Air Manager 4.0 Overview

foreign [Music] so let's take a look at air manager and how we actually use it to interface with the various encoders buttons switches and potentiometers that we're using in our flight simulator so um of course the first thing we'll take a look at is as I stated I'm using a total of four arduinos right now with my system to interface with the various arrays of switches that are used for my my encoders my Garmin GPS units so if we take a look at our device manager if you come in here and you take a look at the individual comports now when you plug an Arduino in to your computer your Windows operating system is going to assign it to com Port so this is basically computer 101 I mean most everybody probably already knows this but as you can see I've got a total of five different arduinos attached to my computer first one I've got here is my Arduino Leonardo now that one is used specifically as my joystick controller um it is basically driving a series of potentiometers it's a five axis joystick controller which is essentially how it behaves pitch and roll on the um on the yolks you've got your yaw left and right on the Rudders and it also handles my throttle and my mixture the pots for those so we got five different ten thousand ohm potentiometers two of them for of course the throttle and the mixture are linear the others are just your standard rotating and potentiometers so the Leonardo is functioning as that now the others that I've got to find here I've got three 25 60 Arduino megas which are defined on these com ports and uh the one that shows up here is a USB serial Port is actually the Arduino Nano so as I said they're connected via USB so now let's go into air manager and see how air manager actually talks to those guys and handles the various functions air manager is an amazing piece of software if you haven't purchased it and you're in the process of building or have a home simulator highly recommend it it's a great piece of software so as I bring up air manager which is usually the first piece of software that I start when I'm getting ready to bring my simulator up you'll notice the various panels which I have built and defined and right now we're going to focus on the Cessna 172 for X-Plane and you can see where my instruments are basically defined on this panel and you can totally customize this you can grab these you can move them around you can shrink them up or down you can resize them put them wherever you want I've got these defined to match the cutouts in my instrument panel so that when this panel turns on which I can turn that on for you here right now and in the webcam view you should be able to see it powering up it gives the illusion that you're looking at an array of individual instruments what's really happening is this is being drawn on the fourth display which is connected to my gaming PC I have a total of six displays connected four of them displays one through four which provide my forward view left right and my instrument panel are all connected via HDMI to my Nvidia 3080 video card it supports four displays the two displays which you see in my Garmin 530 and 430 are these are basically four and five inch HDMI displays but they are connecting to the computer through a dual Port USB to HDMI converter and the reason I did that of course I can't connect more than four monitors but you can add as many as you want via USB I only needed two more so that's why I'm only using one adapter but when you define a panel you can choose which display you want that panel to come up on so that's a very handy feature now you'll notice here you'll see the four arduinos that I'm using for my instruments there's uh there's the three Mega 2560s and the one Nano excuse me now what's important when you add these arduinos to air manager and the way you do that is you simply go up here and you say add device you choose that you're adding an Arduino then you would choose the com Port that it is connected to um and as I showed you you can get that in your device manager and then what it does is in order to be able to use that error manager loads its own custom firmware onto that Arduino which allows it to interface and talk to it and that's how you connect them up directly to air manager now what's important as you add them and this is something that some people struggle with what's really important is as you add each Arduino you need to add them on an individual channel so the first one I added was on channel a so when I added my second one I was careful to make sure that when I added it as a new device I chose to set it up on channel B Channel C for the Nano D for the last 2560. that's a point that a lot of people tend to get hung up on is if you're having trouble a lot of times you can really get kind of snagged if you've accidentally tried to Define these guys to the same channel the system won't really know which one it needs to be talking to so they won't function properly so that's a very important little tip as you add your arduinos be sure that they are on their own individual channels now how do we use these channels so let's go in here and expand the c172 panel and as you can see I've got the individual instruments which these are the ones that come by default you don't have to pay extra for these and like here's the altimeter you can see it's got the definition of where it is same thing for all temperature and oil pressure you can tell it to preserve an aspect ratio as you shrink it up or down you can hide the background you can dim it there's different things you can do with them the thing we're interested in though is the hardware so let's just take our um oh we'll start off with autopilot heading now the way you add Hardware and air manager so say you've got your panel built and you're wanting to basically add we'll just say you want to add a parking brake okay let's say you want to add a parking brake well for parking brake is really simple um you basically just got to switch it's either on or it's off one or the other and there's the one that I use in my aircraft's 3D printed it's got a spring on it which basically holds it in place makes it uh it makes it very very simple so each device that you hook to an Arduino is either it's going to go to either a digital or analog pin and depending on the device you may only need one pin if it's a simple switch or a momentary push button you need one digital pin and a ground if you're using an encoder you're going to need at least two digital pins one for the value up one for the value down and a ground now the nice thing about the arduinos is you can take all of your grounds for your various Hardwares your buttons your switches and bring them all together and run them to a single ground pin so that's how you can you can put so many different instruments and you've only got usually three or four ground pins on an Arduino so you kind of have to share them if you can be hooking a lot of stuff but let's take a look at this parking brake so for the parking brake you can see I've got it basically said it's a switch simple switch and it's running on my first Arduino Omega on channel a this is where the channel is very important and I've got the signal coming in on digital pin number eight so there's two wires connected for this parking brake switch which one of them is going to ground doesn't really matter which side and one of them is going to digital pin eight so when that Arduino sees a signal and it sees this pin go high it knows that I have engaged the switch for the parking brake so air manager then informs the simulator you'll see down here it says searching for flight simulator it knows whether it's talking to X-Plane or Microsoft flight simulator and depending on which Sim you're running it then turns around and when I engage the parking brake it tells X-Plane okay he's engaged in a parking brake so we need to turn the parking brake on in the simulator it's that simple two pins one to ground one to digital let's take a look at something like the autopilot heading this is an encoder so when you're doing an encoder Hardware wise wiring it up it's pretty much the same thing the only thing is you've got to have two digital pins one for the value up as you turn it one way one for the value down as you turn it the other and a ground so there's three pins so as you can see here for my autopilot heading which is one of my encoders on my on my instrument panel I'm going to my first Arduino Mega on channel a and I'm using a ground and two digital pins you can see from that pull down you can Define which ones you're using I'm using pin D40 and d41 so that's how the encoder can then inform the simulator that I am turning that thing one way or the other and it will respond appropriately and adjust my autopilot heading now let's take it one a look at one that's actually a lot more complicated or it seems more complicated let's look at the Garmin gns 530. this is a piece of hardware and the way you add Hardware if you come in here and you click on the hardware button you can search for a specific aircraft let's say you wanted something for a Cessna 172 all right you'll see there are default Hardware items that are already built here's a flap controller micro switch which is one that I built you can customize and build your own switches you see I built one for my flap controller for both flight simulator 2020 and X-Plane but you'll find lots of these like the EGT reference dial your Magneto switch and it'll show you which simulators these various pieces of Hardware work with you simply go in you choose the one you want it'll show up over here in your panel and then you go in and Define it let's take a look at one that seems more complicated the garments got so many different buttons and encoders on it so how does this work same basic general idea when you go into the definition for this you'll notice say the CDI button I have the Arduino Mega 2560 on channel B configured as the controller for my GPS units so when I press the CDI button is basically activating a momentary push switch which has two pins connected one goes to ground and as you can see here it's looking for the CDI button signal on pin d52 we look at the flight plan button a ground pin D50 we scroll down take a look at the encoders same basic idea we've got the outer and inner encoders which I have dual encoders which you can get from prop wash simulation they're great fantastic but it's basically just two encoders built into one so the outer encoder connected to ground two pins d24 d25 the inner two pins 23 and 22. this is where the channel though is so important because this allows the air manager software to talk to multiple arduinos on different channels and understand which devices it's controlling so that's basically how this works it's you when you build your panel you lay out your instruments but then you can also go in and you add the hardware items Hardware items are defined you define them to which pins that you're using on which Arduino and that's how it is allowed it allows you to be able to communicate with your simulator so that your physical instruments and controls and work like they're supposed to with the virtual ones inside the simulator so that's air manager in a nutshell um and how I utilize it on my flight simulator so I hope this little short video has proven to be useful I hope that uh that it's helpful I know sometimes it can be kind of difficult to get your your head around how do you work with the arduinos I know I've connected this Arduino to my PC now how do I make air manager talk to it and how do I wire things up to make them work like they're supposed to so I hope you found this useful again short video got some some more videos coming but if you have any questions feel free to drop me an email or let me know in the comments I'll be happy to try to answer any questions I can this is one that I've been getting a lot of requests for so hope it's been useful and I will see you in the air soon thank you foreign

Channel: N4OSX

Views: 5,534

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Id: Lxm8IVN6y-s

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023