I was sold immediately and decided to have two 22" touch screen monitors for the MIP of the C182T and started planning and calculating on the way the instruments could and should be placed on those two screens. I wanted to have a complete operation oft the sim without having to use a mouse. The left panel was not that hard to define, but the right panel still has room for improvements.
This is the left hand side of the MIP as it is so far. As always compromises have to be made and the same goes for this simpit. One of these is that I placed the Whiskey Compass in the upper left hand corner.
The "normal" switches have different states visible. With pull switches the state is not that easy to see. I made the switches a little larger in the pulled position and also enlarged the shadow of that switch to emulate the motion. This is very obvious on the handbrake (which cannot be turned in my case).
On the right hand side I have placed dummies for the trimwheels. They will be coded in a later state after all the other instruments are completely finished. I have not flown a single inch with this setup yet. I only tested it with putting values in the different fields within Air Manager so I still could be in for a surprise (both positive and/or negative).
I suddenly had a kind of a brainwave and wanted to add night illumination. This came when coding the light switch on the annunciator panel. Normally there is a reddish light when the night illumination is active and also the gauges and certain knobs (mainly the radios) have some kind of illumination. I decided to add that effect to my panels. The reddish light was not that hard to add (semi transparant overlay), but there are a number of gauges that have covers over the needles that had to get that reddish glow too and the yellowish gauge illumination had to be covered in those places as well.
As the night illumination is an overlay that has a higher Z-order, the already defined buttons, switches and dials were not accessible with the night illumination active so I had to split these functions in images, which were placed in their appropriate places and (empty) button, switches and dials definitions. It took quite a lot of work, but I am pleased with the results.
The next step is to make a detailed drawing of the way I want to build my C182T MIP so I can translate that to a plan from which the DIY store can cut a piece of MDF to my wishes. In this MIP the two touch screens will be mounted and also a USB hub, two HDMI extender cables and power sockets. In this way no cables will be needed that permanently dangle from the outside and thus the complete setup can easily be moved to a storage room when not in use or to some kind of exhibition ([hopeful smile] maybe the FS Weekend in november??? [/hopeful smile]).
