New guy - tips for dual touchscreen instrument panels

[home4sale2 2]

Maybe my problem is very specific but it took me a while to figure this out, hope it helps you.

I found a lot of videos on sweet sim setups, air manager videos, etc. but what I struggled with the most was the following, here is my setup:

Nvidia 2080 card which has 3 Display ports, 1 HDMI port and 1 USB-C port. My onboard GPU connections (HDMI, USB-C) don't work because my CPU doesn't support on board graphics (intel i7-kf model). The problem is that if you want to setup two touchscreen monitors, you can't do that because they must be connected via USB-C so I went round and round trying to look at hubs of all kind, a PCIe card with USB-C ports and so on. None of these work because they are all meant to connect peripherals (and not monitors) and whatever was available seems to have been discontinued. I am lucky to even have one on the NVidia 2K series I am told. The world seems to have moved on from USB-C, at least for my purpose (or unless it's thunderbolt or whatever else and that shoots the price up). The touchscreen monitors require an alternate display capability which seemed to be elusive and no one seemed to give me a clear answer. The reason for two touchscreen monitors in my case will serve as the PFD and MFD of the G1000 displays I want to setup for my sim setup. Well, I have found two ways to do this:

1. Connect usb-C out of my Nvidia to USB-C port on my first touchscreen monitor (any monitor you buy that claims to do touchscreen must have a USB-C port else it won't work). That's all you need. Here's where I ran into another problem. Every time you press the touchscreen on the external monitor, the touch would appear on my main monitor. That's because you must configure in Windows 10, which one of your monitors is the touch monitor. Search for "Calibrate the screen for touch input", follow the instructions (you have to hit enter till you land on the touchscreen monitor). Thanks to a couple of Youtube videos on this subject, this was driving me nuts and to a point where I almost thought I had wasted money on these monitors.

2. Connect HDMI to mini HDMI on my second touchscreen monitor (or whatever mechanism for video, could be displayport to mini hdmi, DVI to HDMI) and also connect a USB on your PC to USB-C on your monitor (again, you must have USB-C on this monitor). The touch signal will be sent via the USB to the PC. Again, in Windows calibrate as in step #1.

Now, I only have one monitor so far because I wanted to make sure I could get both scenarios to work. Time to go buy the second one. I hope I don't have issues doing both at the same time.

Good luck.