ABOUT, HISTORY BARON 58 Community (Q&A) TERMS of Use YOUTUBE

START INPUT/OUTPUT GUIDE CONFIG GUIDE TECH TIPS CONFIGURATOR SIMVIM PANELS

SimVimCockpit Interface

SimVimCockpit© Interface is a powerful but very easy-to-use, free input/output control tool for home cockpit builders. It will drastically ease the building process and save your time, because you don't need to have any programming/scripting skills and use any complex specific electronic components, it's a "Plug-And-Fly" system.

The fact is that over the past 20 years you could see a lot of home-made cockpit projects on the Internet, but many of them just started and then eventually stopped, or became "never finished" money-eating projects, stretched for 10 years. This is not to say that this is only due to the lack of a good interface, but if you need to become a programmer and an electronics specialist just for the need to make a few LEDs and displays work in your cockpit, this could frustrate and stop many enthusiast.

The idea of this project grew out of the need to finally have a convenient and easy-to-use interface that will allow each home cockpit builder to concentrate on building the cockpit itself, not thinking about how to get the data from the simulator and how to make it work in your cockpit.

This is the 6th generation of our input-output interface for X-Plane. All history of development you can find here.

Note: if you are going to start building your cockpit for the first time you should realize that it could be a complex and very long process. You should have quite enough knowledge about aircraft systems, have some handwork, wiring and soldering skills. Some knowledge about data structure of X-Plane would be useful if you plan to use some custom aircraft models (to know how it work with "DataRefs" and controlled with "Commands").

Hardware

SimVimCockpit interface architecture doesn't require some specialized electronics components, it has "modular" structure based on cheap, easily accesible, ready-to-use breakout boards and modules listed in the "Components" page.

So, in most cases, all you need is to buy these cheap components (and all needed common switches and buttons) and connect them as described on our website. Some components, LED drivers or stepper drivers may need basic soldering skills (like this breakout board)

Unlike our previous interfaces, SimVimCockpit includes an "address bus*" architecture that allows you to extend the number of inputs and outputs for hundreds of toggle switches, buttons, encoders, dozens of numeric displays and gauges, and guarantees that you can make a full set of input controls for any complex cockpit.

* The term "bus" is related to a set of unified wires which can be used by multiple components in the system to receive or send data.

Download SimVimCockpit© free on our Patreon blog: http://www.patreon.com/simvim




© Copyright 2012-2018 - SimVim