CUBESIM EASY PANEL EP3U HANDS ON IMPRESSIONS

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Here’s an honest review of the Cubesim EASY PANEL EP3U composed by 1 UFC, 3 Mfds (usb monitors) with smaller dimensions against the real F/A-18 MFDs and one Hub (cubesim hub) that has four usb 3.0 port for the UFC and MFDs, four power receptable to give power to the units . You can find them on www.cubesim.com.cn or check their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CubeSimGarfield

The Items arrived quickly with FEDEX and they were packaged really carefully. I was so excited that i just took a picture of the open box. I choose to buy just the MFDs without the bezel as I’m owning the Trustmaster set so decided to go with them.

The mounting of the MFDs (usb displays 800 x 600) to my ALU rig has been quite simple, I preferred to install them directly into the Alu profile of my cockpit instead of mounting them on the provided Alu profile.
Assemby of every MFDs took no longer than 10 minutes, removing the protective sheet, placing the TM Mfd on the display, four screws, the backplate, four nuts and just screw everything.

The UFC instead was provided with a swivel mount that attaches to the back of the UFC and then is attached to the provided Alu Profile. The alu profile then is secured to my cockpit with the provided clamp.

On the Software side the guys at Cube Sim asked me to provide them my monitor setup and then they sent me the lua file for exporting the views correctly on the usb monitors. Initial configuration was set keeping the USB monitors on the left of my main monitors but i realized that each time i was switching off the computer at next reboot i was finding the monitors on the left side. Again Cubesim sent another Lua file that solved everything.
The MFDs response rate is with no delay.
Probably they’re just a little bit dark but this seems to be a DCS issue the brightness in the SIM actually is still not yet acheived on the export feature.

About the UFC, instead, i faced some troubles with the first program they sent me, there was no way to have the UFC working, everything seemed OK, the com port was exchanging datas but UFC was not waking up. It was solved in a couple of days with, what they said, an update of the interfacing program. One click on the new executable, one click on the “connect” button and finally also the UFC was working properly.

What i was unable to use and still unable to use are the three usb ports installed on the back of the UFC. They are supposed to be the port for the TM Mfds but even if the unit is powered by the cubesim hub they continue to disconnect (probably they’re dreaning too much power) so I decided to solve with an extra usb hub.

Construction:
Simply awesome ! Buttons and switches give a positive sound, you can hear the “click” on the pushbuttons and the click on the switches, display are awesome and the time of response with the sim is perfect ! I
I didn’t realize any delay, nor in the display of the UFC nor while changing pages on the MFDs

Cons: Display dimension. Of course these MFDs are moulded on the F-16 dimension viewing area is 4X4”on the display are a little bit wider (5.90” / 15cm) they protrude orizzontally of 0.2” / 0.5cm each side but while flying is unnoteceable.

At the end, I’m very happy with the gift I made to myself for my birthday and I’m sure I’ll enjoy this set up in the forecoming months.