How to I get LED's to light up? - An idiot's guide

[Ryan Aerospace]

Hi Pete

I'm having trouble finding information on how to get FSX to tell an I/O board to light up an LED. Using a really simple example. In a Bell 206 Jetranger, when the rotor RPM gets too low, a warning light comes on in the 2D / VC panel. When that happens, I'd like for it to light up a real LED using my I/O board. I know this sounds like the simplest thing to do but I'm just unsure of how to do it.

I'm happy to read and do the research but would love it if you could help with just the basic steps required to make this happen. Ie, do I need to have a SDK? Do I need to know C++? What's the easiest way to achieve this?

Thanks so much for your help.

Chris

Specs:

I'm using a registered version of FSUIPC 4.50 running on FSX

I have a number of I/O boards capable of lighting up LED's

[Pete Dowson]

I'm having trouble finding information on how to get FSX to tell an I/O board to light up an LED. Using a really simple example. In a Bell 206 Jetranger, when the rotor RPM gets too low, a warning light comes on in the 2D / VC panel. When that happens, I'd like for it to light up a real LED using my I/O board. I know this sounds like the simplest thing to do but I'm just unsure of how to do it.

I'm sorry, but I haven't the faintest idea. It realy isn't something I've done myself, as least not directly. And it will all depend on your I/O board and the drivers that came with it. Most kits for this sort of thing come with instructions: didn't yours?

You might find more specific help if you are doing everything yourself, maybe even including making the boards, on one of the cockpit builder's forums. There's one near here, but also try the forums at www.mycockpit.org .

Regards

Pete

[Ryan Aerospace]

Hi Pete

Thanks so much for your response. This tells me it's 'less' of an FSUIPC issue and 'more' of a hardware (and related software) issue. I'll look into the website you suggested and see how I go.

Thanks again for your prompt response.

Cheers, Chris

[P1IC]

Chris,

It is totally do-able! Obviously, since all of these third-party hardware developers manage it.

What Pete is saying, I think, is that FSUIPC doesn't support the lighting up of LEDs associated with the FS interface, unfortunately. In other words, these annunciator states are not available to FSUIPC - otherwise they could be grabbed and output to the hardware.

I came up against exactly this problem in developing my Level D 767 cockpit, which is absolutely littered with annunciators, and the solution was in the LVLD SDK, ably assisted by Nico Kaan's FSCONV program which provides the required offsets for FSUIPC which aren't supplied in Pete's original install - but these are specific to the LEVEL D 767 product!

I guess Nico's work was only possible because of the existence of the 767 SDK, so if your addon doesn't have an SDK, you will probably never find the offsets.

You could try scanning all the data from FS, made available in FSUIPC, using FSInterrogate (part of the FSUIPC SDK) and see if you can find the indicators in there, although I tried that with the 767 indicators and got nowhere. I just don't know enough about FSUIPC to say if that would work or not. I'm guessing, from Pete's admission of lack of experience in that area, that it might not be as simple as that! :cry:

EDIT!! I've just realised that Pete's admission was nothing to do with interrogating annunciator states using FSUIPC. Of course he knows exactly how we can do that! The issue is with your hardware, and his note posted before he selfishly left us to actually do something else for a short while :D was simply to say that he doesn't know how your hardware is set up to switch a light on! And of course FSUIPC will support the interrogation of annunciators, if the offset for the annunciator is known. Sorry, Pete! :oops:

Alistair