My A-10C preparation

fantastic !!!!!!!!!

Thanks.

Chris, congrats to your baby! Hope he or she grows up to love flying like daddy.

Does that mean you have to give up your intended cockpit room for the baby? Both are so important. What a dilemma. :music_whistling:

Nope we have a spare bedroom for baby and if my room is threatened I have the garage as a fallback. I don't really have a plan for my pit so to speak but I do have a plan for where it goes!

looking good. keep it going.

I found this dial from 0 to 9 in Fry's. Increments steps of 1 instead of 10. Oh well, at least it's about the right size. It'd do for now.

Dude! I've got an IDENTICAL dial!!

:D

Hi Cat, good to hear from you. Bet you are done with your BS pit. Are you going to build one for the A-10C? Or are you holding out for the Apache. That'd be quite a wait though. The A-10C will be a blast. You should do it!

Alex, good to know we have the same dial. By the way, does it matter if I use a linear or audio pot?

Shawn, we should use linear pots. I/O card designers worked hard to ensure minimum non-linearity distortion to the signal coming from the pots, so the pots themselves must be as linear as possible. Audio pots only entertain our ears, and they do us no good when it comes to axis inputs.

I need some help too. The two small text display screens in the cockpit, what are they called, and is it possible to find their dimensions? I figured the larger one has 24X11 ASCII characters, which suggests a resolution of 192X176. I searched for display components for this one, but unfortunately there's nothing of such kind available. To have a black background and green texts, this could be an FSTN negative LCD display, or an OLED display. I didn't find anything similar. Now there're too alternatives: a larger single-color LCD in a different color configuration, or a larger TFT configured as if it had black background and green text. Of course it would take a microcontroller to complete either solution. If I had the size, I might be able to decide what type of screen to start with.

I was talking about this screen:

I couldn't tell much about its content, just tried imitating with my own 7" screen, please forgive me for all those typos on it. The thing looks like the following pics when programed.

The white balance on my camera sucks, I never caught the right color on this shot:

This is not a drawing, it's a second picture taken in a dark room with 1/30' shotter. It's the closest color I could catch on cam. The characters appear as pure green to the naked eye, almost a perfect match with the A-10C display.

*Edit:

TFT screens come in different sizes, I happen to have a small collection:

3.5" 320 x 240

4.3" 480 x 272

7.0" 800 x 480

There're also other choices, like 5.7". Now all I need to know is how big the actual window is. With that data, I'll be able to build an output board with an appropriate TFT component.

I like your style Rocketeer!

Thanks Chris.

Alex, thanks for the input on linear pots. I'd get those instead.

Stranded Duckling from Viperpits.org has a personal site on his A-10 cockpit progress. http://www.strandedduckling.com/index.html

He has very kindly shared PDFs of his panel drawings and even baseboards.

If you print them to 100% size, the panels are 5 1/4" wide. Then take a CDU picture released from the A-10C preview by Sim HQ, crop it and then size it to that dimension, the CDU is about 3" by 2 1/4" or 7.5cm by 5.5 cm approx.

Now that you know the CDU dimension, please do as described above. When printed out, cut out the CDU window and overlay the paper over the most appropriate LCD screen size you have there and show us the result! I'm sure it'd look great.

Cool, I need to go out and find a printer to do that - don't have my own.

7.5 x 5.5cm sounds right for the 4.3" wide screen in the middle. The 4.3" has got a 9.87 x 5.75 cm display area, if I put the 7.5 x 5.5cm window over it, I will have an area of 364 x 260 pixels to display my content. I'll download the files and have them printed soon.

Rocketeer Your measurements are just a bit off.

Standard US control heads are 5.745 inch wide + or - 1 hundredth of an inch(145.94 mm).This measurement is the width of the aluminum back plate. The front back light Plexiglas plate is 5.699 inch (144.76mm) wide.both measurements include the paint on the aluminum and on the Plexiglas. Some good references are on http://www.xflight.de

I just found an old CDU panel the LCD opening is 3.26 inch (82.68mm)wide by 2.62 inch (66.81 mm)tall it would be close on the new CDU opning

Deadman, thanks for the info. Seems like I was almost 1/2" off, which is more than 'a bit' off. But I'm not particular as to insist on exact dimension as real life's.

Are you saying that all US combat planes have the same width in term of backplates? Your reference is for F-16. I thought the A-10, or any other plane, would have its own dimensions from the F-16. It's not like they are made by the same company?

Alex, I see many knobs are for volume. Those for lights will use pots as well. You recomended to use linear pots. But those for volume, must they also use linear pots? ie. stay away from audio pots totally, even for volume?

rocketeer the panel width is standard for all US air force aircraft the control heads IE the ECM pane is in several different Aircraft F-16 ,A-10 and others.The f-16 site is given for a reference on panels only.The measurements I gave to you are off of my Panels that are correct for the A-10A or A-10C model I uses an average off of my ILS auto pilot and Laste panels.

Deadman, thanks for the correction. I think I need to go with something bigger, probably a 5.7" TFT for a 82.68 x 66.81 mm opening.

Shawn, volume pots, a.k.a. logarithmic taper pots are built to complement the non-linear characteristics of human hearing. We use decibel(dB) to measure the volume of sound, and logarithmic pots have similar output characteristics. The output voltage changes much more rapidly on one end than on the other end. The way I call it, is VERY, VERY non-linear. When you don't apply it to acoustic uses, it's gonna act funny to your other senses.

Alex, thanks for the clarification again.

Deadman, seems like you have some authoritative source on the F-16 or A-10 info. I think the panel above is in the F-16. Did you build the F-16 cockpit? Anyway, good to know that you have good info on the A-10. Whatever I build I am going to show it here and hopefully if I am off or wrong you can point out to me. Thanks in advance!

Shawn, I was yelling at you on msn...lol

I see many knobs are for volume. Those for lights will use pots as well. You recomended to use linear pots.

You can use pots for this controls IF game has coded respective commands in axis - probable they coded in keystrokes (keyboard or joy buttons)...

In this case you need rotary switch or encoder (and for these, specific I/O card) to simulate pots. :thumbup:

If you use pot's, you need software to divide axis in bands, to make keystrokes (more complicated) ...

Sokol1_Br

You can use pots for this controls IF game has coded respective commands in axis - probable they coded in keystrokes (keyboard or joy buttons)...

In this case you need rotary switch or encoder (and for these, specific I/O card) to simulate pots. :thumbup:

 

If you use pot's, you need software to divide axis in bands, to make keystrokes (more complicated) ...

 

Sokol1_Br

If you look through the Black Shark clickabledata.lua the things marked with class_type.LEV and realtive = false expect an absolute value in arm_lim defined range. These can be mapped to a pot. The only ones that would require an encoder type approach would be those marked class_type.LEV with a relative = true. In general it looks like in cockpit things that would be pots (limited rotational travel) have relative = false and those that would be encoders (spins freely with out hard stops) in real life are relative = true. I assume they'll use the same approach for the A10 module, but we won't know for sure until it's out.

In almost all cases you will have to write code that does some mapping which could be as simple as converting your hardware readings into the necessary value range (in the case of a direct x axis from 0-65535 to 0-1). The only time you would not need any code is if you where reading a Direct X axis and the game configuration screens allowed you to assign an axis to them. Black Shark does not expose things like brightness knobs in this way. So I would plan on having to write code.

Rocketeer i don't have any experience building a f-16 cockpit.

I only used the ECM panel as an example that here is a standard for the size in width of the control panels.The panels all so have a specified length and increase in a set amount.

I

Alex, thanks for the clarification again.

 

Deadman, seems like you have some authoritative source on the F-16 or A-10 info. I think the panel above is in the F-16. Did you build the F-16 cockpit? Anyway, good to know that you have good info on the A-10. Whatever I build I am going to show it here and hopefully if I am off or wrong you can point out to me. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for your input guys.

For the linear pots, I notice there are two types, those with a switch and those without. For those with a switch, basically when you rotate all the way counter clockwise, you'd feel a click and it switches off. I suppose for volume knobs even though we should use linear switch, it makes sense to have a on/off switch built in? I guess those for lights etc. doesn't need the switch. what do you guys think?

The switch reminds me of radios. This type of pot is used to tune the receiver's frequency. Some volume pots also have switches built inside, and they are used in portable cassette players to control the volume. When you adjust the volume all the way down, it shuts off the power to the entire device, kind of like a master switch.

In the cockpit, there's no need to incorporate such mechanism, but if you don't have other choice, it doesn't hurt anything to install this type of pots.

http://www.rockwellcollins.com/ecat/gs/CDU-900.html?smenu=103

That seems to be basically the same CDU model as used in the A-10, and Deadman's measurements fit:

CDU-900 Family

Display and Keyboard

Screen size 3.25 in. x 2.60 in.

8 lines, 22 characters/line 220 x 170 graphics capability 8 line select keys 7 generic function keys Full alphanumeric plus dedicated keys Qualification

MIL-E-5400, Class 1A

MIL-STD-461 EMI (Incl 200 V/M) 1500 V/M Design

Size

Millimeters

181.00 x 146.05 x 165.1 (w/o conn)

Inches 7.125 H x5.75 W x 6.5 D (w/o conn) Weight

4.54 kg max

(incl I/O card, w/o GPS) 10.0 lb max Cooling

Convection

Power

28 V dc, 34 W max

(w/o GPS module) Lighting 5 V ac, 10 W Memory

4 MB flash EEPROM, application software and fixed CSCI

1 MB RAM

Also, Driven Technologies has a replica CDU and MFD that might be a useful reference:

http://driven-technologies.com/prod_pages/prod1.html