Third part of this brief coverage of my new Panels. Finally the first batch of encoders has arrived! I ordered 20 since each box sports 7 encoders.
MOAR wiring!
Soldering the encoders is very easy, especially since I planned ahead the prepared the resistors and the wires.
I am still waiting for the delivery of the last 4 encoders but I’m in no rush since the in-game bindings are still missing.
I did some tests online, most of them on GAW, but I’m still a long way to became a decent complementary to my pilots. Here are some of the streams.
Coding
Although I have coded these last two boxes even before wiring them, I decided to skip the topic until this last part because this is the longest and most complicate phase so far. I added, in fact, more preprocessor directives in order to optimize the code and make it more flexible and united as many variables and parameters as possible by using dynamic arrays and structures. Finally, since 3-way switches in the F-14 RIO seat currently don’t have any up/down toggles, I coded a workaround in order to use 2-way momentary switches (Arduino keeps track of the status of the 3-way switch and controls three joysticks buttons depending on the 2-way switch status). Mainlobe Clutter and Aspect are a couple of examples of in-game 3-way latch switches controlled by physical 2-way momentary ones. The last step, if Heatblur doesn’t accelerate the implementation of the missing key bindings, is controlling in-game knobs such as CAP, TID Mode and Range with standard encoders hence coding prev/next functions on multiple, parametric, joystick buttons.
The point of such effort is achieve standardization and make the coding of future boxes easier. As you probably have noticed already, I skipped the wiring diagram for these boxes because it is fundamentally the same I used for the Aux box and the UFC. Same happened to the firmware, polishing and new features aside.
FlyAndWire 