Seat Belt Sign

[fritch]

As a newbie to the hardware part of this hobby, I thought I'd try to start with something relativly simple like a control panel for a few basic overhead switches. I picked up a Hagstrom emulator card and programmed up the landing lights trought the microsoft keyboard command menu. I toggle the taxi lights through the FSUIPC menu. So far so good. Now it seems the seat belt and the no smoking signs are only toggled through mouse events (clicking on the virtual toggle switch). How can one emulate this event with external herdware and have FX recognize the switch?

[Peter Dowson]

Now it seems the seat belt and the no smoking signs are only toggled through mouse events (clicking on the virtual toggle switch). How can one emulate this event with external herdware and have FX recognize the switch?

Question: what do you expect FSX to do once you've operated this switch? Do you go back into the passenger cabin to check those indicators are actually on?

FSX doesn't really simulated such things. They are decoration. If you are implementing hardware switches for those, maybe all you need to do is put them in so you can operate them, but not bother to connect them to anything. Alternatively, you might want them to trigger a chime sound. For that you'd need to find some sound program which can be driven by buttons or FSUIPC offsets.

If you use Project Magenta, then pmSystems emulates these switches and pmSounds provides the sounds.

Regards

Pete

[fritch]

Apparantly the FSPax addon planned for FSX is able to use the virtual on board seat belt status and smoking switches to control inputs to the program (possibly through simconnect but I confess I havent checked out the SDK yet). I was just trying to toggle the on screen switch positions with the external hardware.

[Peter Dowson]

Apparantly the FSPax addon planned for FSX is able to use the virtual on board seat belt status and smoking switches to control inputs to the program (possibly through simconnect but I confess I havent checked out the SDK yet). I was just trying to toggle the on screen switch positions with the external hardware.

Okay. In FSX there are new controls for these:

CABIN_NO_SMOKING_ALERT_SWITCH_TOGGLE
CABIN_SEATBELTS_ALERT_SWITCH_TOGGLE

so you could certainly program buttons vis FSUIPC to operate those. Yu should be able to find them in the drop-down lists for button or Keys assignment.

If you want to operate them via FSUIPC offsets you'd need to write the control number (listed in the "List of FS controls" document installed in your FSX Modules folder) to offset 3110.

Regards

Pete

[fritch]

Thanks Pete,

Didnt notice the Cabin options in the pull down menu. Works fine.

Larry

[Peter Dowson]

Didnt notice the Cabin options in the pull down menu. Works fine.


Whenever you want to find out if there's an FS control to do the job, just enable Event logging in FSUIPC (on the logging Tab), then operate the switch in FS and check the log to see what control, if any, it produced.

Regards

Pete