BluFinBima

Someone PM'ed me a while back offering assistance with graphical design. Unfortunately I have lost that person's message. We are looking into the feasibility of an M-2000C interface for the new Helios, and having a great looking profile to run against it would be awesome. If that person is still interested in helping, please PM me again.

Just a quick update. If you recall, the Harrier profile requires a new level of Helios. I have decided not to release the Harrier profile until I can be sure there are are no problems with the new Helios. To this point, I have not had confirmation from any tester that the beta Helios works with their existing profiles. This should not be interpreted as a criticism of the individuals who indicated that they might be able to perform some testing - each person let me know their ability to test and the reasons for delays - but I wanted to let the people following this thread know that we have stalled due to the test effort.

Firstly, I now have bragging rights to say that I have flown an F/A-18C at the world's largest military airshow (according to Wikipedia) :pilotfly: For those at RIAT in the UK this weekend, take a look at the Thrustmaster tent.... The person I spoke to said it was still a prototype, but surely it must be getting close to production. Really enjoyed my 10 mins flying with this (and the new rudder pedals):joystick:.

Hi folks, Firstly, apologies for the delay. It is absolutely not because I've been off flying my Hornet. My hornet has been in the air twice since the launch, and the Harrier has also been grounded to give me time to work out all of the problems that crawled out of the woodwork after I began the efforts to make Helios with the AV-8B Interface more robust. I have an ask of anyone who is interested in helping. I need people who are willing to test the installer for the new Helios, and also regression test the new Helios with non-Harrier profiles. Specifically, I am not looking for people to fly the Harrier which is why I am not yet making the Harrier profile available. My plan is to release the Harrier profile once I have confirmation that the new Helios does not cause major problems. Please PM me if you're able to assist. Many thanks

Hi Fakum, The profile I've created does not work without the new level of Helios and the new Helios is simply too fragile to inflict on anyone at the moment. You'll be the first to know when it is ready.

Hi Fakum, Please do not interpret this long post as me having a go at you. I am definitely not, and I really do appreciate your interest. I can also understand your frustration. I suspected that once I disclosed what I was up to, there might be some interest, and I also suspected that once I released the video, it would increase the interest level. As I said in the earlier posts, I was genuinely trying to find out if there was any significant interest, and to be honest, the answer seems to be "No". I only know of you and three others. Gunterlund's earlier post actually caused more challenges for me. If everyone used a single 23" 1920x1080 touch screen then life would be simple. I realised that he and potentially others would gain little benefit from my work due to some short-cuts I had taken so these needed to be addressed. Let me give you a little background. The profile is the easy bit. If it was just about me sharing the profile, everyone's life would be so much simpler. I could send you the profile today, but it would not run because it binds against a brand new AV-8B interface in Helios, and it is this new interface where all of the complexity lies. The Helios code that you are running is 1.3.? but it seems that Craig was doing some extra work before he eventually made it open source. This means that if I compile the open source, I get a 1.4.x level that was never released. I am having to guess at how Helios all hangs together under the covers, and I'm having to learn c# and xaml to do this (it is not technology that I am in any way familiar with). My intent is to release something, but it does not help anyone (especially me, because I would feel obligated to help) if it all falls into a big mess when someone other than me tries to install the new level of Helios. As you can see from the video, I personally have a workable solution which I am happy with (for me) and I could quite easily have stopped there. I didn't. I am continuing to put in a staggering large number of hours every morning and evening (and all weekends) so that others might benefit from this work. I have a wife, a Harrier and a new second-hand Hornet, and they are all feeling very neglected. One of these is the reason why I'm trying to release this thing as quickly as possible ;-) . I just don't want to cause virtual aviators grief when they install the code and curse my very blue fin. Please bear with me. If I could estimate when I might be finished, I would, but I simply do not know how long it will take. If you're interested, last week I created a kanban which is here which I am using to track the work items. When most of the things are in the "done" column, I'll be ready to release. Thanks again for the interest. I do appreciate the moral support.

GunterLund, Don't let Fakum see this, it delayed getting the whole thing ready for release.... :music_whistling:

Hi Fakum, I'm deliberately avoiding your question ;-) There is a big difference between me using the code and other. I'm able to overlook all the iffy stuff I've done, but I can't inflict it on others.

Hi Gunterlund, It would have been nice if Razbam had used the same codes for the MFCD's that DCS did, but they didn't. While I was not planning to provide separate MFCD's, it is similar to some other tidy up activities that I need to do so I'll see what I can come up with.

Hi Gunterlund, The MFD screens are just holes in the helios panel for the exported screens to show through. They are not really part of the profile set-up at all (just the frames, knobs and buttons). You can still export the screens anywhere you like. I happen to use Will Hartsell's IRIS to move my exported screens to the machine running Helios, but I'm sure there are other options. If you're seeing MFD's on your 10" today, the exact same mechanism should work.

Apologies for the first video link in the post not working. I'd messed up the YouTube tagging. Should be sorted now.

And now the video..... OK... sorry for the delay, but things rather busy at work. I set myself a target to get this video published before the F/A-18C shows up... only just made it. If this does not work (and it didn't for me), then the link is Please let me know what you think!

I thought I'd give a brief update on where I'm up to. There is some good and not so good news. Firstly I should state that my intention is not to tease you and then take something away. If you're wanting a virtual cockpit for the Harrier, then Ikarus is really your only sensible option and from what I've seen, Heinz has done a great job. I've pushed forwards with Helios more out of technical curiosity than anything else. I just want to give you the facts. I think I'm about 80% complete on the what I set out to achieve with the AV-8B Helios interface. I'm thinking that there are a few esoteric things that I'm simply not going to implement, but I'm pretty much complete with most panels, and it is flyable and stable with the Helios Control Center. I've still got minor bugs to fix but everything is looking good at the moment. Now the not so good news. My experience of the Helios Profile Editor from the open source repository is that for me, it isn't particularly stable, and I regularly have to delete the layout file to gain access to sub-panels. I also occasionally have to tinker with the XML in the profile to work around problems. I've got used to it, but I can imagine that the issues might cause problems for many. I'm not an experienced c# programmer so I'd not going to be in a position to resolve problems with the profiler - it is what it is. I should state that this is not intended as a criticism of Craig Courtney's work. He did an awesome job with Helios and the open source version has a few issues which is probably why it never got released. I have two additional points to this update. Firstly, I want to gauge the level of interest from the forum for having a beta version of the interface at a point when I've run out of steam. My view is that the interface (and my default profile) will never reach a point when it is "production ready" standard. I will also not be able to deliver the new Helios as an installable package, so anything I provide will be on an as-is basis, and while I will attempt to assist with any problems with the interface I've added, I unlikely to be able to help with Helios problems. Basically, I'm saying that IF I provide something, you'll need to have some experience of tinkering with Windows software to get it working. Secondly, I wanted to ask whether there is any interest in me creating a video of what the interface is and does.... again not trying to tease... just wanted to ask the question to avoid effort on my part if there is no interest. I'm interested to know your thoughts/interest. Cheers, Neil

Many thanks for the response Heinz. I realise this is a little cheeky for me to ask, but it would help me a lot if you could post or PM me with the senddata lines for devices 2000 - 2018. I'd also be interested to know if you think it would be possible to expose the ODU messages directly (ie without using a viewport). Thanks in advance

Hello everyone, I've been looking at the AV-8B profile in Ikarus, and it is a great piece of work. Apologies if I have missed the answer to this, but my searches turned up nothing. Unfortunately I cannot find a DCS-Exports for the AV-8B. For most devices I can work them out, but for devices in the synthetic range (ie 2000 upwards) and which are calculated in the Exports.lua, I'm struggling to identify the sub-devices for the AV-8B. Does anyone have an export.lua which calculates the values for all of the devices in the AV-8B DisplayDotMatix classes? If so, would you mind sharing with me please? Many thanks

Hi gunterlund21, Thanks for the pointer to Capt Zeen. The exports file is important in the process, but the data then needs to be bound inside of Helios and the cleanest way to do this is with an interface for the specific aircraft. I guess you could do translations in the exports.lua to map AV8B codes to A10C codes and then use the A10C Interface in Helios, but this would cause a lot of work in the exports.lua, and limit helios processing to the functions that are implemented for A-10C. Since the code is open source, it seems easier to implement a new interface in helios and keep the export as simple as possible. I have been able to identify 84 indicators for the AV-8B, but I only know what a handful of them do. Next step is prototype the Master Caution and Master Warning indicators but I'm hopeful.

Snacko, Thanks for the ptr to Capt Zeen. The MiG-21 isn't by Razbam so I suspect that it'll be a different story again. I did see that Cylution did a partial Helios interface for the MiG-21 so there maybe some clues there. Since posting, I stuck a UDP listener on the port and started to get some values. Finding the lights test switch was a big win, so I'm sure I can eventually flush out all the codes and identify the indicators. There are also lots of changing decimal values which I'm guessing are gauges, but that will take a lot more time to decode. I have also been sniffing through the AV-8B LUA files, and I have regrettably concluded that all of these values are not externalised anywhere. If there is any kind Razbam forum member lurking, I'd really appreciate a list of codes for indicators & gauges if you're feeling generous ;-). So I have a way forward now - albeit a slow one - so the next step is to finish off the AV8B Interface in Helios which will include all of the items that I personally need to use. My plan is to contribute it back into Gadroc's project, but after that, I do not know how I would make it available if another version of Helios is not released... Something to consider assuming there is interest from anyone else.

Hi, currently I run Helios on a second machine and I began a migration for the AV-8B this weekend. Unfortunately the second machine requirement meant that I could not use SICARIO's profile because it uses the keyboard interface. Thankfully Gadroc made Helios source available on GitHub, so I now have a VERY basic AV-8B Interface working in Helios, however the one significant item I cannot figure out is how to get the indicators & gauges exported so that the AV-8B interface can have indicators bound to them. Does anyone know how to export AV-8B gauges & indicators, or if not, does anyone have any suggestions how to progress this? At the moment I would settle for the Master Warning & Caution and the warnings/cautions. My guess is that this is difference between RAZBAM & DCS aircraft because it is a pretty straight forward thing to do with DCS aircraft. Anyway, any help / suggestions would be most welcome.

I've been running with HT16K33 based switches and LEDs for about a year now and this works well. The caution panel was where I started and moved on to UFC and other switches from there. I ordered the HT16K33's from China so the cost is reduced compared to the AdaFruit boards and they're all being driven using a single Arduino Pro Micro Leonardo compatible (ATMEGA 32U4) because these are great value at the moment. Happy to share info if anyone is interested in going down this path.