doveman

Thanks Nopileus, you've made me very happy to learn I can just stick with the existing 5 wires using the SPI bus and I don't have to wire 20-odd individual wires instead :) Shouldn't be too hard to adapt the code for the Arduino Mega hopefully and will leave me lots of inputs for other funky stuff as well.

I just bought an old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS to cannibalise the stick to extend my Sidewinder FFB2, something like this http://forums.eagle.ru/attachment.php?attachmentid=83931&d=1371853528 Taking it apart, I see that there's just 5 wires coming from the stick for all the hats and buttons, so it's obviously using some sort of matrix. Will it be possible to use this with my Arduino Mega and appropriate code or will I have to just disconnect the existing wiring and solder up a separate wire per switch?

I stumbled across this useful site whilst searching for something else today and thought it might be of use to somebody who's looking to build a flight stick, with or without FFB. http://www.simprojects.nl/flight_stick.htm http://www.simprojects.nl/hacking_a_force_feedback_stick.htm http://www.simprojects.nl/diy_force_feedback_interfacing.htm Maybe even FFB rudder pedals http://www.simprojects.nl/rudder_pedals_with_force_feedback.htm

Found there are no win 8.1 drivers for the scanner part of my OKI mfp colour laser printer/scanner, so had to setup a win7 vbox just for scanning, which is a bit of a pain. So best to check there are drivers for all your devices before you consider upgrading.

Thanks Ninefingers, following http://www.gadrocsworkshop.com/node/48 and disabling right-click on hold made the tap start working with Helios as a single left-click. I don't have any Input Panel or Pen or Flicks tabs (definitely saw the latter before I swapped over the cables though, although it might just be a coincidence that this has disappeared now), so couldn't do any of those other steps but it doesn't seem to be necessary and I'm not planning on using it for anything other than Helios anyway, so I should be fine :)

I've just got a Dell P2314T touchscreen. I had a nightmare getting it setup, as using DVI at it's native resolution of 1920x1080, it wouldn't fill the screen and had a large border on every side. It filled the screen in Win7 normally. In both Win7 and Win8 though, touching it would affect only the other, non-touchscreen, monitor. Anyway, I fixed it eventually by using the DP, which was going to my U2412M, instead of the DVI for the touchscreen and the DVI for the U2412M. Now, touching icons on the desktop seems to work like a normal single-click but running Helios, touching the buttons, seems to work like a double-click (maybe one click when touching and another when releasing) and for example, for buttons that open additional overlay, it closes them as soon as I let go. To make them stay open, I have to double-tap the buttons. Mouse left-clicking or right-clicking on the buttons opens the overlays normally and leaves them open until I click on the button again. Press and Hold is meant to do a right-click and that sometimes works in Helios and leaves the overlay open. I did have a tab called Flicks appear before under Pen and Touch settings in Control Panel and an icon for it in the system tray but they've both disappeared now. It's probably only going to get in the way of using Helios anyway but I'd still like to know why it's disappeared! More importantly though is fixing the problem with Helios so that it's not doing double-clicks every time I touch anything, so does anyone have any ideas?

I don't know if it's the angle it was filmed at or something but I don't think that video adequately conveys the size of the screen and how immersive it must be. I've got a 50" (not for PC stuff) and it's very immersive because at that size, not just the horizontal but also the vertical dimension is large enough to fill a large chunk of my peripheral FOV, even from 8ft away. Even though it's still 16:9, I don't get the impression of it being wide and short like with my 24" monitor, which might be wide enough to extend into my peripheral FOV horizontally but vertically it's not much bigger than my head and leaves me very aware of the wall/desk above/below it.

I'm not sure that's true. If he's pushing the limits of the GPU VRAM, it could be beneficial to use the onboard (which will use the system RAM or maybe have it's own Sideport RAM) to run a secondary monitor for Helios or whatever. I don't imagine it's possible to export the MFCDs, etc to a monitor that's not connected to the main graphics card though but I don't actually know.

Well if it's realistic then of course it should be happening. Now I'm upset it doesn't happen with the ka-50 [emoji6] Sort of joking but when an aircraft in the sim behaves differently to how it does IRL it makes me worry about what else might be modelled poorly or not at all.

I don't think there's any place in a sim for unrealistic aerodynamics/aircraft modelling, so if this is unrealistic I think it should be taken out. You could use a camera shake effect to give the impression of vibration instead perhaps.

Thanks. Yeah, I'm hoping the Thrustmaster F16 stick handle I've just bought, being plastic, will be light enough to work with just 2x current. I'll need a longer extension with more bend in it, like molevitch's though, as I won't have a cutout in my chair. As I aim to transition from a desk setup to cockpit, with a much lower (car) seat, I'll have to build it with the box on legs so that it's the right height for my desk chair now and then I can remove or cut down the legs when I move to the cockpit setup. The first thing I need to do is work out how to attach the extension to the FFB2 base though, and then attach the Thrustmaster F16 handle to the other end, with it's buttons/hats wired to an Arduino. I'll probably use a box like PeterP did for the FFB2 button/hat inputs as it would be a waste not to use them.

Thanks, it might be possible to 2x the power quite easily according to that, although even that would probably require a better AC/DC PSU. To 4x the power, not only would several components need to be replaced but also the motors it seems. Maybe 2x would be sufficient for an extension with Thrustmaster F16 handle though.

Yeah, that makes sense, thanks :) Only downside I guess is you can't move the mouse between the cockpit (centre screen) and Helios by moving it up or down but have to move it across the right-hand view screen, which will be a bit unnatural but perhaps I won't need to do that much anyway. Clickable Radio mod isn't working at the moment as far as I know, so that's one less reason to need the mouse on the centre screen.

If I'm using a 3x1 arrangement, totalling 5760x1200 (the centre monitor is 1920x1200, whilst the outer two are 1920x1080) and then want to add a Helios monitor (1920x1080) below the centre screen, with MFDs/Shvkal/Abris exported to it, do I have to run 5760x2280, which almost doubles the pixels, even though there's no monitors to show anything either side of the Helios monitor or is there a more economical way to achieve this?

That does sound like it would be cool, having a DoF adjust instead of zoom, so that the player can focus on different distances and scan, as he would IRL. Probably never been done in a game before though, so couldn't say if it will actually be usable in practice until someone implements it for us to try.

I just bought a second FFB2 (the later X08 red trigger version) and was planning to give the one I already had (X05) to my Dad so that he can fly helos (he's using a Thrustmaster Hotas X at the moment for planes but that's useless for helos, as I found when I had it!) I might have to keep it and use it for this mod though, as I do need to make an extended, curved, arm so that the stick will clear the edge of my chair and replace the stick with something with more buttons/hats. CH Fighter Sticks are about £90+ now though, so I won't be buying one of those to cannibalise, unless I see a faulty one going cheap. I might be able to get an old Thrustmaster serial port stick cheap to cannibalise. Obviously I wouldn't be able to use the interface circuitry but I've got some Arduino Mega boards, so I presume I could just wire the buttons/hats to one of those? I'm still considering whether I could just increase the power using one FFB2 though, so that I can give the other to my Dad as I originally intended.

Maybe you haven't got the exports enabled then. Just use Easy Monitor Configurator http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=71831

Try using ED_A10C_CDU and ED_A10C_RWR

It's encouraging that the EDGE screenshots I've seen have the sky looking much more like that photo (i.e. realistic) than current DCS does, so hopefully with the new engine they'll be able to give us accurate glare and reflections to help us spot stuff :)

Thanks for posting the photo/screenshot. They nicely demonstrate that it's not lack of pixels that causes DCS to look unrealistic :)

I bet it would be easier to see stuff in a real-life video than in DCS, even though they're playing at the same res. and size, which rather suggests something else is the problem, such as poor contrast between objects/background, lack of glare, etc. Throwing more res. at it will increase the burden on the GPU and do nothing to fix those problems.

Well to that I would say, cater for the majority of players who will be using 1080p monitors and who need something like smart scaling, even if it does give those with bigger monitors an advantage (but maybe they also need smart scaling, I couldn't say as I don't have an UHD monitor). They already have an advantage anyway if they can see things that 1080p users can't, so it doesn't seem like a good justification for doing nothing and might in fact even things out a bit.

You can get pills for that ;)

I was really looking for a video showing what a pilot sees IRL but thanks for the link, interesting information.

I wonder if anyone's got a link to some video footage from a cockpit, showing what the pilot sees at the distances we're talking about IRL?