Air Manager Instruments sharing thread

Yeah, thanks Crunch. Once I get some familiarization with AM I should be posting over in your other thread “Simstrumentation”. Great thing you and your partners are doing over there and the benefit to our community is immeasurable.

AM is a great tool. It’s been around for a long time, and there’s a plethora of the stock instruments (both by SI and some community) for other sims. MSFS is behind, but more and more are being made MSFS compatible as time goes by. It’s going to take a while for it to catch up though.

The issue is that many of the planes in MSFS are different from those in other sims. Either they’re unique, or unique / more modern variants. While generic instruments and controls can work just fine, they don’t really “fit” the look and feel of that specific plane. In other cases, stuff just isn’t available at all, as was the case with the CJ4 that we started out with.

I’m sure a lot of people are developing their own instruments and panels for private use and never sharing them with the world. There are many valid reasons for that. They don’t want to give away their work (fair enough, that’s their right), they don’t want to be providing support for their work, the process to get stuff in the AM store can be pretty onerous , etc. We just don’t feel that we should sit on this stuff we make and hoard it for ourselves when so many others could be benefitting from it. It’s good for the community as a whole, and good for Air Manager / Sim Innovations, as it brings a flood of new people over to their software.

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Great idea.

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This thread is brilliant. Just now seeing it.

I 3D printed a (preexisting) trim wheel and wrote some basic code to control via a Arduino Nano, by modifying the generic “Trim Wheel Code”.

Question where/how do i send the code to your git?

Air Manager is excellent! I’m an early MSFS 2020 adopter with a fully functional panel added more instruments since that video.

We don’t really take external submission for new stuff. We’re glad to have folks branch off and re-submit if they have a significant improvement to something we’ve done (our stuff seems to work as intended as far as us non-pilots can tell) or want to add functionality for XP or P3D or something to our existing stuff, since our instruments are for MSFS only.

This is an older thread that’s mostly obsolete now as links to stuff are pretty much dead since our old Google Drive repos are shut down. You might want to move it to the newer, more relevent thread here:

Another option if you want to share your instrument(s) with others in the community is to join our Discord where we have a section for users to share their creations.

Noted!

We don’t really take external submission for new stuff.

With great and due respect, isn’t that the very issue of AM… users having limited options or exposure of their own work?

Perhaps the next step in the evolution of expanding AM Instrument dev is an OPEN and transparent bilateral repository.

In any event: Wow, what service you have done to to the MSFS community with your imitative (Simstrumentaton) and salient forum post, above and beyond most. THANK YOU.

The key with Air Manager is to build your instruments in line with Sim Innovations’ guidelines and submit them to the Community Store via the menu item in Air Manager. That way, they’re integrally part of Air Manager and available to all users right out of the gate. Our GitHub page is there for visibility on our stuff atm and a way to get high demand stuff into the hands of end users ASAP.

We’re actually in the process of submitting our instruments. We’ve submitted all our CJ4 suite so far and they’re pending approval (we got feedback on a couple of changes required to functionality on 2 of them). I’ve also submitted our G1000 NXi. Haven’t heard back from them on that one yet other than they’ve received the submission.

Next I’ll likely be submitting our Kodiak and Mooney M20R instruments.

So while we’ll always have the latest and greatest versions of everything on our GitHub, the idea is that our stuff will be directly accessible from within AM.

Bit of a change of direction, but is anyone able to get the NAV/GPS switch to actually change the VOR 1 to track the GPS on Air Manager? I’ve tried a whole host of different NAV instruments, and while some will show a NAV/GPS change on the panel, they universally track whatever VOR NAV 1 is tuned to and won’t track the GPS course. Would love to figure out how to fix this.

Thanks!

I think there are a couple of nav source switches in AM. I know I have one loaded in a couple of my layouts and they work fine.

I’d say as a first step, make sure that the one you’re using is MSFS compatible, because a lot of instruments only work with XP. I can check later this evening when I get home to see which one I’m using.

Thank you! The issue I have is that once the sim switches to GPS being the source of nav information, the CDI/NAV 1 instrument in AM still takes its info from the VOR tuned in the NAV 1 radio and not from the GPS. I can switch the source of information from the sim’s perspective using a NAV/GPS switch in AM, the VLOC/GPS switch on my realsimgear 530 or the NAV/GPS switch in the virtual cockpit. All of those correctly change the source of NAV information for the CDI/NAV 1 instrument in the virtual cockpit within the sim, but none change the source of information for the CDI/NAV 1 instrument showing on the AM panel (which still just derive nav information from the VOR tuned in the NAV 1 radio).

Does that make sense? I’m very encouraged to hear that others don’t seem to have this issue!

Thanks again!

I’d have to check if this behaviour is consistent with what I see on my end. I’ve never noticed it particularly.

Thanks again - I’ve included two pictures below, which show the correct functioning of the AM CDI/NAV 1 when slaved to the VOR tuned in NAV 1 and the fact that it continues to track that when the source is switched to GPS. Interested to hear if you have different results!

Now that I see this, I’m not sure you can set AM to use anything other than NAV1/2 and track GPS instead.

I see it behaves that way in the virtual cockpit by your pics. But should it do that IRL as well? I’m not a pilot, so I don’t know.

In most of my steam gauge planes, I either have a G5 (Air Manager payware) instead of a CDI or I don’t really pay attention to it as long as my plane is following the magental line on my GNS. I may have the same problem and not even know it.

IRL you can change the source of nav information so that the CDI tracks the GPS data instead of the NAV 1 radio signal. It isn’t the end of the world for getting from point A to point B (there are plenty of other magenta lines to follow :rofl:), particularly if you’re in VMC, but it makes flying RNAV approaches pretty unrealistic (especially LPV approaches, which provide a GPS derived glide slope as well, so you can fly them like an ILS - not sure that’s actually implemented in MSFS yet…).

I had asked about this on the AM support forum and the only feedback I got was “use XP11,” so I’m guessing it works correctly there…

I’ll keep poking around and hopefully I’ll find a solution somewhere…

And that’s why the community over there never really grows and it a small group of longtime users. Not to badmouth them in any way, as there are some really great guys over there that have been incredibly helpful, but just seeing how so many MSFS support questions are either ignored or get the “MSFS is an Xbox game. Use a real sim like XP” replies they get, I tend to post very, very rarely.

That was probably from jph. That user hates MSFS and trolls anyone who posts about it and goes completely un-checked. I’m heavily invested in AIr Manager and a long time user of that forum for all sims and I’ve chosen to only go there infrequently now until the moderation improves.

I suspect your CDI issue may be the instrument you are using. I will do a quick test now and come back.

The following are what I use to program the CDI needles in my panels.

“NAV CDI:1”,“Number”, <<<< NAV1
“NAV CDI:2”,“Number”, <<<<NAV2
“HSI CDI NEEDLE”,“Number” <<<<GPS

I use “GPS DRIVES NAV1”,“Bool” to set the GPS as source. This just started working after the last update.

I am not sure But maybe with FSX the needle values for NAV1 and GPS toggled in NAV CD:1. If so then it would need to be corrected to work with MSFS

Just had a look at this and it is a bit of a mess. Good old MSFS indeed does things differently to legacy FSX instruments. It looks like I knew about this from a while back because I had modified my own C172 CDI’s to work correctly but never got round to flagging the issue with the online ones. In the process of updating. It doesn’t help that the scaling on the MSFS deviation simvar’s is also different by a factor of around 5. The gps vertical deviation is also different. Then we have the Nxi that adds further difference. All this in the name of progress. I’ll update with my full findings in due course. It may take a while to get to the bottom of this.

Yes that is the main issue with lateral deviation. Well that and the scaling being different even though the SDK documentation suggests it is the same as FSX. Vertical is a whole lot different from what I’ve seen so far. Still investigating.