Help with real Gables radios and fs9

[lasseh]

Hello

I'm building a 727 but unfortunately I'm not experienced in writing/scripting or anything that has to do with programming! :/ However I'm quite optimistic that I will somehow get my old gables nav/com radios to work with fs9. They are already wired and connected via the Leo Bodnar card, and each frequency is recognized as a combination of button presses. So far so good!

But the real struggle begins when I have to program the button combinations as frequencies in fs9. I have successfully written a few lines in fsuioc.ini - just to get myself familiar with the language - and actually managed to program the entire frequency band for the nav radio. But it took forever, and I had to write an actual line for each frequency, so you can imagine how long that woul take if I had to do that for two nav radios plus two com radios!

So I figured there might be another way around this.. Something similar to what to Chek DC9 guys have done with their gables radios, but that's for fax and I'm still with Fs9.

Any inputs will be very much appreciated!

Here's a little preview of the various parts, not yet a permanent setup, but this will do for now!

[727737Nut]

To bad you cut into the original wiring.  Could have help you out for less than 50.00 you would have had a working set of 4 radios and ATC /transponder radio. On one little arduino no less. 

Rob

[lasseh]

Hi Rob

I have got two extra radios like this one with all the original wiring! How will the arduino do the work?

[727737Nut]

Get the schematics from Gabels, On them you will see the switch output matrix.  Usually 10 to 14 wires are all that is needed to give you the frequency combinations. You use that info for the code in the arduino, very short example, if switch a and b  com1 hundreds =1 if switch a and c , com1 Tens = 2 so on and so forth.  Using a centipede shield and an arduino you get 70+ inputs for and full control for less than 50.00

[Flying_Fox]

Tis info also might help:
http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread.php?t=26647&p=142383&viewfull=1#post142383

[xplanematt]

Ditto what Rob said. If you get the pinouts from Gables, you don't have to modify those gorgeous works of engineering art. If, OTOH, the wires are cut, you're faced with finding out which wires are the commons (not impossible, but WAY harder than just using the unit as it was designed). Basically the "tuners" are big switches. For a given set of digits, you'll have one common pin, and a bunch of other pins that each will be in one of two states depending on what frequency you have selected: 1. Open, or 2. Connected to the common pin. You can use Gables' truth tables to work out which wire should be high or low for which frequency, but the way I do it is run all the commons to my Arduino common (ground, typically), then read each group of pins that corresponds to a set of digits. I generate a string of 1s and 0s (1 being HIGH/connected, 0 being LOW/open of course) as I sequentially scan each Gables pin as an input in my code. Then I just sit down and tune every frequency individually, recording the resulting string in a lookup table. Once the code is done, I know what frequency is tuned by comparing the current string of inputs to my lookup table. Easy stuff...just lots of wiring. Rob and I have both done this, without hacking up the radios. I did the nav/comms of a real 737-200 cockpit like this....stuck my Arduino and Centipede shields inside an old PC power supply case, and used D-bus connectors to hook everything up. The sim builder tucked my interface box inside the throttle quadrant, a single USB connector goes from here to his main PC that runs his other USB gear. Neat and clean.

Matt

[Flying_Fox]

BTW, here you can find the Gables NAV pinout:

https://phoenixcomm.wordpress.com/category/radio-sub-system/gables-engineering/

and:
https://phoenixcomm.wordpress.com/projects/airinc-410/



Nick

[lasseh]

Thanks a lot for all your input everyone!
I'll give it a try, and keep you updated here whenever I have some results.

Once again, thank you!