Touch screen controls X Plane NOT Air Manager panel

[miner_tom]

Hi to the community,

I am working in Windows 10, with the latest version of Air Manager.

I used to have Air Manager working on a separate 15 inch display, and the touch screen did work to control the instruments. That was a couple of months ago.

Now, after upgrades to X Plane and Air manager, the touch screen monitor will only control the instruments and switches in MOUSE mode.

When in TOUCH mode (air manager) the touch controls will control things happening in the X Plane display. I can see highlights in the X plane monitor display, telling me that X Plane, not Air Manager, is getting the commands.

So, the question is, other than telling Air Manager panel to work in Touch mode, is there any other selection that needs to be done so that X Plane does not interpret the touch screen commands before the Air Manager does?

Thank You
Tom

[old pilot guy]

Sometimes after a Windows update things change. In windows10 control panel: Hardware and Sound / Tablet PC Settings ( not Pen and Touch) / Display Tab / Setup. This will allow you to select which monitor has the touch input.

[Sling]

Yep it’s sounds like MS screwed your touch settings. Do the calibration as old pilot guy suggested and all should be good.

[miner_tom]

Sometimes after a Windows update things change. In windows10 control panel: Hardware and Sound / Tablet PC Settings ( not Pen and Touch) / Display Tab / Setup. This will allow you to select which monitor has the touch input.

Thank You, old pilot guy, for responding to my post.

As unbelievable as this sounds, Windows 10 does NOT support tablet mode when you are using multiple monitors. It will support tablet mode only in single screen mode. The reason that this sounds so unbelievable to me is that I had the working in multiple monitor mode months ago. I am not prone to hallucination so I know that it did work at one time.

Do you have your extra touch screen monitor working with multiple monitors (besides that one)?

If you do please tell me the settings that I need to set. All of the microsoft information says that tablet mode is not supported when multiple monitors are in extended mode.

Thank YOu

[Sling]

miner_tom,

Did you actually try what was suggested. I have multiple screens some of which are touch and what you need to do is right in old pilot guys post. You are not the first to think this was the solution but on very occasion someone posts with this issue they eventually do this and their problem is fixed. Save yourself the trouble and do the Setup. You’ll know you are in the right place because all your screens will turn white after you select setup.

[old pilot guy]

I am running 2 identical windows 10 pro pc's - each pc has i9-9900K /RTX 2080 super/ 64gb ram./ 4 27 inch monitors
PC#1 runs X-Plane 11.50 Vulcan as master / Air Manager 3.71/ Air Plugin on main monitor / overhead monitor which displays Zibo 737 overhead panel /mouse input as default.
PC#2 runs 2 external displays as x- plane 11 slave. Air Player installed and recognized by Air Manager -this touchscreen running air player works fine.
I recently added a touchscreen monitor on PC#1 running Air Manager to run the Zibo FMC and PFD as touchscreen.
With respect to the main pc#1 running air manager:
Overhead Zibo panel on 27" monitor. 15.6 inch touchscreen. X-[lane on the center monitor. If I just run the touchscreen monitor all works fine. When I add the Zibo overhead panel -Air Manager shuts down. I can run either the overhead Zibo panel(27" monitor) or the touchscreen monitor (15.6")alone but not at the same time
Everything works fine then during the flight for no reason Air Manger shuts down - no constant time or timeout.. X-plane keeps running fine.
I have the 1st touch screen set up in Windows 10 as described in my previous post. Still no joy.
The attachments I have included are only when the main pc ins running.

Log.txt

(75.07 KiB) Downloaded 155 times

[miner_tom]

I am running 2 identical windows 10 pro pc's - each pc has i9-9900K /RTX 2080 super/ 64gb ram./ 4 27 inch monitors
PC#1 runs X-Plane 11.50 Vulcan as master / Air Manager 3.71/ Air Plugin on main monitor / overhead monitor which displays Zibo 737 overhead panel /mouse input as default.
PC#2 runs 2 external displays as x- plane 11 slave. Air Player installed and recognized by Air Manager -this touchscreen running air player works fine.
I recently added a touchscreen monitor on PC#1 running Air Manager to run the Zibo FMC and PFD as touchscreen.
With respect to the main pc#1 running air manager:
Overhead Zibo panel on 27" monitor. 15.6 inch touchscreen. X-[lane on the center monitor. If I just run the touchscreen monitor all works fine. When I add the Zibo overhead panel -Air Manager shuts down. I can run either the overhead Zibo panel(27" monitor) or the touchscreen monitor (15.6")alone but not at the same time
Everything works fine then during the flight for no reason Air Manger shuts down - no constant time or timeout.. X-plane keeps running fine.
I have the 1st touch screen set up in Windows 10 as described in my previous post. Still no joy.
The attachments I have included are only when the main pc ins running.Log.txtAir Manger 1.jpgAir Manager2.jpg

Thank you once again, old pilot guy. I am kind of old myself and attempting to become a pilot (age 65).

It seems that in your description of PC#1 there IS a problem working with a touch screen and a non touch screen at the same time, as evidenced by the "shutting down" of Air Manager (for no apparent reason). By profession, I am an electronics engineer and believe me, there is always a reason . If I had to guess I think that it may have something to do with how windows switches out of tablet mode. There is a switch in the setup for tablet mode, in windows 10, that allows you to see a message if the PC is switching out of tablet mode. Might be worth having a look at that setup.

My setup may be a little bit different in that I have multiple non touch screens. However, looking at what I believe is the setup for your PC#1, you also have multiple screens. In every attempt that I have tried to set up into tablet mode, windows tells me to first switch into "Single PC Mode". Of course, at that point, only one monitor is activated and the others go dark. I then set tablet mode to on and then attempt to switch the display back to extended mode. At that point the other displays go on and windows tells me "Switching out of tablet mode".

I suppose that at this point it is not worth all of the effort to try to get my Air Manager instrument display into touch mode (used to work but no longer). I DO have knobster working, so at least I can turn the knobs with knobster after selecting it with the mouse. Not the worst thing in the world.

Best Regards
Tom

[miner_tom]

miner_tom,

Did you actually try what was suggested. I have multiple screens some of which are touch and what you need to do is right in old pilot guys post. You are not the first to think this was the solution but on very occasion someone posts with this issue they eventually do this and their problem is fixed. Save yourself the trouble and do the Setup. You’ll know you are in the right place because all your screens will turn white after you select setup.

Hi Sling, I just responded to "old pilot guy" with the latest. Yes, I did indeed "follow the steps". As I mentioned to old pilot guy, in attempting to configure the displays, which are in extended mode (might be pertinent) windows only allows me to enter tablet mode in "Single PC Mode". At that point, only one monitor is active and the others go dark. If I then set tablet mode to be active, and then go back to extended mode display, I get a message saying that Tablet mode is now off. Seems like the catch 22 that I can't get around.

Now that I remember having watched some or all of your setup videos, about a year ago, when I first started working on this simulator, I can ask you a question concerning using the Arduino to handle physical instrument input. I have such a system working but am using SimVim cockpit, in conjunction with Air Manager, in order to make it work. I explored using air manager with the arduino (probably better than sharing the arduino with two pieces of software), but for some reason, it was not working as expected. My memory is not as good as it used to be (now at 65) but if memory serves I remember that it was because my physical simulator console uses rotary potentiometers and not rotary encoders. I had experimented with LUA and found that Air Manager only worked with certain simple versions of LUA, so the usual LUA tutorials were not applicable to my need for writing LUA code for my rotary potentiometers.

Oh, I just went back and looked at an older post that I made months ago. It turns out that I was not able to do a CALIBRATION of the hardware rotary potentiometers with XLUA. It was because of the Dataref command. That was why I ended up using SimVim, as it has a good calibration routine for analog controls. Has that changed with Air Manager?

NOW I remember fully why calibration was important. When I originally tried Air Manager with the Arduino for control, the yoke was displaying a tilt of about 25 degrees to starboard (to the right). Far too much to ignore. The only way that this could be fixed is with some kind of a calibration routine. At the time, Air Manager could not implement such a routine (Dataref) but I did try. That is when I started using Simvim for the console control. I still use Air Manager software for instrument panel design.

With that history, I wanted to ask if you believe that using Arduino and Air Manager together with the hardware being rotary and linear poteniometer calibration can now work? The console that I have is an old Precision Flight Controls console, together with the pedals, and it is about 25 years old. VERY realistic yoke and pedals. I gutted the old PCB and added the Arduino Mega.

Thank you for your support
Tom

[old pilot guy]

Thanks for responding to my posts. It is interesting that my slave pc#2 is also running two external view monitors and Air player running a separate touch screen panel and all work perfectly with never a shut down. When air manager shuts down on the primary PC both the zibo overhead panel and the touchscreen go back to a blank windows desktop view with Windows continuing to run X-Plane on the primary display. PC #2 with the 2 monitors and touchscreen continue to work perfectly.

[miner_tom]

Thanks for responding to my posts. It is interesting that my slave pc#2 is also running two external view monitors and Air player running a separate touch screen panel and all work perfectly with never a shut down. When air manager shuts down on the primary PC both the zibo overhead panel and the touchscreen go back to a blank windows desktop view with Windows continuing to run X-Plane on the primary display. PC #2 with the 2 monitors and touchscreen continue to work perfectly.

Whenever I have problems of this "mysterious" nature I always think that it is some kind of windows issue that they never thought through, because, well, it's like the old phone company before they broke it up...they don't have to. I mean, I had it working myself with multiple monitors and a touch screen monitor, it just does not work now.

I thought of switching the simulator to linux because mostly all of my other work is done on linux. But, Sim Innovations only supports Debian based distributions and I run all of my other computers on Ubuntu Distributions, which, and this is your useless fun fact of the day, are based upon Debian or at least Ubuntu used to be, which means that Air Manager might work under linux, but I just don't have the time to spend experimenting with it.

Oh, you might be interested in this. When I started building this Sim, about a year ago, I used a 25 year old Precision Flight Controls console, with really great and authentic yoke and pedals. I tore out the antique PCB that was in there and put in an Arduino (using cat7 shielded cables, even for DC from the rotary pots to the arduino... electro-magnetic radiation in the room was affecting the analog to digital converter in the Arduino and gave the yoke an unintentional "wiggle"). The problem with using Air Manager and an Arduino was that when the system started up, the yoke had about a 25 degree list to starboard. There was no way that I could write XLUA (a subset of the full LUA) code that would calibrate the rotary pots in the yoke and pedals. At the time, Air Manager tech support agreed. Since 25 degrees is unacceptable I had to start using SimVim, which had a great calibration routine. Are you aware of such calibration issues?

Best Regards
Tom