Life, The Universe and ... Everything!

Finally have some time to breathe and so it is time to play with my flight sim ... but instead of launching X-Plane 11, I fired up the X-Plane World Editor and spent a few hours adding ground traffic routes to WMKK KL International Airport. Now we have baggage carts, trucks and other ground vehicles moving about. I also played with the new Terminal Kit and KLIA2 finally has a Skybridge! I will upload to the X-Plane Scenery Gateway soon. KLIA2 Skybridge Taxi Routes in WED Debugging Taxi...

There appears to be quite a bit of updates going on with the ExtPlane plugin source code in the last few months, and it turned out some of these are needed to fix some of the bugs I am facing when using it. Unfortunately, to get the latest and greatest version, you have to compile it yourself. Here are my notes on how to go about compiling the plugin on Linux and Windows. Note: If you are using my Pi-XPlane-FMC-CDU, you can just use the pre-compiled binaries linked to in my post here. This ...

This is my fully 3D printed design for a Dual Concentric Rotary Encoder with Push Button. It's useful for making the knobs for flight-sim radio panels, where there is an outer knob to set the smaller digits, and an inner knob to set the larger digits. It's inspired by a design I found on Youtube, where the designer, Theo Deckers, CNC'd a bracket to hold two regular rotary encoders together. I don't have access to a CNC machine or the parts that Theo uses, so I decided to design one purely us...

I've been stumped for the last few weeks with getting my Raspberry Pi FMC to work with Zibo's 737. I used the ExtPlane plugin to interface my code on the Pi with the simulator, and it works well for almost all FMCs except Zibo's. The symptoms would be missing or truncated data updates, causing the screen on the Pi to get messed up. Since I'm only working on the Pi end, it's hard to tell whether the problem is with ExtPlane or Zibo. The AirFMC iPad app, which comes with its own plugin, is abl...

I spent a few hours updating my Kuala Lumpur International Airport (WMKK) scenery for X-Plane. I've added Taxi Routes for every single taxiway in the airport. Taxi routes are used to guide AI aircraft around the airport, without which they will taxi through buildings and across grass areas. That involved not only tracing out each taxiway in WED, but also naming them. This also means the ATC is now a bit more intelligent when guiding you around the airport, i.e. when requesting taxi clearanc...

The Garmin G1000's displays have a 4:3 ratio. Since these are getting harder to find these days, I wanted to see what the X-Plane Garmin G1000 looks like without the bezel, when stretched full screen on a 16:9 monitor. Laminar's Philipp Ringler mentioned in a blog post that it could be done: Screen-only popup instrument windows Several people who build home-cockpit setups have asked about removing the bezels from the popup displays, so they can have only the screen of a GNS430/530, FMS or G...

X-Plane 11.10, released yesterday, features a new default Garmin 1000 module ... which can be used as an option in the Cessna 172 right now, and most likely will be adopted by add-on GA aircraft eventually. I have three ongoing unfinished home cockpit projects but this is tempting me to start a fourth! It looks like I am going to end up with a hybrid Boeing 737/Cessna 172 !

Up till now, I've been using the ExtPlane plugin to integrate my 737 home cockpit components with the X-Plane Flight Simulator. ExtPlane is a third party plugin that gives networked devices access to X-Plane's DataRefs and Commands. With it, external devices can query the current state of the Flight Simulator, such as the current airspeed and elevation, or the present position of a switch. It can also be used to manipulate state within the Flight Simulator, such as to change the state of a p...