Making a PCB?

[pvjen1]

Hi everyone,

im making a generic cockpit and my console has 30 switches, including push buttons, rotorary switches (with some with push functions) and toggle switches, I want to use FSUIPC to communicate directly from the board to FSX or FS9.

is it not possible to make a pcb board to recieve all these inputs? and is it hard to make a pcb board for this purpose as I have a friend who can design PCB boards but has no understanding of fs software and if a software is needed to be developed to interact with the flight sim.

cheers
Phil

[Buddym]

HI Phil,

Sounds like a fun project. Communications with FSUIPC needs a driver for whatever hardware you use. For Opencockpits you can use IOCards software or SIOC, along with the mastercard which connects via the parallel port, or via USB using the USB interface.. Some cards like Leo's use USB and a joystick driver. I have an open-source board that i built that uses USB and the generic Windows joystick driver as well. You should work that part out first, since there is no way to simply connect it and have it work without an interface and driver. I built my cards (I did not design them, the design is open-source) because I love electronics and building things, but I own and use both the OpenCockpits cards and Leo's latest card every day. They are both built well, widely supported, and deliver lot's of function for the price. Not only is Leo's card complete plug-n-play, it has very convenient spring-loaded terminals for connecting it to your hardware. Unless you just want to build your own I think Leo's card is a great place to start.

if you do want to build your own, have a look at the MJoy projects that are out there. I have posted several times here on these forums regarding my MJoy boards. The project is very widely used, and mine run without flaw. There are some guys (Frakk and Sokol) over on the Xsim forums that are real experts on this project. They know the ins and outs and have pcb designs, blank PCBs, etc. The MJoy connects via USB and uses the built-in joystick drivers in Windows. I built the MJoy 16C which has a TON of buttons and 8 analog inputs for pots. Feel free to ask any questions, I'll help if I can, and Frakk/Sokol have a very long MJoy thread over on the X-Sim forums.

Buddy

Hi everyone,

im making a generic cockpit and my console has 30 switches, including push buttons, rotorary switches (with some with push functions) and toggle switches, I want to use FSUIPC to communicate directly from the board to FSX or FS9.

is it not possible to make a pcb board to recieve all these inputs? and is it hard to make a pcb board for this purpose as I have a friend who can design PCB boards but has no understanding of fs software and if a software is needed to be developed to interact with the flight sim.

cheers
Phil