Saitek Flight Instrument Panel and Falcon BMS
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Hello everyone,
I am a little bit curious about Saitek’s products and Falcon’s compability, espcially for Saitek FIP. First of all, I know there are panel extracters for Falcon but for me Saitek FIP(Flight Instrument Panel) feels better.
Actually, there is tool that allows Saitek’s FIP to work with Falcon. It is Raptor007’s tool(can be found here:http://www.raptor007.com/falcon-4-to-saitek/). I tried to get in touch with him but I was unable.
Saitek FIP is not cheap and probably MFD extracters for Falcon are better options when it comes to cost but What would you think about if someone develops a tool for Falcon? I currently have Saitek switch panel and I am using it with the program called SPAD.next. I am quite happy with the switch panel’s setup. To be honest, I am planning to develop a software for Saitek FIP and Falcon BMS. I want to know your opinions guys. I am not a professional programmer but this is sounds fun. Your opininons are important, so please let me know.
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Any thoughts guys?
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IMHO those FIP’s are nothing else than wasted money. With a combination of a 7’’ or 10’’ touchscreen display wich is less than half of the price and BMs Display extraction in combination with Helios you get even better feature set.
I you relly want to use the FIP so why not using Raptor’s Tool as even the source code is available on github. As a professional software developer I would rather take an existing project and refactor it to my needs than starting completely from the scratch -
Thanks for the reply oakdesign. I know it is a bit waste of.money but as I wrote feels better
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Hello guys,
I have spent some time trying to understand Falcon007’s FIP tool but I am completely confused. First of all, I am a beginner level programmer and I am trying to understand the Falcon’s tool. I downloaded the lighting’s MFD extractor, this extractor is base of the Flacon’s tool. But I do not understand the connection between the these two tool. Can someone explain brifly how to extract data and guide this data to a device? I am missing something but I do not know what it is.
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Hi,
I think you missunderstand a bit. Lightnings MFD extractor is not base of the Raptor’s FIP Tool. Maybe first to understand the concept. Both tools read from Falcon BMS Shared Memory. One part of Lighning Tools is a C# Impelementation of reading Shared Memory Data. Lightnigs F4SharedMem can either used as solution within your own Project or compiled to a dll and referenced in your or another project.
Every BMS installation provides an F4SharedMem.dll including a header file within it’s tool folder
Raptor’s Tool uses that Dynamic Link Library .dll which provides functionality to access Shared Memory Data but apparantly a version that might be outdated an does not reflect the current FlightData.
If you say “beginner level programmer” it’s hard to judge where to start at. So are you familar with C++ programming? Refactoring the FIP tool to work with 4.34 is surly a doable project, but as a professional software engineer I wouldn’t call that a beginners project -
Hi,
I think you missunderstand a bit. Lightnings MFD extractor is not base of the Raptor’s FIP Tool. Maybe first to understand the concept. Both tools read from Falcon BMS Shared Memory. One part of Lighning Tools is a C# Impelementation of reading Shared Memory Data. Lightnigs F4SharedMem can either used as solution within your own Project or compiled to a dll and referenced in your or another project.
Every BMS installation provides an F4SharedMem.dll including a header file within it’s tool folder
Raptor’s Tool uses that Dynamic Link Library .dll which provides functionality to access Shared Memory Data but apparantly a version that might be outdated an does not reflect the current FlightData.
If you say “beginner level programmer” it’s hard to judge where to start at. So are you familar with C++ programming? Refactoring the FIP tool to work with 4.34 is surly a doable project, but as a professional software engineer I wouldn’t call that a beginners projectThank you oakdesign. I am more familiar with C# programing. From what you wrote, I feel like a need a lot to learn. If you have more advice I would love to hear.
I think I need to understand more of F4SharedMemory.
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Hi
if you are more famililar with C# I suggest clone or fork Lightning Tools from github. And start with the F4SharedMemViewer project and try to get the the Datafields and structures Version 15 and 16 from the F4SharedMem/FlightData.cs to be shown in the UI of the
F4SharedMemViewer those fields are currently not shown in the Viewer project. So stuff like BettyBits, MiscBits, bingoFuel. This Data is written to SharedMem by BMS but currently not diplayed in the latest version of the ViewerThis would be something I would give one of my trainees to start with as a refactoring/updating project of legacy code project. To learn setting up multi solution projects, Debug into solutions, adopt existing code etc
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Hi
if you are more famililar with C# I suggest clone or fork Lightning Tools from github. And start with the F4SharedMemViewer project and try to get the the Datafields and structures Version 15 and 16 from the F4SharedMem/FlightData.cs to be shown in the UI of the
F4SharedMemViewer those fields are currently not shown in the Viewer project. So stuff like BettyBits, MiscBits, bingoFuel. This Data is written to SharedMem by BMS but currently not diplayed in the latest version of the ViewerThis would be something I would give one of my trainees to start with as a refactoring/updating project of legacy code project. To learn setting up multi solution projects, Debug into solutions, adopt existing code etc
What about using the F4Shared files located in the “C:\Falcon BMS 4.34\Tools\RwrEmulator\Source\F4SharedMem” ? I found this file. I feel like this is important for my project.
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Basically a modified version of
https://github.com/lightningviper/lightningstools/tree/master/src/F4TexSharedMem
havn’t done a compare yet what has been modified in the RweEmulator. But with a quick look into the files the version provided with Rwremulator don’t reflect the latest changes of FlighData strucures so better to go with lighnings versionMaybe you should start to understand the concept of Shared memory which is not a BMS only thing. It’s a OS functionality and can be implementetd in any software
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/creating-named-shared-memory