Can someone give me an indication if the 4 switches (plus the altimeter setting) on the real Airbus FCU are push/pull on/off or are they momentary push/pull. I have just designed and built the push-on pull-off type with a rotary encoder incorporated, which is fairly simple, but suspect that they maybe the second variety, momentary push-pull with the at rest position in the middle, as Magenta has them in the FCU.These also are not too hard to build, but would like to know how the real Airbus switches work before I continue. Cheers.............Brian

Brian,You might want to drop Peter Cos of Flight Deck Solutions & the A320 Project a note.Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.comInfo for simpit builders

Hi Brian,i found in my documents that they are momentary and flip back to the middle rest position. we have rebuild this units at Flightdecksolutions (FDS) http://www.flightdecksolutions.com Achim Bethkehttp://a.bethke.bei.t-online.de

Can you explain how you designed yours?I have been thinking that something similar wouldnt be incredibly hard to construct (also wondering if there would be a way to do concentric shaft encoders in some simple way, for $80 per COLE switch I rather try to find ways to do it myself :)I just havent had that need right now, still building the framework, but I'll come to this eventually I guess. And my friend is building autopilot stuff, so he would need such push/pull + rotary construction.Tuomas

Thank you all for the replies. The dual concentric is probably not too important, as I feel we can get away with the single type ok. The switches are important though, redesigning duals is pretty hard but not impossible though.If there is enough interest I can post some photos of the switches/rotaries for those people that like to build their own.Cheers......Brian

>If there is enough interest I can post some photos of the >switches/rotaries for those people that like to build their >own. Um sure, would be great to see.Dual concentric is interesting for radio tuning. Currently I just have two rotaries in my radio panels but having it like on real radios where you tune whole MHz with the outer knob and the fractional part with the inner one would be great. Those exist yea, but they are very expensive and likely hard to find as an individual.Tuomas