IOCards hardware

An interesting site with lots of information and pictures and schema's of Opencockpits IOCards hardware, such as pin numbering, can be found here. I will only describe a few particular pieces of Opencockpits IOCards hardware.

It is recommended to use the USB expansion card and to connect a Master Card to this USB expansion card and NOT to a LPT port. The USB solution works flawlessly and USB is common practice these days, besides lots of new PC's do not even have a LPT port.

Don't forget to connect +5V and Gnd to the Master card. The easiest way to do this is to take one of the spare Molex connectors of your PC power supply, take a red (+5V) and a black (GND) wire from that 4 pin Molex.

A cockpit has lots of rotary switches (1 x n) and rotary encoders. I strongly recommend to use gray type encoders.

Also find her some information about the pins at the In- and Output connection boxes and some info about the USB LCD card and the USB Outputs card.

You can connect a gray type rotary encoder (to be precise: 2-BIT GRAY TYPE ROTARY ENCODER WITH 1/4 CYCLE PER DETENT and 16 DETENTS/REVOLUTION) directly to two inputs of the Master Card. One does not need the Opencockpits Encoder card.

The encoder has three pins. Two go to inputs of the MC and the gnd to the common gnd of the same group where you connected the two inputs from the encoder. The inputs should be consecutive.

Gray-code means that only one bit of the 2 bits output changes at a time. The sequence is: 00 (zero), 01 (one), 11 (three), 10 (two) and back to 00 (zero).

The sequences "zero-one-three-two" is called a cycle. 1/4 cycle per detent means for gray-code encoders, that for each detent (step) just one of the two bits changes and that there are no bit changes in between detents. A condition for use with IOCards Master card is that the gray type encoder changes only a 1/4 cycle per detent!

Watch out:

There are also gray type encoders that change a full cycle per detent or 1/2 cycle per detent, these types will not work correctly when connected directly to the Master Card.

You should take encoders with 16 detents per revolution (360 degrees), no more.

 

An encoder that is gray type and will work is CTS corporation type 288. A CTS type 288 encoder is available in the Opencockpits shop. Examples of how to program a gray type encoder in SIOC can be found at the howto page.

Opencockpits also sells Input- and Output connection boxes. You can connect your in- and outputs to the Master card without having to solder.

The connections card is bi-sexual... Depending on the placement of the 40 pins connector it's used as 4 * (9 + ground) input card or as 38 outputs with a ground.

Here is the Input version:

The grounds of each group are indicated in this picture with a black spot. The pins are well indicated. Note that 9 input pins share 1 ground, the pin ordering indicated is the logical ordering. If you connect a gray type rotary you should take pins n and n+1 within one and the same group.

And here is the somewhat more difficult to interpret Outputs version:

Note that pin 1/37 is the GROUND (second from the bottom left, see the black spot). Pin 0/36 is +5V (not really needed) and the other 38 pins are the Outputs.

With the Opencockpits USB LCD card you can control up to 4 LCD's.

Contrary to other Opencockpits USB cards/modules (like the Outputs card, or the MCP, or a Master card), this card is controlled by a separate software package.This program, called IOClcd.exe, acts as a IOCP client to SIOC. In our SIOC script we can use SIOC variables that will be displayed via IOClcd.exe.

To make this more clear I'll show you an example: the display of the Left, Center, Right and Total fuel tank values of the Level-D Boeing 767 (FS9 version).

First we use the IOClcd_config.exe program to define a so-called virtual screen at a 20x4 character display. You may define up to 4 virtual screens per display. With a SIOC variable you can switch between virtual screens, so you can switch for instance between a Fuel screen and a Engine parameters screen.

In this example I'll only define the Fuel screen:

Var 2950 is used as virtual screen selector, if we assign it he value 0, then this fuel screen will show up. Certain positions are given fixed text values, like the L, the C and the R, and the decimal points.

The yellow blocks are the fields where the actual fuel tank values will be shown. I have defined them two positions wide for the integer values and 1 position wide for the decimal values. Each field has a SIOC Variable attached, it starts with 2951 for the integer value of the Left fuel tank and it ends with 2958 for the decimal value of the Total Fuel value. All these definitions are entered with the IOClcd_config.exe program and at the end we save this configuration in a file called fuel767LCD_fs9.lcd.

The SIOC script used to compute and display the Fuel Tank Values of the Level-D Boeing 767 can be found in this zip file, together with all the other related configuration files. The interesting part of the SIOC script is the definition of the variables that are implicitly "linked" to the 20x4 display via the IOClcd.exe program:

 Var 2950 value 0 // virtual display selector

 Var 2951 name FuelLHLCD // FuelL High part at LCD (2 digits)
 Var 2952 name FuelLLLCD // FuelL Low (decimal) part at LCD (1 digit)
 Var 2953 name FuelCHLCD // FuelC High part at LCD (2 digits)
 Var 2954 name FuelCLLCD // FuelC Low (decimal) part at LCD (1 digit)
 Var 2955 name FuelRHLCD // FuelR High part at LCD (2 digits)
 Var 2956 name FuelRLLCD // FuelR Low (decimal) part at LCD (1 digit)
 Var 2957 name FuelTHLCD // FuelT High part at LCD (2 digits)
 Var 2958 name FuelTLLCD // FuelT Low (decimal) part at LCD (1 digit)

If we run this SIOC script (and FS9, and IOClcd.exe) the LCD display will show a screen like this:

Many people have asked me how to configure and power the USB Outputs card. Note that I use the 64 outputs of this card to drive led's.

Here a picture of my jumper settings:

JMP1 is open, JMP2 is closed. At connector J3 I have connected a GND wire (black) and a +5V wire (red). The +5V power comes from my flightsim PC's power supply.

 

IMPORTANT:

The bad news: The 64 outputs at this card share a common +5V. This is different from the 38 outputs at a Master card that share a common GND. Take good notice of this difference when you connect your led's!

The good news: in SIOC you do not have to take these differences into account, writing a '1' to an output in SIOC will always make the led lit.