I find myself constantly zooming in and out of certain areas in the g1000 glass cockpit to do things like check engine gauges for leaning procedures or other things that have me breaking the immersion with a computer mouse.
I’m looking for a way to put some big ■■■ gauges on a secondary monitor/tablet so I can always see them without having to rummage around the cockpit. I tried the spacedesk thing with a popout window and was dissatisfied with the lag and the lack of quality to sufficiently stream it over wifi. The white windows bar at the top also breaks the immersion. I found a freeware G3000 style flight companion APP that uses communication directly with the SIM to simulate it’s own gauges and this works way faster and smoother than the popout mirroring. The only problem I have with it is the MFD screen has the map taking up most of the screen real estate so the gauges are made small.
Another thing I tried was simdashboard. I love how modular it is and how you can make your own panel of whatever gauges you want, however to get anything useful out of it I’d have to pay money apparently. I’m not looking necessarily to manipulate things in the game on this second screen, just to have some flexability on reading live data from the game.
I’m open to different possibilities though, I want to get an idea of whats out there and what you guys think.
Air Manager is by far the best and most flexible instrument panel solution. Search here and the sim Innovations forum for an idea of what’s on offer. I’ve literally made hundreds of instruments and now the MSFS SDK is better more instruments compatible with it will become a reality.
I’ve checked out the thread linked above and a few of these videos. It certainly seems like an attractive option. I have prior experience with LUA so maybe I could put that to use again. Costing more than I paid for the game though is not too attractive I’ll admit.
I see mostly analog gauges in there, is it possible to have digital style gauges or numerical readouts instead?
Right now I only fly GA with steam gauges but also have a panel ready to go for the 172 with the Garmin 530/430 package.
When you get into the panel style you would be popping out the panels in the sim and moving them where you need them on another monitor for Air Manager to go overtop.
There is an extensive thread here
Which goes over all of this and a group here on the forum or creating great content and making it available.
Numerical read outs absolutely yes. What types of digital gauges did you have in mind? PFD’s, EHSI’s, digital engine monitors, etc have been done. LCD and 7 segment type displays also.
I was thinking of a tach that looks exactly like the one in the G1000 MFD but instead of going in increments of 10, it goes in increments in 1 like the external camera HUD tach does. I find it easier and quicker to lean for climbing with a more responsive tach like that.
I find the lean page of the G1000 NXI MFD given it’s numerical readouts for each cylinder is more useful for me when it comes to leaning at cruise than the EGT gauge. I think maybe because it’s easier for me to discern actual numbers though versus very tiny movement changes on that little white blip. I have to be zoomed all the way in to be able to see the fine movements, issue for me lol.
I wouldn’t mind trying an analog style EGT gauge like in the non G1000 skyhawk because I can set a visual reference for peak with the knob. Just need to know how many degrees each increment is.
Ok. So typical of what you might find in a digital engine monitor like say the MVP-50 or EDM-930 etc. One of the best features of AM is its so flexible so you could replicate the outside view instruments and have them available on your instrument panel and whatever size you like. The caveat is the sim needs to make the data available for whatever you want to display. So EGT for every cylinder as an example.