aircockpit.com

Hi Everyone,

Firstly for those of you who missed my introduction but wondered what a South African, living in Holland is doing on a French Forum, ... well take a look HERE to see my introductory post. I ended up finding this forum because I was searching, no, make that scouring the internet for builders of King Air Sims. How come so mane french builders are info Beechcraft aircraft? Anyway, I am here now, so here is a thread to accompany my project.

Although a shell and complete panel are in my opinion the key elements of a simulator, I have become a little concerned by the face that I cannot find the software that I would like to have for my aircraft. I believe if you are going to try to simulate something then you should try and simulate it, within means and your budget, as closely as possible. This includes the aircraft systems. FS2004 and FSX both have great KIng Airs but also have their limitations. It would be great if we had something to really simulate the KIng Air systems as realistically as possible. I mean, hot starts, setting the Generator switches to Reset before you turn them on and the like.... This is all possible right? Yes it is, look at Marty Bochane and his amazing Prosim Suite for the 737. so much stuff is modeled and it all has effect on the aircraft as you fly it.

I was one of the initial Beta testers for Marty and I made my OpenCockpits and CPflight hardware available to him so that he could make his software compatible with the different vendors. I was building a 737NG at the time, on Jan 1st 2013 my son (18) and I decided to sell our 737 project and build a KIng Air as the 747 was turning into a very expensive project, although there are great tutorials on the web I honestly do not dee myself building a fully working motorized throttle unit from scratch, the idea of a smaller sim was more attractive and thus the idea to build a King Air was born.

I started by checking the available software out there, RXP looks amazing but it has (or maybe had) a definite downside for me, I wanted to be able to run the EFIS and EADI as stand alone glass and not be limited to the fact that I would have to run it as a gauge inside FS9/10. I found Laurant's Website and decided to use his outstanding gauges until something better came along. Unfortunately I could not find what I was looking for and I decided to take the ultimate plunge.... learn C# and write my own gauge, ... um, .. core, . .um , .. whatever .... I got started with a blank piece or paper, listing the thing I wanted to have and how I would like to have them .... well one sheet of paper became two, then three and then about 8. I realized this would be no easy chore... but hell, I work as an IT project manager and I have some programming experience (albeit many years ago that I last programmed in PERL, PHP or Javascript).

I purchased a good C# book for brginners, downloaded som additional huides from the web and armed with the FSUIPC SDK and the aforementioned things I got cracking.

Now almost 5 months doen the road I have finally started to make some visible progress. I have all the switches in the Core interface and now I am doing the scripting behind them. I have no illusions that I will have a flyable sim witin any short period of time as this is a learn-as-I-go project. Sometimes I spend all evening doing something then, when I fire up FS it does not work properly so back to the drawing board I go. ...

For the next few months there will be no Nice MIP, Pedestal or shell to show... just loads of screenshots of a work under progress, here are a few screenshots:


The Switches


Lighting control panel


Fuel controls


Anti-Ice controls


Environmental Controls


Anunnciator blocks .... you might notice a few 'strange' annunciators, .. but I decided to add a few custom ones like 'Gear Fail'. If we switch the Annunciator test switch on .....


.... tadaaa.... they all light up...

Thanks for looking and most off all , . thanks for reading (and tolerating) my English :)

RXP looks amazing but it has (or maybe had) a definite downside for me, I wanted to be able to run the EFIS and EADI as stand alone glass and not be limited to the fact that I would have to run it as a gauge inside FS9/10

Very interesting project... but there is also the problem of gps and possibly weather radar, difficult to deport on a second pc ... I use reality xp gauges for this purpose, as well as Jetline 2 gauges for EFIS and EADI (but they are valid only for FS9 ...)

Your software will be usable with F9 and FS 10?

Your project is absolutly amazing.
It's the dream of all the cockpit builder, to have a realistic software with interface possibility for a real cockpit.
As you say, it already exist with a 737 and the prosim softawre, but developers are not interested with "small" aircraft.
That's why your project is fantastic, if it works, if you are able to develop a cockpit software for the B200 as good as the prosim is for the 737, that would be a huge news in the small cockpit builder community.
And if it works, have you ever plan to sell it?

Steph, If you have a core system running on a PC it is possible with WideFS to run almost anything on the other PC. Project Magents do it too as well as Prosim. Once I have the core interface finished I will look at making gauges and connecting them to the core. I saw that FSxpand/Flyware has now come with a set of gauges for the King Air, they look good but I think that Laurents gauges are still the best bet out there at the moment (for free too!) Niether of the aforementioned support terrain or weather radar, something I would definitely like to have in my project.

FiX, what you say is so true. It would be awesome if we really could simulate all the systems and have a simulator that really is 'as real as it gets'. FS9/X is very limited in what it does as far as aircraft systems are concerned, The designers of the high quality Payware aircraft like PMDG, iFLY, QualityWings, A2A etc still do an excellent job of adding systems to their aircraft but they remain limited. My biggest inspiration has been seeing Prosim737 evolve and seeing the systems that are modeled within it. Iy is because of the lack of proper (complete) King Air gauges that I decided to make my own. While I was scouring the net looking for information on programming gauges I realized that I would have to learn a 'proper' language like C++ or C#, and if I were to start learning a language like that I would have to start from the beginning, that is when I decided to try and model the King Airs systems too.

I honestly have not decided weather to sell the software when it is finished, for me 'finished' is a long long way away. I might decide to sell it to cover the costs of building the simulator, but I have taken so much from the Flight Sim community for years, it's time to do something back. I must have downloaded a million files from Avsim and Flightsim.com over the past 17 years that I have been seriously simming. So to answer your question, maybe it will be a shareware product, or maybe hand out the core for free and the extra modules (gauges, radar, tcas etc) at a price.

I have three weeks of holidays coming and I was not planning on going anywhere so I hope to get a lot of work done on the project and hope to have a beta version finished by the end of August. I will keep this thread updated as I go along. there seem to be more Beech builders here then on other forums.

Bye from Holland,

I understood, I just wanted to highlight that the necessary gauges for GPS or radar weather would be a problem. We can forget the weather radar and opt for a more modern instrumentation for navigation, some beech have a Honeywell FMC I believe ..

Another thing: did you receive the dwg files?

Hello Capetonian,

your post was the reason to register at this site and you are right, for B200 builders this is an impressive place. I have started to build a simpit of a B58, but then changed it to a B200 as I was looking for more complexitiy in the flying modell and process.

The gaugesfactory indeed for me was the reason to start as I loved the gauges, now I have been long looking for all kind of alternatives for the B200, currently I am using PanelBuilder EFIS gauges for the engines.

I am kind of disappointed of the low complexity of Carendado and would be highly interested to find out what you are doing with your core. Further more I have now real problems in assigning important hardware buttons (like interter, autofeather, auto-igntition, etc. and annunciator messages to my simpit as everything was just built for VC usage.

Would be happy to hear what happend in the last months with your project and would truly be more than happy to use my simpit for testing your software, if this is for interest for you.

Best from Vienna and regards,
Alfred

Hi there Alfred,

Firstly thank you for taking an interest in my project. As you have read I decided to embark on the long and tedious task of developing my own King Air suite to fill the viod that seems to exist for those flying aircraft that are not part of the main-stream fleet.

The project is a massive one and I still have a long way to climb before I can peer over this mountain and see some sunshine on the other side. If it's just gauges you are looking for then you might want to try FSxpand, they have a set of KIng Air gauges, see here for some screenshots: http://www.cockpitsolutions.com/pages/panels.htm
From what I understand form your post you are also looking for a decent systems simulator, that's awesome but you will have to have massive dose of patience :) I only started programming at the beginning f this year to be able to build my own suite. That, combined with a full time job that keeps me away for most hobbies add up to a very slow production time.

I like to see the phase as a 4 phase project:

Phase one will be the Aircraft systems; electrical system, Fuel system, hydraulic system etc These should all be reproduced as realistically as possible. All the information for these systems will be pulled from the B200/300 POH, flight manuals and checklists.

Phase two will be the coupling of the core with open cockpits cards and vice-versa, Once these two phases have been completed you will be able to control everything from physical switches.

Phase three will cover the implementation of a correct navigation system, TCAS, and the like as well as the appropriate gauges for the necessary systems.

Phase four will cover the Merging of all of the above into one seamless package

The second stage of the project will then be fine tuning a B200 flight model to go along with the core project. I hope to have phase one finished in the course of November and phase two finished sometime in January.

Whereabouts in Austria are you based?

Hi from Vienna!

You know I started from a different approach. I just wanted to learn flying and from the first moment I was unhappy with a Virtual Cockpit on a screen. So I investigated about 6 months and then started to build step by step elements. Now I am like you just on a way - but it took me until now finding out that the add-ons for GAs like the King Air are by far not as realistic as I would want them to be. When building so many knobs and switches I want to fly by the book and wand negative reactions from the simulation when I am doing something wrong.

So I started to look for Add-Ons and tutorials to fly the King Air at least somehow realisticly. Pls do not judge my flying skills from the video I have prepared for you, it is more a collection of small quick take offs and landings...

You find my video now at youtube: http://youtu.be/p-QUuWGkmyw

I see the current status as a huge pre-test and form to learn handling the plane and learn handling the cockpit building. I am currently looking for shell concepts (full covered cabins) or a real cockpit shell. Found one of a piper sceneca - but it is that huge and they want for this (great) rubbish far too much. I am purchasing in the next weeks a real GA intercom as the communication aspect adds a lot of realism (especially with real GA headsets).

A friend of mine working for the Austrian air traffic control (austrocontrol) developed and programmed the I/O cards, he is building currently the core of the navstack.

I am thinking of purchasing the King Air from Flight1, as they seem to have some damage engine developed - but I think it might be a little buggy. MilViz is developing the King Air 350 - I am sure everything is better than the Carenado. As it concerns the gauges I got a mail today from Gert of fsxpand telling me that he is planning to rebuild the engine cluster for the King Air - so I might consider his gauges for the furture. But maybe I go for the cluster of real gauges from flightillusions one day.

So if you happen to come to Vienna I shall be glad to learn more about your project and show you the simpit - where in Holland are you?

Best, Alfred

Hi Guys
Just found this thread by fluke, Great!
On our side of the Pond, very few tbprop builders.
Hold on tight..this is an ultra long range project !
Congrats.
JP