Updated: Using the Datareftool in X-Plane

hello once again i am back i was kind of thinking that you know one of the things that we need to learn how to do um very good i would say in order to be able to use all that custom data ref and command stuff is you need to be able to use the data rift tool and i think i remember from the last video that i made about how to find the custom commands or data reps it's been a long time and i think that the new version of the data rev2 is also so much better than the previous one that i had used in that other video so i thought it was a good idea to just go ahead and make a new video with the new version of the data ref tool so that's what we're going to do today first all right so we're going to go ahead and jump into x-plane here and we're gonna basically uh use my uh cessna 172 from airfoil labs which is i don't really fly it right now anymore because i'm flying the mooney more and i'm also flying the twin engine uh what is it the twin comanche because i'm trying to get ready to take the p3 uh with that star so i want to get some multi-engine you know practice um i haven't really been flying at all in the last you know four months or so but i'm trying to slowly get back into everything that i was doing before so we're going to go ahead and jump inside here and there are certain things in here that i want to assign because i already know that they don't work um so first things first in order to use the the data ref tool you know you need to go to this website here um basically if you do a google search for uh data riff to download on upon the many results that you'll get one of them will be inside the explain.org but you can also go directly to the one on github so you basically click on this link right here let me get myself out of the picture here real quick so that i don't block anything so you go to the downloaded here and then it's going to take you to the to the github page where it's at so this is the latest release of july 14 2021 and if you go down here to the bottom unless you're a linux genius or somebody who likes to do the you know the your own compiling or whatever you can get the source code but if you're just like me you just want to get the the zip file that uh you know that comes you know so when you download it you're gonna get a zip folder obviously and if i i already did this so i'm not gonna download it again but you know when you download it obviously it's going to be um this zip right here and you're going to extract it just like everything else and you're going to get this folder and it's going to have two versions in it i already moved the other one out so it's going to be data ref 2 for x plane 10 and then also for x plane 11. i already moved the one for x plane 11 over to my plugins folder so what you would do is you would just move this folder over to your plugins folder in the x-plane and you're going to basically have a folder called a data ref tool i renamed mine so i took off the the version number and everything but this is where it's at and that's how you do it inside there all you're going to have is this 64 folder um and that's all you're going to get in there huh there's nothing in there i'm kind of amazed that it works but anyways um so that's what you need to do first of all once you have the data riff tool in your plugins folder you'll be able to get to the menu right here and the only thing you need to do is go to search and you're going to get this little window here and i really like this one more because um you can actually uh make it bigger both directions and there's a lot of features about this tool that i really like and then not only that but they also made it not um see-through anymore so before it was really hard like if you had the data ref tool let's say over a certain part of the airplane where it was bright you couldn't really see the letters and with this one you could see it a lot more so i really really like this one here right so first things first i'm going to show you a little bit here the the layout of the tool so the search bar right here you can search for multiple search terms separated by a space so if you wanted to look for something you know that or multiple things at once you can do that but for me i think it's already confusing enough just to search for one term so i've only ever used it with one term but if you did want to search for multiple terms at once you can use them separated by a space this little thing right here says irregular or regular expressions uh to tell you the truth i don't even know exactly what that means so i'm not gonna get any further i looked i read the instructions and everything for it but i couldn't find any more explanation of what that does um this one right here is uh the case sensitive so in case you want to look for if you want to just use something that's a capital letters uh you would activate this one here so that it only finds uh whatever you typed up here in the in the lower case or uppercase uh letters and that's what that would filter out this one here the ch it's for changes so when you click on that you'll see right now when i'm doing it it'll clear out the whole entire list and only data riffs that or commands that change will show up so if you press a button only the command commander data ref that was activated when you push that button will show up in the list and then this one changes between data reps and commands or only data reps or only commands so you can narrow down the list that way too up here you see the total number of data reps that are loaded so as you start typing letters here you know you'll see the numbers start coming down coming down because it's narrowing the search so that's really handy too that once you once you put a search term in here you're not gonna have thousands and thousands of data reps to go through you're only gonna have some now another cool thing that i really like about this one here is that you can actually copy the name of the command or data riff so you can paste it into you know like for example the configurator or whatever you or even if you want to put it into a text document before you were not able to do that and another thing is this edit button once you have a certain data refer command highlighted and you click edit you can actually change the value of the data riff so if it's a writable data riff you can see the results that changing that value has inside the simulator so this is a really cool uh tool to have all right so like i said the first one we're gonna do is uh the autopilot uh button right here so right now you can see that with this airplane loaded i have 9433 data reps which is a lot you know so if i wanted to put like just ap you know now it only shows 611 but that's still a lot so maybe i can just type autopilot and now it's well it's 314 but remember what i told you that you can just isolate it to the ones that are changing so if you click on that you can clear it all the way and then when i press the autopilot button you see that you know whatever showed up here so here is the very top one right here 172 slash autopilot slash ap underscore ap that's the that's the one that actually gets um activated now if you want to know if that's a data ref or a command usually commands will not have any numbers over here but if you want to make sure you can just put commands only and then when you press it again you see it come up right there so that's the one you're going to need to know now that's a simple one because it's just a little you know command that's it it has no values no nothing else associated so that's good so now we're going to go ahead and go over to this side here let me see all right and we're going to do the true airspeed little bug here so in order to do that you know we'll go ahead and delete that and we'll just put maybe tas um and right now everything is clear so we can move it but you see since i only have commands it doesn't come up so you can go ahead and put data refs and try it again and you can see that the value is changing there right so there are two things you need to know about when you get a a data rate for something like this first of all you need to get the data riff itself the name of it and then you need to know what the values are what's the maximum and the minimum and you need to also know what the step is so when you when you move it you go to one extreme and you go to zero you see that and if you go to the other extreme it gets to 100 in this particular case uh now when you move it one little click at a time you can see that it changes point 25 each time you click once so that's what they call um they call it the step or the index i think they call it the in data riff index in the configurator so those are all the notes you need to take in order to to figure that out okay so that's that's that one right there all right so now we're going to try to find what the function or the data rifle command for this is right here so right now we don't have any search terms in there at all so basically you know we can move it and we don't we can just check to see if anything is moving uh you know so we can figure it out um but you have to go through this entire list you know which is 6700 data reps right here so we don't want to really do that so i'm going to type artificial horizon and then just put that i want to see the ones that are changing so if i move it that's actually not showing up okay well this one is very interesting because you see that that does say ah but i didn't have the the capital the the case so it wasn't showing up but now it is but i'm telling you some of these things are very hard to find so you just have to you know guess and take different chances um so obviously you can see that uh if we move it all the way to one extreme it goes to negative one and then if i go all the way up to the other extreme which is at the top it takes a while it gets to one so the range for this one is gonna be negative one to one and then every time you push it it's changing by point zero one you see that was zero 0.99 and then 0.98 0.97 so you your step is going to be 0.01 so that's one of the things you need to know then so that's how we found that one the next one we're going to do is the alternate static air valve so we're going to go ahead and clear all of this and we're just let's try to type out for alternate and then we're going to go down here let me see so we can move the static air valve but right now we only have data revs so it's not coming up with data reps so we can try commands and it's not showing up there either so let's try with 172. uh let's see if that shows up nothing showing up there let's see that's a lot of them right there so i don't know if we do the star get rid of that okay it's not oh it's actually a data riff it's not a command so let's do that so if i switch it let's let's change it back to that okay okay so i think is this one right here the actuators static air but there's two of them so sometimes you need to figure out which one it is you see when i open it up is is both of them are zero and then when you close it both of them are one so it could be either one of these but sometimes you just need to try one and if it doesn't work then you try the other one on this particular airplane i believe a lot of the things do have a v after them so i'm gonna i already have my notes and it is the one with the v so i already know that but if i didn't know that i would probably try one of them and if that didn't work then i would try the other one so anyways so that's that one the next one we're going to try is the engine mixture so for this one let's say we want to try mix and let's see if we change it there's a mixture right there so this is the only one that's particular to this airplane so you can see that is 172 slash engine slash mixture underscore ratio underscore zero and obviously if you push it all the way in it goes to one and if you push it all the way out i bet you it goes to zero but i don't want to push it all the way out because then i'm gonna kill the engine um but we need to find out if there's uh a step sometimes you don't need the step but sometimes you do but in this particular case uh no i don't think we're gonna use a step it's it's very very variable so i'm just not even gonna mess with a step but at least we know that this is the data rift that we need so that's what you would write and you would write your maximum and minimum values which is zero to one okay and the last thing we're going to use is the fuel tank selector so i guess let me see we can probably use the word fuel in order to do that one and so let's see if we switch over to the left tank oops there we go so you can see that it was 172 slash com underscore fuel underscore tank underscore left and that is a command i believe let me see okay yeah so that goes to the right and that goes to the right again so these are two commands but at the same time let me see there is a uh 172 slash panel actuator slash fuel tank select and you see that when it's on the left tank it's negative one and then when it's on if i can change it okay there we go when it's in the both is zero and when it's on the right is one so you have negative one zero and one so you can try both of these with this because it might be it might be the the data riff or it might be the commands up here and you can see that it also changes this standard x-plane uh command right here or a data ref but in in the numbers do change right there too but when you select the normal uh configuration configuration command for fuel tank selector it doesn't do anything in this particular airplane all right so that's pretty much how you find you know your custom commands or data reps so the reason i wanted to do you know this variety of uh commands and data revs is because each one of them is a little bit different and although like i said before i had already done it on a previous video uh about using the data rev tool to find these things um i think it's a good exercise just to show it with a new one here that that i have now the new version of it you know so this is going to be the foundation for if you want to use any sort of custom commands or data reps to make your own custom keywords which is the part that i was planning to the the next video on but it's not working so instead what i'm gonna do right now i'm going to basically just show you how to assign the standard you know configurator um parameters or keywords for all of these different uh buttons and switches and encoders and show you that with this particular airplane they're not working and then we're gonna go and assign them the actual custom data wraps and commands to make each one of these things work with the airfoil lab cessna 172 so that's my plan for now so hopefully i can start working on that one pretty soon after this and then i will upload it as soon as it's ready all right well thank you guys very much again for watching and hope it was worth the wait the four-month wait for me to start making videos again and uh yeah so we'll see you on the next one thanks

Channel: Qosmokid

Views: 445

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Id: C167E9maT5s

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021