text-displays connected to the parallel port and using the Hitachi chip. But still, something. And very nice. http://www.mikkila.org/fsbus/lcd //Tuomas

Yep, only the aviation gps'es have the protocol support. //Tuomas