Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Home cockpit software integration

The software setup consists of XPlane, Zibo 737, CPFlight midwest plugin, ZHSI and a rasperry Pi4.

I personally prefer XPlane over P3D and for sure do not want to spend the huge amount of money requested by ProSim that is not justified for non-professional use IMO. XP or P3D is a personal taste of course. I think that what XP gives out of the box is much better than what P3D offers; on top of that XP has a great number of tools and sceneries provided for free by passionate users while on P3D you have to pay for everything. 
In the past XP was a difficult environment for home cockpit builders but now the situation is very good and promise for improvements in the future. XP is easy to customize, upgrading does not require full reinstallation and most of HC tools are available for free.

The integration of the CPFlight hardware has been very easy thanks to the great midwest driver that supports the Zibo 737 natively. The driver is cheap and the support is very good; the installation is easy and intuitive. My radios, MIP and CDU worked immediately once connected.
CPFlight hardware  is, as I constantly repeat, very good even if a bit expansive. IMO the time saved using this hardware its look and feel and quality really pays off. During the integration I had few problems with power supply and finding the correct way to connect the components in daisy chain problems that have been solved with CPFlight support. In this respect that documentation is not good enough and should be improved a bit.

I add a 75 inch 4K Samsung TV for the main screen and connected the monitors on the MIP and the one of the CDU to my 980Ti graphic card. It has not been easy to find the proper configuration of the monitor cables as it depends on the graphic card. It supports up to 4 mnitors but no VGA socket while MIP monitors have VGA connectors. In the market exists converters from VGA to HDMI and DVI but not all of them work well. 
My NVidia card has only 4 Gb RAM; it runs with 4k resolution and all the other monitors but need 3jFPS to keep the frame rate under control.. This is very important while flying on VATSIM because it disconnects the sim if the frame rate drops below 20/second. The reason is that when the frame rate is below 20, XP slow the simulation down and other people on VATSIM sees big liners flying as slow as a Cessna does. Perfectly fine IMO to make the simulation more close to reality.


The TV fits perfectly in the wall of the sauna. I do not foresee to install monitors for lateral views but I admit it makes a big difference so I will probably review this decision in future. For such a big screen a resolution of 4K is mandatory so I had to trick a bit the configuration of XP to get a reasonable frame rate. Now I fly at 30 or more frames per second  and 3jFPS reduces the graphic details when the frame rate drops below 30.
To improve the frame rate I connected the upper and lower EICAS to Raspberry Pi4.

737 instrumentation is displayed in the MIP monitors with ZHSI bot the in the main computer and in the RPi4. A must for home cockpit builders. The CDU screen is managed by ZCDU. The content of the FMC can also by displayed in the monitor of the CDU with xPanels but it is a bit slow.

RPi4 supports 2 4K monitors and in my case they are used for the upper and lower EICAS and the stand-by instruments whose content is displayed by ZHSI. I am satisfied of the result but note that the refresh is a bit slow. For this reason I have delegated the RPi4 to the EICAS. The slowness is due to the default graphic driver of the RPi4: I know that there is a better driver but I was not able to let it work unless together with VLC. Now there are other linux distributions for Rpi4 like ubuntu and fedora core that could help.

It is a pity that Zibo does not allow to dis-anchor and move around the display of the instruments. ZHSI and ZCDU works well and they are very well supported. However ZHSI uses jfoenix java library that seems to be unsupported so it could be a critical tool in future.

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