G1000 AND Steam Gauges ... why choose?

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I am using Scott Vincent’s ‘Instrument Panel’ app on a Raspberry Pi for the steam displays. GitHub - scott-vincent/instrument-panel: An instrument panel for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

The PFD is a popped-out display shown on an Android tablet using Splashtop WiredXDisplay.

The MFD is on the screen on my laptop.

I might have to look into that raspberry pi thing sometime. I’m not inclined to dole out $65 for airmanager. Have they fixed the FPS drop issue when popping out panels yet?

I don’t believe so, but it doesn’t really affect me too much on my system.

This is like eating your cake and having it too.

Also it lets me fly the improved SU9 Beta C172 with a steam panel.

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I hate staem gauges and I love Glass PDF & MDF…
ALL… G1000, G3000 and I hope soon G5000 :roll_eyes:

You are missing out. Air Manager is the one bit of software aside from the sim itself that I could not fly without. It’s worth every penny. There are now over 1000 instruments and you can create or modify your own. Not only does it do the instrument display but you interface hardware and map controller buttons and axis.so no need for multiple apps like Mobiflight, SPAD, Axis & Oh’s, FSUIPC etc etc it does it all.

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i hate glass, love steam lol funny

In su8 the drop has disappeared for me if I run DX12 but other people don’t seem to have benefited.
I think Air Manager should be cheaper: it would sell better and bring more revenue at a lower price, but I think it is well worth having.

I will probably get Air Manager at some point also. One thing that made me hold back was apparently having to pay separately for ‘premium’ panels.

Also, for what it’s worth, I think you can hook buttons and encoders up the the Raspberry Pi and use Scott Vincent’s Instrument-Panel to inteface to them. However I never tried that since I have a panel which uses Mobiflight already.

I guess that proves one of my points. Two pieces of software when it could be one. If you knew what it takes to make a whole panel of quality instruments then you would understand why there is an additional charge for the premium stuff. It’s kinda like default aircraft for the sim and payware add ons.

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WOW… I use PI’s in my racecar for digital dash. Never thought about using them here. Good job, man…

The thing is, you don’t NEED premium panels. They’re nice to have, and some of them have instruments that are a touch better than the free ones, but there’s very little you get from them that you can’t already find in the free community instruments. You just assemble your own panels using those.

The vast majority of these panels I’ve assembled are from freely available instruments, or instruments the Simstrumentation group I’m part of have built from scratch. There are a few payware parts which could easily be replaced with free ones. The paid are just a bit better. Or in the case of the Garmin G5 displays, that’s payware that’s well worth the $10.

And this is just SOME of the panels I’ve got built that I happen to have pics of available to me atm.




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I am probably going to go with Air Manager at some point. What kind of touchscreens are you using?

These are both 24” which I think gives a more realistic instrument panel size when placed side by side but quite a few users are using the smaller wimaxit monitors that you see in the @Crunchmeister71 images.

Like @Sling380 said, larger monitors are definitely better. I’ll be building my more permanent cockpit setup in the not too distant future (pending some home renovations in the room the cockpit needs to be built in). At that point, I’ll be using a pair of 22" montiors as my mains, and using my existing 15.6" Wimaxit monitors as a side monitor and centre pedestal (the roles my tablets are currently filling).

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I am torn between the flexibility of Air Manager and the tactile feel of real knobs and switches using Mobiflight.

I have been flying using the G1000nxi (C172, Baron, Caravan mostly), using two separate monitors for the PFD and MFD and my homebuilt panel for twiddling the knobs. It is actually very nice, so I may just build a smarter panel around that concept … but then again, that would restrict me to G1000 …

You can use external hardware with AM as well just like with Mobiflight. It works really well with Arduinos. And there’s the Knobster, of course, which is a “catch all” dual encoder knob. Touch a knob on the screens (radio, alt, hdg, etc), and then use the Knobster to activate it. Or you can just flash and Arduino and use multiple switches and knobs as you would with Mobiflight. You get the best of both worlds in 1 software package that all works together vs piecemeal of multiple different platforms that have to run separately.

Overall, AM + Knobster is by far the most versatile setup you can have as in seconds you can switch from 1 plane to another. But in the end, you do what you want to do.

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