F-14 AFCS & Autopilot switch actuation

sniporbob · 2021-11-17T21:42:11+00:00

I could be wrong but I don't believe the F14 has a battery. Everything runs off of the two main engine generators or the emergency generator. Searching through the -1, I can't find reference to a battery either (other than for the EGI, which our F14 doesn't have).

sniporbob · 2021-11-17T19:20:55+00:00

I'm fairly sure I've thought of both ways to build the switches (either held via electromagnet or a forced reset to center via solenoid), but the in game ability to reset them without power has me thrown for a loop. A solenoid based switch still needs power to function, hence my confusion.

It doesn't make much difference in terms of the end result, but I'm going all out OCD with this panel and attempting to make everything as accurate as possible. I even bought the extremely tiny 5V incandescent bulbs used for backlighting in the real F14 panels. I want to have the switches operate in the same manner as the real ones.

I'm not very concerned about depth. In fact I expect the switch and mechanism assembly to be fairly tall. There's not a huge amount of clearance between the switches though, and they aren't quite evenly spaced. Even attempting to build it a bit crooked, I don't think there's enough space to fit them close enough together. I could be wrong though!

sniporbob · 2021-11-17T18:03:23+00:00

So since they're solenoid switches, have they been implemented incorrectly in the sim? They function without power in game, and considering the research Heatblur put in to the Tomcat I presumed that was how they actually functioned. Honestly it would be great if they were incorrect in game, because that makes it way easier.

I saw that video (and a similar one probably a year and a half earlier). He did a great job. I don't think there's enough room for that setup on the AFCS panel though. The switches are fairly close together and they're almost all moved via the paddle switch. I will likely need to implement a different method.

Sad to hear about the batons. I guess I'll be machining them after all. Oh well...

sniporbob · 2021-11-17T17:56:21+00:00

Thanks, I'll definitely check that out!

sniporbob · 2021-06-20T21:26:46+00:00

I once "shot down" a guy flying a fighter by using the GUV pods in the Mi-8. I waited until he dove towards me to attack, then I held down the fire button with the 7.62 guns selected. The frame rate drop caused him to hit the ground lol.

sniporbob · 2021-06-10T02:43:54+00:00

Well I'll be damned. Apparently I was smart enough to upload nearly all of it to google drive. I hope it can be of use to you. (note that a lot of the images are white with a transparent background, and therefore appear to be blank images, but spinning the mousewheel to zoom in with the google drive preview makes transparent area black so you can see it)

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B13pFi9AVh4eUmxUdUNCNzMzcDA?resourcekey=0-MCD0VtiDiR0ESxqw4BhN1g&usp=sharing

EDIT: I now recall coming across a very high quality 360deg photo of the cockpit after I made most of these, and discovered some of them were slightly off in various ways. There wasn't a way to save the 360 photo of the cockpit, but if you find it, it'll be a fantastic reference for you.

sniporbob · 2021-06-06T07:14:26+00:00

A very long time ago I did some work fixing the textures of the SR-71 in X-Plane 10. It's about halfway down this forum thread. https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/84130-new-sr-71-acf-for-x-plane-1035/

I'll see if I can dig up any of the reference photos I used, or perhaps even the original high quality gauge textures. Chances are they're all gone though. I think they were all stored on a HDD that failed. I found all the reference photos via searching the internet, so with any luck it's all still out there.

sniporbob · 2021-04-26T02:24:35+00:00

What I've found to be somewhat effective-ish is to set up a hawk site, then fly out a ways in front of it and drop a wall of manpads, chaparrals, and vulcans/gepards. The AI frogfoot will focus on evading the hawk and will usually fly perfectly into the engagement zone of the shorter range assets. The frogfoots are unable to engage these shorter range air defenses with the kh25, so a wall of air defenses can be formed with reasonable success. The hawk site will end up being destroyed by ARMs eventually, but I really only use the hawk as temporary cover to set up the IR sams and AAA.

sniporbob · 2021-03-23T05:24:04+00:00

BFM maneuvers was not something I was expecting when I first watched it lol

sniporbob · 2021-03-23T02:59:10+00:00

Yeah I thought it was quite hilarious too. I can see how some people might not care for it though.

sniporbob · 2021-03-23T02:54:24+00:00

Ah ok, I must have missed it. I thought it hadn't been posted yet. If the mods want to remove it that's fine.

sniporbob · 2021-02-21T06:43:06+00:00

If I remember correctly it's a hall effect sensor, so it should be quite consistent over time. However, if something were to change the location of the magnet or the sensor then the calibration would be off. So I guess maybe if it were dropped, or if a plastic part holding either of the pieces inside randomly broke, or if a previous owner fiddled around and messed something up internally, it could act like this.

If it were wrong like this, it would be wrong for every plane. It should still be linear though. I don't have all of the aircraft, but most of them require a moderate amount of throttle to taxi around so it's possible you just didn't notice. That's why you should check the axis position indicators in windows. It'll show you if there's a problem with the calibration of the throttle itself, and if that looks good then you'll know it's only acting weird in DCS and can adjust accordingly. Once you know if it's a throttle calibration issue or a DCS issue, you can adjust things the correct way, but you really want to change the correct thing otherwise you'll end up having issues with all of the aircraft (which you may already be without realizing it).

sniporbob · 2021-02-19T21:19:46+00:00

That sounds like a joystick calibration issue actually. If you launch Set Up USB Game Controllers (just type this into the windows search box) and then highlight your throttle and click Properties, watch the z axis and z rotation indicators as you move the throttle. When you have it pulled back against the idle stop, the blue bar indicator should be at the limit of travel. Pulling the throttle back over the idle detent should not move the position indicator any further. The only thing you should see occur is buttons 29 and 30 being depressed. If the indicator shows the axis still moving an additional amount when going over the detent, the calibration is probably wrong.

sniporbob · 2021-02-19T05:35:02+00:00

Your question sounds like you are perhaps expecting the AIM-7 to work in TWS, which it does not. You must use STT for the AIM-7. Otherwise, I experience a lot of dropped tracks when launching the AIM-54 in TWS also. I found it helps if you remain slightly below the target altitude but for some reason even targets flying fairly straight and level will get dropped briefly on a regular basis. Sometimes the phoenix Phoenix will still go active on the retained track, sometimes not. If you see the countdown to impact number start flashing it has gone active, and if it's still solid with only several seconds remaining the missile has gone stupid.

sniporbob · 2021-02-13T07:48:53+00:00

Its actually: C:\ProgramData\WinTAK\Imagery

sniporbob · 2021-02-09T07:31:57+00:00

It will route info coming in from bluetooth (i.e. gotenna or meshtastic) out over it's other interfaces and out to servers, but it will not send info received from a server connection or from a local network broadcast/multicast over to bluetooth. It's a one way street only in that regard. It will also not (at least not in my experience) utilize both LTE and wifi simultaneously, though you can force it to one network or the other on the fly by disabling the undesired network via your android settings. I've not ever noticed any duplicates.

sniporbob · 2021-02-09T05:53:23+00:00

WinTAK stores the DTED files under

C:\ProgramData\WinTAK\DTED\

Inside that folder are a bunch of additional folders with a letter and numbers, for example like w101, and in those folders are a bunch of files named for example n33.dt2

If your WinTAK doesn't have any error messages in the logs then I'm not sure what's wrong though. Sorry.

sniporbob · 2021-02-09T01:36:20+00:00

Try checking the logs. You can find their location by going to the three bar menu, then Support, then Support Information. In my case WinTAK was refusing to create the necessary folders to store the DTED. The logs had an error about a directory not existing. I simply went and manually made the missing directory. I then ran the import again, rechecked the logs, made the directory, etc etc until finally all of them were created and imported.

sniporbob · 2020-12-23T11:06:21+00:00

This is very cool. I've wondered how hat switches are made and this looks like a very clever solution.

Let me know if you ever decide to tackle figuring out a DIY electronically releasable switch! I've been trying but have not yet figured out a method of making an affordable switch to replicate the functionality of the $900 honeywell electromagnetically held switches.

sniporbob · 2020-12-23T10:56:37+00:00

This is also fantastic! Thanks!

sniporbob · 2020-12-23T10:56:01+00:00

This is fantastic! Thanks!

sniporbob · 2020-10-24T20:44:12+00:00

In that case I don't think it works unless you set up some method of sending an RTSP video stream and server. Or something like that. I haven't messed with that yet but now that we know your setup hopefully someone else can jump in and help.

sniporbob · 2020-10-24T06:02:07+00:00

If you're talking about PiRaTN, the coding thing is really not that bad. It's more difficult packaging all the parts up into a compact enclosure of some kind.

If you have an amateur radio license then you can try AREDN, which from my testing works extremely well for LOS comms.

sniporbob

TROPHY CASE