Urgent! Do the trim functions (eg. in the left panel of the F-16) work in the sim?
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Hello,
I’m building my pit at the moment and now I put in all the switches and dials into my different throttle system. Want to make the second trimming of the side panel, too. As far as I understood, pilots use it to compensate erratic loading or in case of an emergency. Also it seems to be the only way for yaw trimming. For normal pitch and roll trim pilots use the trim switch on the HOTAS, as far as I understood.
Do these side panel trims function in bms 4.33.1? Are they analog axis or keypresses?
Many, many thanks in advance!
Yours Viper
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They do function. They should be binary inputs, not axes. You should test their function in flight via keyboard input to their respective callbacks to verify behavior.
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Frederf, thanks so much!!!
I have pots that could generate binary inputs. If the trims functinable I will implement them. Otherwise there hasn’t been a need for them. So I had them connected to other functions.
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Hi, sorry to correct you. They could be set as potentiometer axis. Actually it is the best way to do it because as keys they are a little buggy.
You could get more info on viperpits.org
Cheers -
actually they are motorized pots
in BMS they can be used as regular pots (but no needle movement according to stick trims) or motorized pots (much harder to implement)
but yes they do work fine, been using them in my pit for ages -
I have a couple of these motor pots for use in my MAN TRIM panel -
If you decide to go this way, make sure you get linear taper ones and not the logarithmic (audio) taper ones. One thing that is convenient about these is that being stereo pots they are two channel - so you can use the TRIM hat to drive the pot and take that output to drive the TRIM hat callback well as use the other channel to drive the manual signal callback and the two will remain synched (though you should probably mask one while the other is being invoked - I haven’t gotten that far in my build yet). This makes it easier to implement simulated failure modes - like TRIM hat not functioning, manual input required…at least that’s my approach.
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I have motopots too but yet no idea in how to drive the motor through BMS. I had the idea to make a hybrid with a servo and see if it works but I don’t wanna burn them…
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On the “fly” I can think of a couple of ways to implement using Pokeys or Arduino…one way being to read the TRIM states out of shared memory and use those to drive the motors. That way the TRIM hat will work as TRIM, but if the sim fails the TRIM hat you can still set the output to change the TRIM state manually - in this case you’d also need to inhibit the drive inputs…in theory…you’d have to also read a FAIL bit and use that to set condition to disable motor drive…
Another way is to read the TRIM hat output commands/states from SM and use those the drive the motors, letting the pots set the TRIM state(s)…which is probably the best way. In this case if the sim fails the hat then presumably the inputs will be nulled, and you’d have to rotate the pot manually to set trim - which is the desired condition. And theory holding that the hat output state variables exist in shared memory….
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Hi, thanks Stevie.
I didn’t expressed myself correctly, I know how to make it work in theory even implementing the DISC switch, the problem is technically. The motor isn’t connected to the pots at all. It is a normal motor that move the axis back and ford if you change polarity. But I need a way to connect BMS memory to that simple motor according to the pot position, in order to be move when I operate the stick trimmers. That sounds like a servo to me.
Cheers -
Yeah - what I don’t know is if they are stepper motors or something else…but in any event I figure I can use an Arduino or Pokeys to drive them. Using an H-bridge?..dunno yet.
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Nice, let me know what you get
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WILCO!
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O.k.
so I will do them as axis. Makes things a lot easier. Have built the panel, but not connected the electronics yet. I have two options, one is as analog axis, the other is to connect the pots to a pcb which reads the pot and converts its position to button codes, like the antenna knobs at the cougar.My cockpit isn’t that complex as many others, cause first my budget isn’t very big and second I want to be flexible with the simulators I use. I have many old sims like the whole Jane’s series and other stuff, too (about nearly 600 collected over many, many years). Not all of them will be used. I am a frenetic collector of simulations and have nearly all since 1988. Not only flightsims, all kind of combat sims and a lot civil stuff too, like racing games etc.
Many of the better old simulations, like the Jane’s stuff, I still want to use. That’s why there is a second PC in the pit just to fly those old sims. Was about a year of work to get them running with a dual-core 3ghz cpu on an asrock mainboard. Some like Janes USAF run with DirectX and a Geforce 6800GT AGP, others like the Longbow Anthology make use of nglide under Win98! (completely new resolutions are possible - a great advantage over the old 640x480) and others again like the Novalogic F-16, Mig-29 etc. use the Voodoo 2 SLI (they don’t really like nglide - too many glitches and bugs) on this board. There are not many options for a feedback from those old sims to the cockpit.
The first PC, which drives the newer stuff isn’t a beast as well. Just two Geforce GTX 680 in SLi with an old AMD 1100T six core cpu. The third PC is the cockpits brain. It’s a AMD 965 with an ATi Radeon 7770 HD. It’s only purpose is to display the MFD’s and the gauges, as well as send all the inputs of the pit to the other PC’s.
I use only the three MFD’s, some gauges (dependent on the simulator in use) and some LED’s which simply put to the circuit for the displays in the pit. So gear down, three green LED’s light up. If there is a malfunction with the gear simulated in the sim, my cockpit gives wrong information, cause no callback from the sim exists. At the moment I could live with that. Maybe at a later time I will create things more detailed. As you all know, such a project is never really finished
My focus was to simulate more types of aircraft, so I had to compromise many, many things. The other fact is, that my budget doesn’t allow such great things you could buy at the sim-stores. It has to be relatively cheap. Even if you built the things by your own, some of the parts are very expensive.
Then I had tons of old hardware, remained from my first project decades ago. I don’t want to throw them away, so I decided to tweak the things a bit, but this makes the building not easier.
Have posteted some pics here, so you could see which level of “realism” my pit is. There are a lot of much better pits out there, but I’ve never seen one for multiple aircraft. After building the pit for a while I know why! It’s a real sh… to get all under the hood. Hope I could finish it the way I would.
P.S: is there a way to extract the caution lights to an external monitor? I know about the MFD’s and some gauges, but don’t know if the caution lights also could be extracted. If so, I could use the space over my MFD’s, that isn’t really used at the moment (but the TFT’s display reaches to that point) to built some real working caution lights, instead of simple printed fakes.
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With YAME you can extract the eyebrow lights, caution panel, clock and a few other goodies.
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Badger, thanks a lot,
that helped me. Will deal with it tomorrow. Sh…, it is tomorrow! We have 03:39 here in Germany. Another long day. Started at 08:00 yesterday. Building the ICP at the moment. At the coffee breaks I’m here in the forum. But now it’s time to go to bed. Couldn’t look straight out of my eyes anymore.
Again, thanks for the advise
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Hi, I recommend you should go to VP and read a lot. Not everyone is building a perect 1 to 1 cockpit.
It is a lot easier to use analogs than a PCB to convert them in keypresses. Even with an old joystick you could do it.
Cheers! -
+1.
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Thank’s for the advice!
In falcon bms and the FS9/FSX the problem is now solved. But the other simulators don’t like many USB devices at the same time. O.k. you could use VJoy and URJ to make them a single device, but many didn’t support other axis input than the primary joystick. Does anyone know a good program to change axis input to keystrokes?
Most of the software I tested could only create one key for the axis direction, cause they are meant to play arcade games with an analog stick. AutoHotKey could be an approach, but it is really complex and plodding to learn. Joystick to mouse and joy2key also create only one keypress or one macro for the directions. What I need is something that create keytrokes like the antenna buttons at the cougar.
P.S: Have three digital axis left from my old FLCS/TQS combo, because in falcon bms and flight simulator I don’t need them anymore (they were meant for trimming), but they are centered axis only and I need “throttle” axis (non centered) to simulate volume or brightness knobs for example. As I need only a very few of them the rotary encoder way doesn’t give a good return. You need an extra pcb to connect them to an Arduino or you have to use one Arduino just for rotaries. The software I use for buttons and switches (LINK2FS_Arduino_Keys) does not support rotaries, so I had to use another software with an extra Arduino in this case.
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O.k.
have found a software that makes exactly this behavior I need, it’s called Joystick Cursor Tool from http://www.deinmeister.de/jct_e.htm. Description is in both, german and english on his page. Only drawback is, in contrast to what he descripes on his page, the program only works with the first two axis (x,y) of a connected device in the “Cougar antenna knobs” mode, for me. Will try to contact him about this problem.
The other axis are programable just with one keystroke, if you try to program them with his so called “sequence of arbitrary keys” they do not react anymore.