Interfacing Hardware

[Yoshi]

Hi,

as mentioned in another thread I'm planning a homecockpit (Citation 750). Since I decided to use FSX as my software environment the next question is about the hardware interface. There are many possibilities out there, a few months ago I started testing with IOCards and FS9. Worked really nice, but I'm not sure if it really fits my requirements.

The Citation by Wilco/Feelthere seems to have some extra developed functions (the two battery circuits for example). They seem to be not addressable via FSUIPC or any keyboard shortcut.
Here comes SimConnect into play. I didn't recieve an answer from Wilco support yet, so I don't know yet if there is a possibility to interface these functions via API. If it is - great. But this fires up even more confusion...
From what I've read yet I can do pretty much everything in SimConnect (using C#). But can I still use IOCards? Or would I have to build everything on my own? I'm not sure about this thing, perhaps it's even "cleaner" to code everything, from interfacing FSX via SimConnect to the Hardware switches on my own.

Perhaps all those thoughts are totally silly and stupid, but every help and explanation or links to do some RTFM are appreciated!


Thanks in advance, cheers

Yoshi

[Alex Barrett]

Yoshi,

Assuming what you want to be done, can be done via SimConnect.

Then at the most basic, and least time consuming, level, it would be easy enough to assign all your cockpit functions keypress combinations through a .exe (or series of them)

Then you could have your IOCards trigger the keypresses when a switch was flicked, button depressed etc.

There's certainly enough software out there designed to do that. I even know one person who used the keypress trigger software bundled with Saitek Joysticks, to trigger his cockpit commands.

As I said, that would be the most basic way of doing things, to my mind, and I don't think it would affect functionality in anyway.

Alex