Hi all,

 

I'd be very interested in your experiences in mapping Saitek hardware to addon aircraft. I'm using the Yoke, 2 Throttle Quadrants, all 3 panels and 6 FIDs with SPAD.Next and find there is a great deal of variability in getting addon aircraft to respond to the hardware. My best result so far has been Flight 1's King Air (awesome aircraft!) and I've had minimal luck with Carenado products.

 

I'd like to expand my fleet and obviously want to buy a plane that gets me the most use from my hardware investment.

 

What do you folks recommend?

 

Many thanks

Warwick

1 hour ago, Maaarp said:

I'd like to expand my fleet and obviously want to buy a plane that gets me the most use from my hardware investment.

What do you folks recommend?

The problem is, such planes are the lowest common denominator because the Saitek drivers will require that they only use default functionality. As you have SPAD.neXt, a better approach is to acquire aircraft with better systems and find or create profiles to match. This will need to you to dig around and try to figure out which Lvars you need to read and poke values into, but it's generaly possible to get somewhere close.

Thanks Mark,

 

I use Spad.Next all the time and have either programmed myself using the Event Viewer or downloaded snippets. I must admit not to have tried using LVARs yet, just dabbled with FSUIPC's mouse macro function. I probably should have a look into using them.

 

Thanks mate

Warwick

On 12/12/2019 at 2:48 PM, Maaarp said:

Thanks Mark,

 

I use Spad.Next all the time and have either programmed myself using the Event Viewer or downloaded snippets. I must admit not to have tried using LVARs yet, just dabbled with FSUIPC's mouse macro function. I probably should have a look into using them.

 

Thanks mate

Warwick

I have been able to get the Carenado planes to work with Spad.Next.....You just have to spend a bunch of time with the Event Viewer and you should look at the LVARS.....Generally Carenado does have some LVARS for most things..

One thing that you do have to do some of the time is not only set and LVAR for the Function that you want to happen but then also set the Switch state at the same time --- Yes seems weird but just by setting the Switch "position" does not trigger the event.....So weird...

 

19 hours ago, LesOReilly said:

I have been able to get the Carenado planes to work with Spad.Next.....You just have to spend a bunch of time with the Event Viewer and you should look at the LVARS.....Generally Carenado does have some LVARS for most things..

One thing that you do have to do some of the time is not only set and LVAR for the Function that you want to happen but then also set the Switch state at the same time --- Yes seems weird but just by setting the Switch "position" does not trigger the event.....So weird...

 

G'day Les,

 

I reckon this will solve a problem I'm having at the moment. I've used the LVARs to set an event (say Engine Start) and have found that the switch moves on the cockpit ok but nothing happens (in this case I'd expect N1 to rise on the MFD). Could the Switch state be the issue here? If so, I've had a bit of a poke around Spad.next and can't see how I would set the switch state.

 

Would be grateful for your advice.

 

Cheers

 

Warwick

I am traveling back from Asia now. I will try at some point over the next few days to give some examples. 
 

which plane(s) are you most focused on?  I have a few of their planes so it’s always easier if we use the same plane for working on it. 

Hey Les,

 

Thanks heaps for that. I've got their Cessna Grand Caravan which is a lovely aircraft that I've not spent too much time with. My main focus right now is Flight 1's King Air which I'm doing most of my flying with but I hope that the principles should be the same.

 

Have a safe trip and hopefully your place isn't too near anything that's burning.

 

Cheers

So is that the C208B with the G1000 or the other one from them?

I literally just setup my C208B a couple of weeks before heading out...I was going to make a video similar to the videos I did for Spad.Next with a PMDG aircraft...I just did not get to editing it yet :)....

I am in Canada so Nothing by me is burning.....everything is frozen currently here in Ottawa 🙂

 

I use only Lindawith my Saitek hardware and develop sometimes Lua functions to be integrated in the user.lua file. I have the Real Air citabria, turbine duke, A2A Cherookee and Spitfire, Majestic Q400 and FSLABS 320. Also a couple of Carenado like the C337 and Caravan.

I have the multi panel, radio panel and switches panel. My Yoke is a CH Product and interfaced the same way.

 

 

Hey Les,

 

It's the G1000 version.

 

Glad you got home safely and I reckon a bit of cold is much preferable to being on fire!

 

Cheers

Warwick

6 minutes ago, kama2004 said:

I use only Lindawith my Saitek hardware and develop sometimes Lua functions to be integrated in the user.lua file. I have the Real Air citabria, turbine duke, A2A Cherookee and Spitfire, Majestic Q400 and FSLABS 320. Also a couple of Carenado like the C337 and Caravan.

I have the multi panel, radio panel and switches panel. My Yoke is a CH Product and interfaced the same way.

 

 

Hi Kama,

 

I'm trying to get my head around what LINDA is and where it might be used. From my quick reading of the forums I gather that it does something like SPAD.Next. Do you use both programs or do they work together? I'm a little confused!

 

Cheers

Warwick

 

4 hours ago, Maaarp said:

Do you use both programs or do they work together? 

I do not own spad.next. I had spad original version but it was replaced by Linda. 

Basically, Linda is an interface that allow you to assign different functions to button for different hardware. MCP complete airliners panels (I don’t own one) are supported as well as Saitek Switch, Multi and Radio panel. My CH Yoke is also detected and I use Linda only for Button assignation and FSUIPC for axis. I don’t know which other hardware panels are supported.

You can assign any button as a "shift" function (2 levels of shift possible). So each button can have 3 functions. You can assign standard FSX/P3D functions, FSX/P3D controls codes or functions from libraries developed by Linda authors. There is one Saitek library that mimics the standards functionality of default airplanes. There are 50 others modules (libraries) available form that thread for different popular planes.

In addition to libraries, each of your aircraft have an empty user.lua file where you can use your imagination and Lua language skill to define your own functions and assign them to your hardware buttons. You can even use the same function name as the standard one embedded in Linda main code to replace them. Code in user.lua takes precedences with similarly named functions in the linda core files or aircraft modules. For instance, on aircraft without speed function in the Autopilot, I use my own code to display the actual speed instead of a target speed. Another example is functions that I created to assign to a “shifed” position of the ACT/STBY button of the radio panel. When I depress these two buttons in shifted mode, they activate the buttons in the radio panel to hear the ID codes of ILS, VOR or NDB. You see the idea.

There is a useful tracker function and console that allow you to expose LVars from airplane and track them. You can for instance track all LVars then deselect one by one the ones that are not the ones your looking for. This allow you to refine your research and identify the LVars that perform the desired functions (not always easy as some LVars just move knobs or button in the VC without changing the internal variables. Some diggings is required). The same tracker screen allow you to track Offset values in different formats. Another utility is the lua editor where you can explore the Linda code or create your own modules.

So this is a powerful free utility to interface hardware.

 

Edited December 26, 20196 yr by kama2004

Thanks heaps for that Kama, I had heard about LINDA and Luas but really didn't know how they might be used. I'll have to figure out if I need to learn this in addition to Spad.Next.

 

Cheers mate

 

Warwick