DomoticsDuino by Marco Lamanna

Anyone who has followed the construction of my Home Cockpit in the past years knows that I used a standard keyboard circuit to interface the simulator buttons.

I talked about it (many years ago!) in this post /en/blog/learjet-45-home-cockpit/post/2012/02/handmade-input-interface.html

The idea was very interesting and really low cost...by disassembling a simple keyboard and putting a lot of patience in soldering all the contacts it was possible to create an input interface to be able to manage all the buttons in a very simple and low-cost way.

Unfortunately a few months ago, during the recovery phases of my Home Cockpit, due to some wrong connection, I managed to burn two keyboards.

So I started thinking about some other alternatives (also because I had run out of keyboards!) and I came across the fantastic MOBIFLIGHT.

In few words, MOBIFLIGHT by Sebastian Möbius is an Open Source project that allows the integration of standard hardware with your flight simulator.

Using for example the famous ARDUINO microcontroller, it is possible to manage INPUT (buttons, potentiometers, ...) and OUTPUT (led, lcd, servos, ...) of the simulator.

There is an excellent Wiki on the official GitHub page that allows you to learn more about the potential of this project: https://github.com/MobiFlight/MobiFlight-Connector/wiki

he official Youtube channel of the project is also a great source of information and support: https://www.youtube.com/@MobiFlight

After reading the documentation and watching some tutorials on Youtube, I decided that MOBIFLIGHT could be for me.

Fortunately at home I had some unused ARDUINO UNO boards (thanks to my home automation experiments) and so I decided to give it a try, even if that particular type of board (ARDUINO UNO) is not in the list of officially supported ones (https://www.mobiflight.com/en/documentation/module.html).

So I create a very simple test case: a button connected to the ARDUINO UNO pins which triggers a "virtual" event towards MOBIFLIGHT.

So let's start with the download and installation of MOBIFLIGHT CONNECTOR, a software for Windows that allows connection with the simulator and complete configuration management.

When first started, MOBIFLIGHT CONNECTOR scans the system for connected ARDUINO boards. In my case, even if not officially supported, my ARDUINO UNO is immediately found; I'm also prompted to install the MOBIFLIGHT firmware inside, which I do immediately.

The firmware is a particular software that is installed on microcontrollers to instruct them on how to manage INPUT and OUTPUT connected to them.

In this case, the MOBIFLIGHT firmware is part of the project and is necessary to allow the ARDUINO board to understand how it has to manage the various devices connected to it. This operation is done only the first time a new ARDUINOboard is used. If firmware updates are published, the system will ask us whether or not we want to perform the update.

With the firmware installed, ARDUINO is immediately recognized as a MOBIFLIGHT Module to be configured.

We are therefore ready for the actual configuration

At this point, we connect our test button to an ARDUINO INPUT PIN and add it in the module configuration on MOBIFLIGHT, taking care to insert the correct pin number.

Every time you make a change to the module configuration, you must remember to update the configuration on the board, using the Upload config function.

We then move on to the INPUT configuration to assign a function on the simulator to the test button created previously.

In my case, I assigned the parking brake, using FSUIPC offsets (I still use FSX).

At this point we are ready to verify the operation using the TEST function, which MOBIFLIGHT makes available to us, without the need to necessarily have the simulator turned on.

Below you will find a short video showing all the steps taken: from the first run of MOBIFLIGHT, to its configuration up to the final test, which took place successfully. The next step will be to buy an officially supported board (I'll get a compatible ARDUINO NANO), also because I need many pins to manage all the buttons and with ARDUINO UNO I wouldn't have enough.

After successfully testing the free version of AIR MANAGER, I decided to buy the commercial version to have access to all the features and be able to download a whole series of panels and community-developed tools.

Before I can actually use it, I have to do one last preparation step: reassemble the GLASS COCKPIT monitors on the front panel.

The monitors are connected to a surrounding PC running only AIR MANAGER and connected by network to the FSX PC

This is the area where the monitors should be remounted

These are the monitors

And here is the final result, with a plastic cover over the monitors and AIR MANAGER running

At this moment I'm using just free panels, downloaded from the siminnovations website. This is the link: https://siminnovations.com/community-panels

My idea is to try to develop some panel / instrument, starting from one of those already available.

Here you can find a short video about my actual Glass Cockpit

OPENHAB Developer team releases the new OpenHAB 4, Milestone 1.

It's a Milestone release, so it's not intended to be bugs free. The update process may broke your actual setup.

It's a wonderful news and we can expect a stable version soon.

This is the official annuncement, directly from OpenHAB forum: https://community.openhab.org/t/openhab-4-0-milestone-builds/145132.

There is also a post about feedback on install, update and use of the new version: https://community.openhab.org/t/openhab-4-0-milestone-discussion/145133.

Let's think about planning an update...

The time has come to resume the Glass Cockpit, still missing in the current version of simulator

In Version 1 I had implemented it with some software that I had found on the net but which, unfortunately, were not very flexible and above all were not very optimized and often crashed the PC that managed them.

Here you will find two posts where I talk about it /en/blog/learjet-45-home-cockpit/post/2013/05/glass-cockpit-assembly.html /en/blog/learjet-45-home-cockpit/post/2013/11/glass-cockpit.html

However, I thank Dave Ault for having created them and made them available...without him I might not have discovered the possibility of creating a glass cockpit.

I've certainly arrived late, but I've recently discovered a great software, AIR MANAGER, to create panels for the different flight simulators (FSX, P3D, X-Plane and of course FS2020).

It is not free software and is sold by Sim Innovations .

The price is not affordable and the potential is very high.

I'm not here to speak about its characteristics, also because there is a lot of material on the net, but in a nutshell I tell you that it allows the creation of any type of panel and instrument which can be interfaced with the main flight simulators.

To develop a panel or tool from scratch, you need to have some programming skills, read the API docs it and learn the LUA scripting language.

For those who don't want to be involved in programming skills, the community provides a whole series of already implemented panels and tools to choose from.

It is also possible to start from one of them and make changes to make it more useful for your goal...I will probably adopt this strategy, mainly for a matter of time.

That said, before buying it, I downloaded the free version that allows you to try it with just one panel. I wanted to make sure it could work on my old Glass Cockpit PC which is still running Windows 7 (and I'm not planning to upgrade it right now).

In the following video the result, extremely positive.

The next step will be to purchase the full version and start playing with the various panels, reassembling the monitors in their place in the simulator.

In this video I check the engine startup, taxi and take-off procedures from Turin Caselle LIMF runway 36, using Microsoft FSX

The simulator is not yet complete; all the Glass Cockpit instrumentation is still missing

Enjoy your viewing

In this video, let's see together what are the steps to perform an OPENHAB release update on Windows 10

In the previous video we had done the standard installation of OpenHAB 3.4.1 on Windows. Today we see how to update this release to version 3.4.2, just released.

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

In this video, let's see the steps to setup OPENHAB 3.4.1 on Windows 10

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

In this period, the usual SMART lighting of the Christmas tree could not be missing.

Using an old SONOFF POW, dusted off for the occasion, I integrated the activation of the Christmas tree lights in OpenHAB 3.

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

Third and last video related to rules triggered by datetime item.

Let's add a switch in the sitemap to enable/disable rule execution.

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

In this video we see the creation of a sitemap to set a DateTime type item used for the activation of a rule.

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

Test of all the led of the assembled startup panel. There are two types of LEDs

• 12v for the panel lights, always on or always off
• 3.3v for the status lights, switched on or off according to the state of the simulator

Enjoy your viewing

In this video we see an example of a datetime trigger on a rule as an application of the new Openhab 3.3 feature that I introduced in the previous video

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

In this video we talk about the possibility of managing the activation of a rule based on date and time through an item of type DateTime.

Up to version 3.2 of OpenHAB the rules that can be activated via date / time had wired the time conditions in the definition of the rule itself.

In version 3.3 the possibility has been added to set an item of type DateTime as a trigger for activating the rule: in this way it is possible to set the activation of the rule through the interface, without having to change the definition of the rule itself.

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

Arrangement of the fixed LEDs of the center pedestal, using wooden cuts to be embedded in the panels.

Enjoy your viewing

New restart for the "version 2" of my Home Cockpit, let's hope it's the right time.

After having disassembled everything, let's start by checking the LEDs of the various panels.

Enjoy your viewing

In this video we see an example of a datetime trigger on a rule as an application of the new Openhab 3.3 feature that I introduced in the previous video

This video does not presume to be a tutorial, but simply a step by step of what has been done to achieve the goal. I hope that it will help someone.

Enjoy your viewing

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