F-16 MFD, ICP and DED

[BaronVonVaderham]

Hi guys,

  I decided to go for an F-16 setup for my home cockpit. I’ll be staying with a desktop version, comparable to the winwing offering for the f-18.

 As such I’m looking for ICP and DED solutions, as well as MFD solutions. 
having contacted the f-18 mfds with the f-16 mfds, it looks like I could get the winwing mfds, or any other mfd offering for either aircraft, as they both have 5x5 matrix buttons and corner buttons. 

however, for ICP it’s less easy/cheap, and DED is even more difficult to find. 
soo far the easiest solution for me would be the simgear solution, as they provide plug and play ICP and DED (the DED is actually affordable in my opinion, but their ICP is quite Expensive).

i don’t want to go down the diy route for time reasons (for the next decade fatherhood will prevent me from spending any daylight time to myself).

 I’ve found a few other ICP providers, all in various degrees of completeness, availability and affordability, and I was wondering if any of you had experiences with any of the selections, including simgear. Or maybe there are options I missed? This is what I found so far:

- tekcreations: generally affordable, but not available, and bearers if that I don’t know how complete it is. 
- realsimworld: not cheaper than simgear and need to purchase various bits and pieces and construct the icp. Currently not in stock. 
- hispapanels : diy solutions with prefabricated parts. Adhesive, and in stock, except for mini joystick and honeywell switch.

- pc flights: diy solution, and doesn’t actually have the icp. 
- PSM: unknown. Looks like he has an icp, and considering pricing of his other components this looks like a good option. However, only a Facebook page for contact, and I don’t do social media. 
- invictus cockpit solutions: affordable, but not available. 
- panel products inc: couldn’t find pricing or availability. From the images it looks like they use RS plugs (either discrete signals or as serial bus), which means a conversion to usb needs to be build. 
- r-delta sim controls: REALLY cheap icp. Looks like made to order (expected 1 week shipping on pre order). I get the impression that their first version doesn’t have a great build quality as they’re working on a new version with better components. 

- various Etsy options: not looking at these right now, but if someone has a recommendation I love to hear it!
 

Regarding DED, if there is a way to output the DED as a single display output, I can probably get a small rectangular display from Amazon for it  

if anyone has experiences with any of the above solutions, or if someone  knows of other suppliers of ICP and/or DED, I’d love to hear!

[Vinc_Vega]

10 hours ago, BaronVonVaderham said:

...

Regarding DED, if there is a way to output the DED as a single display output, I can probably get a small rectangular display from Amazon for it  

if anyone has experiences with any of the above solutions, or if someone  knows of other suppliers of ICP and/or DED, I’d love to hear!

 

Something like discussed here?

 

Regards, Vinc

Edited July 18, 2023 by Vinc_Vega

[JohnnyChicago]

Hi,

I have one ICP from PSM ... it's a good looking high quality product from Sebastian (Poland). But yeah, you can only contact him on Facebook as far as i know.

The DED is easy to make . Just buy an Arduino (or ESP32) , an SSD1322 Display and copy the code from the thread above.

 

[BaronVonVaderham]

@Vinc_Vega, actually that’s an interesting thread! I’ll have a look at that. 
but originally I was thinking about using an LCD/TFT/ISP type display of about 3” and have the text displayed on that. 
 

@JohnnyChicago, I take it you already persuaded from Sebastian before? How did that go? I take it that you’re very satisfied with the product?  It does look good I’ll admit. How much did he charge for the icp? The cheapest version of simgear is €339. 

[JohnnyChicago]

I have for now two products from Sebastian .. ICP and RWR Display .. all works fine and quality is good.

ICP was around 150€  + 20€ shipping cost +/- . ICP works as a joystick , so no need of extra software.

[wiggles5289]

1 hour ago, JohnnyChicago said:

I have for now two products from Sebastian .. ICP and RWR Display .. all works fine and quality is good.

ICP was around 150€  + 20€ shipping cost +/- . ICP works as a joystick , so no need of extra software.

I have seen this dudes work on FB. For that price, its worth it.

The DED is hitting the limitations of what I can understand and develop the Arduino coding for. Until someone can implement a library to translate the bits for inversion with a standard font file, there really is no cheap DED solution. It also sucks that because of the new IC checks implemented, you cant just export the DED or RWR without getting locked out of public MP servers.

[Vinc_Vega]

1 hour ago, wiggles5289 said:

... Until someone can implement a library to translate the bits for inversion with a standard font file, there really is no cheap DED solution... 

I already posted an update to your code here

It's ported to the U8g2 graphics library and uses new invertable fonts. Beware of that it has to be used with the ESP32 boards. 

Regards, Vinc 

[wiggles5289]

Killer. Ill test it out on STM32 and Vanilla Arduino Nano.

[Vinc_Vega]

You'll need lots of RAM and speed to bring up a resolution of 256x64 pixel. We therefore decided to go with the ESP32.

Pls. keep us informed about your progress.

Regards, Vinc

Edited July 23, 2023 by Vinc_Vega

[BaronVonVaderham]

I’ve placed an order with Sebastian, so I look forward to hearing from him in a couple of weeks. 
 

he told me that I will be needing dcs bios to use his stuff, so I’ll need to invest some time to find out what that’s about. If one of you had a noobs starter guide of sorts to dcs bios, that would be very welcome. 
 

for the mfds I decided to get the TM mfds and a couple of 8” hdmi touch screen displays. Don’t care about the touch part, but it’s plug and play (sans the dcs display config of course).

 I’ll need to look into a hdmi to usb adapter at some point, soo I can use my mono’s usb display output for the mfds and EHSI 

[Vinc_Vega]

16 hours ago, BaronVonVaderham said:

...

If one of you had a noobs starter guide of sorts to dcs bios, that would be very welcome. 

...

You may have a look into the below posting.

Regards, Vinc

 

 

 

[No1sonuk]

On 7/25/2023 at 5:41 PM, BaronVonVaderham said:

 I’ll need to look into a hdmi to usb adapter at some point, soo I can use my mono’s usb display output for the mfds and EHSI 

Something like this?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09BJWGPXR/

[BaronVonVaderham]

2 hours ago, No1sonuk said:

Something like this?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09BJWGPXR/

That’s the one I have my eyes on

[No1sonuk]

1 hour ago, BaronVonVaderham said:

That’s the one I have my eyes on

I have one.  Works well for 2 MFCDs.  I have a third but not hooked it up yet. 

[BaronVonVaderham]

7 hours ago, No1sonuk said:

I have one.  Works well for 2 MFCDs.  I have a third but not hooked it up yet. 

Does the usb-c port need to provide a video stream (I.e. be part of a graphics processing circuit, like a gpu), or can you use a regular usb-c port?  I currently plan to have 2 MFDs furred with hdmi inputs, and I ordered an EHSI and RWR from Sebastian (amongst other instruments and panels), which add 2 hdmi inputs. 
My mobo had only one hdmi output, and my gpu had only 2. I don’t have any graphics usb-c ports, but I do have two usb-c ports on the tab cluster of my mobo. 

[No1sonuk]

Mine's plugged into a USB on the mobo.