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

gpsout.ini in FS9 Modules-folder: [GPSout] Sentences=AV400 Interval=1000 Port=COM1 Speed=9600 (if you have it on COM1) On the GPS you need to do two things: [*]In the INTERFACE -setting on the config, set it to "Aviation IN" [*]You need to set it to SIMULATOR MODE If still in doubt, see the Garmin manual as on how to do those things. //Tuomas

It will not drop if you add *instrument panels* to the other screens. Just one 3D *outside view* per PC, but you can have many *panels* with 2D gauges just fine. You need to run in windowed mode though, but just adjust your screen to get the titlebar off the top edge... :) I get good FPS with my setup. Geforce4 on "scenery view" and a Matrox Mystique PCI for the instrument panel on the picture below: //Tuomas

Okay, this is good to know. The log shows stuff like: (numbers, timestamp I guess) Elevator input=NNNN1 calibrated to NNNN2 And NNNN1 is roughly twice the calibrated value, so this is definitely my problem. But does this mean the calibration comes from FSUIPC (I have disabled the axis calibration stuff) or does it come from FS itself? Update: Solved - So, I had a bunch of the joystick sections on my FS9.cfg - things like "aileron_something=127" (I have this on the other computer, so I dont remember it exactly) - but since I dont have joysticks right now, I just cut those out, saved the config without them and started FS again. And it appears to be solved. So some calibration was still haunting me from there, even though the corresponding joystick never was plugged in.. Go figure. Anyway, it's good to know this kind of thing can cause problems. Thanks for the hints, Pete, and good night! :) //Tuomas

Ah yes. My typo. Yes. FS2004. I think I know. I *dont have any joysticks* so there are no FS's calibrations, sensitivities or null zones defined at all. So there's nothing happening *before* setting the value. I'd probably need to have a dummy joystick in place to get those? But since my control stick is not a joystick at all, as far as windows is concerned, I cannot set the null zones to it. I wonder if the only possibility is to look into fs9.cfg to see if that has some default sensitivity settings, and if not, then just swap my controls so that the primary controls go via the joystick card, and the throttles go via the iocards master card. It's easy to do and not a hassle, but this case was pretty interesting. I wonder how many add-on planes break if you remove joysticks btw? Keyboard controlling works okay though, which is strange. I'll try logging tomorrow. How does the PFC flight console work btw, does it also put all data through something else than the joystick interface, even the yoke? Would it have the same problem if you remove your real joysticks? No worries, no such nintendos my cockpit ;) You'd be best off using these for throttle control so that the AutoThrottle action can still override as needed. Interesting. This should be useful for my friends who are building an autothrottle also at some point for their setup. Yep. This is pretty interesting stuff (and one could do this easily with the SIOC programming language of iocards (it's pretty wacky language with number-named variables and other fun quirks, but it's pretty awesome tool for making logic like that on a home simulator.. :) My setup is a light twin though, I havent decided whether I want an autopilot yet. //Tuomas

Hi Pete! :) Been a while, but I've been building my own flight controls and setup.. My setup uses the IOCards hardware from opencockpits.com - basically, the potentiometers are connected to the hardware board, and with the software, I send the values directly to FSUIPC addresses. This is not a joystick from windows' perspective. Stuff gets written to FSUIPC directly. Like, aileron and elevator potentiometer values is mapped to BB6 and BB8 etc. But turns out I have a problem now: The controlling works right. But it is a lot like when you set "sensitivity" to very low in FS in the joystick options. I can see from the iocards monitoring software that both fsuipc variables seem to move the full range (-16383 to 16383) - but the control surfaces in FS do not move much. Thus control sensitivity is very low. I'd change the sensitivity - but there is no way to do it as far as I know. Also I cannot use fsuipc's axis curves etc, since this is not a joystick. Do you know any solution to this? It seems like the axis'es do not move the controls to full deflection, but rather default to some "low sensitivity" mode? I might need to use a usb joystick interface for the primary flight controls, and do the throttles etc via iocards, since those do not have this problem. But it would be interesting to know what causes this problem, and have others faced the same thing? When one writes 16383 to the offset, shouldnt the flight control surface get a full deflection or not, or am I missing something here? Best, //Tuomas

Or course you can just add a pci videocard (or use the 2nd output probably on your primary) to display the gauges on an undocked window. //Tuomas

You can install a second videocard (Matrox PCI cards seem to work okay) and use that with a second monitor on the *same PC*. Then you can undock the panel and move it to the second monitor while the main screen is for outside view. No need to use several PC's for that. Also many videocards these days have "dual head" - two outputs that you can use separately. Only one usually is usable as a "primary" and thus can be 3D-accelerated ("outside view") but the other works fine as a 2D-screen (gauges). //Tuomas

Yeah. iQue seems radically different from their other gps'es since it's a PDA with a GPS device and just PDA software that makes it a GPS. So I guess there is no global "Use Aviation IN protocol" -setting? The GPSMap 196 I have works great, but its black and white and doesnt make the gizmo-nintendo-factor that high :) - it's still a great GPS though. And makes a good training method to use it on the sim rather than poking it in the air when I should be looking out of the windows for traffic :) //Tuomas

Yep. But usually putting regular 2D panels on the other monitor does not have a big hit on the framerate, I do it and it is completely reasonable. It's a bit faster even since it does not need to mask the "window frames" of the panel over the scenery display. Using a Geforce for scenery and a Matrox Mystique PCI for my instrument panel. //Tuomas

The NMEA IN usually means the possibility to input waypoints and routes into the unit from your computer, thats part of the protocol. I guess some units also accept position data, like the Lowrance ones seem to - at least some people seem to report that the emulator software does work with a loop cable. //Tuomas