tonyswash Posted January 23, 2023 Posted January 23, 2023 I’ve just returned to DCS after a break of a few years, attracted by all the specialist cockpit kit now available, new models like the FA/18, the promise of a dynamic campaign coming soon and what was now possible with exciting kit like the Elgato Streamdeck. I have very limited desk space in my den and I wanted to construct some sort of Hornet cockpit that I could easily and quickly set up to play and stow when I was finished. After a lot of market research I settled on the various Winwing control panel offerings. Here’s my experience for what its worth, hopefully anybody considering buying the WinWing panels may find it informative. I started off by buying the Winwing Hornet UFC panel. It took just over a week to get from China to the UK and pleasingly I wasn’t charged any customs or tax. I was very pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the kit and it’s ease of set up. I ran the SimAppPro software from Winwing, downloaded and installed the Hornet config file and the UFC just worked perfectly (although I subsequently ran into some glitches - see below). The thing looks and works just like the UFC panel in the Hornet. Although it’s made from sturdy plastic and feels pretty solid it is actually very light which is perfect for me as I wanted a light weight pit setup. Based on that experience I ordered 3 MFD units from Winwing, both the button panels and the actual displays. Again it only took just over a week for it all to arrive but this time I was charged custom fees and tax. I found setting up these units more complicated but once up and running they worked great. Again lighter than I expected but the actual displays are very crisp and clear. There are quite a few extra buttons on the MFD frames you can program with anything you want. The MFDs are bigger than the Thrustmaster Cougar MFDs. Over all I think these panels, both the UFC and the full MFD displays, are good value for money and I would recommend them. There are however a few issues that would be buyers should be aware of. First all the panels come with attachable stands but these are pretty restrictive in that only two positions are possible, neither of which met my needs, and because the panels are so light if you try pushing the buttons with them sitting in the upright position they move and/or fall over. So they work best attached to something. I didn’t want to attach them to the desk as I wanted to be able to stow them away easily so I built a lightweight thin timber sheet panel box, with a slightly inclined front panel, onto which I attached the various Winwing panels. This means I can just lift the entire structure on and off my desk in one go. This leads to my first criticism which is that the back of all the panels have a small raised area, so if you want to attach them to a flat backing surface you have only a limited grip area and attaching them to a surface is a bit tricky. I did it with a combination of velcro on the raised area and a small wooden weight bearing rail for them to sit on on the tilted front surface. The Three MFDs and the UFC require seven USB sockets so I attached a powered USB hub at the back of my panel box and only need to plug in one USB cable and a power cable to get the whole thing working. All the panels come with nice long USB cables, over a metre in length, so I needed to use cable clips to stow away all the various cables neatly at the back of my panel box. However you cannot install the occasional firmware updates via a USB hub, so when the a firmware update becomes available I will need to pull each panel off the velcro to attach it directly via a USB cable to my PC. A bit of a pain. . The display panels for the MFDs need to be arranged in the Windows display setup in portrait mode underneath the main monitor. Unfortunately because I am regularly detaching the MFDs from my PC I found that Windows kept resetting the position and orientation of the three MFD displays meaning I had to rearrange them each time. I could not find a way to force Windows to remember the MFD display orientations but I found an easy solution in the app Displayfusion, which you can use to set the position of the displays properly then save it as a configuration that can be invoked though a key combination (which I have set up as a Streamdeck button). I still have a weird glitch where one of the MFD displays keeps showing the Windows task bar but I just set the Task Bar to autohide and that solves that. The final problem I had was caused by fact that I was the using the HUD only view a lot more because I don’t need to see the cockpit instruments most of the time as I have the hardware panels. However I found for some reason this view interrupts the instrument feed to the Winwing UFC panel so the instrument display would freeze and the unit would become unresponsive. Going back to the default cockpit view, with the UFC visible on the main screen, reestablishes the connection and solves this problem. To sum up. Very pleased with this Winwing kit, I’ve finally got a DSC cockpit that’s easy to move in and out of position and it makes flying a real pleasure. Here's a couple of photos. One shows the back of my instrument panel with all the cable management and the USB hub. The other shows the instrument panel in place and in use 6
Tiger-II Posted January 25, 2023 Posted January 25, 2023 Very nice! Has the WinWing software stopped "calling home"? Motorola 68000 | 1 Mb | Debug port "When performing a forced landing, fly the aircraft as far into the crash as possible." - Bob Hoover. The JF-17 is not better than the F-16; it's different. It's how you fly that counts. "An average aircraft with a skilled pilot, will out-perform the superior aircraft with an average pilot."
tonyswash Posted January 29, 2023 Author Posted January 29, 2023 The software does check for updates. I’m not bothered by that because I only use my Windows PC to play a few games so I am not very concerned by security. Everything serious gets done on my Mac. An update on my experience with the kit. A further glitch I have encountered is that if I change some control in DCS - say some key bindings - sometimes DCS World seems to restart itself when I click save. If that happens DCS seems to forget the monitor setup and the display is scrambled such that I cannot click on the Quit button because it is off screen. I get around this by having a ‘Quit DCS’ action programmed into a Streamdeck button, and an ‘Open DCS’ action on an adjacent button, and if the screen gets scrambled I can quickly quit and relaunch with just a couple of button taps.
Boogie Mitchell Posted March 21, 2023 Posted March 21, 2023 I was saddened to hear about your experiences using the HUD only view. I've ordered my MIP and this was a HUGE consideration. Absolutely no need to see the units on screen if you have them in front of you. Really bummer ED doesn't implement an easy solution for this, considering the large home-pit types. Are you still having this issue with UFCs locking up in HUD-only view?
Lowlyslows Posted June 13, 2023 Posted June 13, 2023 On 3/21/2023 at 2:26 PM, Boogie Mitchell said: I was saddened to hear about your experiences using the HUD only view. I've ordered my MIP and this was a HUGE consideration. Absolutely no need to see the units on screen if you have them in front of you. Really bummer ED doesn't implement an easy solution for this, considering the large home-pit types. Are you still having this issue with UFCs locking up in HUD-only view? How was your experience with the MIP?
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