Track-IR 4PRO & X-Plane

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

Track-IR 4PRO & X-Plane:

 

How many degrees of motion with x-plane?

How many hours to configure it and get x-plane set up?

Is getting x-plane to use it twitchy and touchy, or easy?

Does it matter which plane I'm flying?

[Keith Smith]

Hi Wayne,

 

I believe there are two plugins, one from the manufacturer and one from Sandy B. The stock plugin supports 3 DOF, Sandy's unsupported plugin supports 3.

 

For non-vatsim x-plane related questions, you might try the x-plane.org forums, there are some excellent ppl in that community that are definitely not reading this forum. I say this not to dissuade you from posting here, but only so you know what options you have.

 

I have no idea about twitchy/touchy, but I'm guessing you configure that through a high level program independently of x-plane.

 

You'll want to find a plane with a 3d cockpit that you enjoy. I'm incredibly close to ordering one myself and making the leap of buying a new system with a big widescreen LCD.

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

Keith, Tell ya the truth, it's Jason's Pipers that are making me want Track-IR.

 

I'm right on the edge of just ordering the thing and answering those questions myself. If it doesn't work with x-plane (and I think it will), I'll sell a slightly used track-IR to one of my FS friends.

 

Good point about the x-plane.org forum. Unfortunately, it's gray-on-black today. I thought I ended up at Goth-Plane by mistake.

[Ian Elchitz 810151]

I fly exclusively in the 3d panels. Jason's are in my opinion top notch. I did considerable modifications to the Cirrus Jet I've been flying recently and have been itching to look into a TrackIR.

 

Will have to be added to the '08 wish list after the recent upgrade however.

 

I am looking forward to your full report as always Wayne!

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

About two hours of fiddling to have it installed and figured out good enough to go fly. No major surprises.

 

This is a spin around the traffic pattern at Van Nuys 16L using Track-IR. Sandy Barbour's great plug-in gives X-Plane 5 degrees of freedom (x, y, z, yaw, pitch) with Track-IR. You move your head, it changes the view. Works pretty well.

 

The plane is 3pointaircraft.com's excellent Fighter ultralight. Great plane, dumb name. Yes, the plane's nonexistent radio stack picks up marker beacons. It's a fun flying plane, and well behaved in the air.

 

The star here is the Track-IR; its co-star, X-Plane. Please excuse the [Mod - lovely stuff]py flying by the second-rate actor in the cockpit.

 

Video here (simtube).

[Mark Steele 953544]

Very Cool!

 

Wayne - how far do you actually turn your head to have the view out the rear of the aircraft?

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

Wayne - how far do you actually turn your head to have the view out the rear of the aircraft?

 

Here are pictures from the utility you can use to tune TrackIR. These are the default settings; you can change how far you have to move your real head to make the game head move. All six axes are individually tunable. The default tuning is non-linear.

 

The window with the three dots shows the TrackIR camera's view of the TrackClip PRO clipped to my headset.

 

The window with all the curves and lines shows the head position and game position of each axis.

 

The bottom window is, I trust, self explanatory.

 

Track IR configuration pictures

[Ian Elchitz 810151]

 

Track IR configuration pictures

 

Nice haircut Wayne

[Keith Smith]

Wayne, thanks for taking the time to make and post the video. It's official, I'm getting a new system, a big widescreen monitor, flying with 3d cockpits and the Track-IR.

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

Ian, The fake dummy's hair is only slight shorter than the real dummy's hair.

 

Keith, You don't even need the widescreen monitor with TrackIR But I'll support your story that you do. It's for a good cause.

 

The only issue so far is that it's harder than a son-of-a-gun to click on panel buttons in a 3d panel with TrackIR. You have to hold your head perfectly still while clicking or the button moves out from under your mouse cursor. There is a hot-key to freeze the tracking, and I wondered what that was for. That's probably what. Look at the panel, wack that key, click the button, then wack that key again. Somewhat annoying. If I can [Mod - Happy Thoughts]ign that key to a mouse button, that'll be ideal.

[Keith Smith]

Wayne,

 

Your next purchase should be the GoFlight hardware. Then you can start building a real panel with a stack for transponder, com, nav, and adf freqs. I also believe that the current version of xplane allows pretty flexible mapping of keypresses to functions. Dig through the menus and text files to see what you can find.

 

The only reason I'm thinking about widescreen is because I'm looking for a pretty large screen (such as an HD monitor), and those are only available in widescreen.

[Ian Elchitz 810151]

The only drawback to the Widescreen monitor is that your 2d cockpit (and internal XP screenshots) get cropped off.

 

So essentially while looking at a 2d cockpit - it's as if I'm flying in one of Wayne's beloved Piper Cubs with no door (or door frames).

 

I've learned to love the 3d cockpit however. Keep in mind that some are better than others.

[Ian Elchitz 810151]

Your next purchase should be the GoFlight hardware.

 

This reminds me. A few years ago I pulled out the old soldering iron and started to build one of those FSCOM modules, hoping to put something like this together myself.

 

I wonder what sort of alternate solutions are out there these days that might allow one to build their own stacks as opposed to purchasing a goflight model. The Student pilot config retails for $350 but I'm not sure of the functionality. For the fancy private pilot you are looking at one large. Wonder how much effort, fun, cost, and hair it would take to build your own.

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

Ian, There are so many choices, I don't even know where to begin.

 

Building your own, I think you're going to want a microcontroller to interface with all of the switches, knobs, dials. It'll be either one your program, or one you buy already programmed and built to generically interface with digital and analog i/o. You get to decide whether to have RS-232 or USB for your computer to talk to the microcontrollre. Why RS-232? Because the cheapest breadboardable microcontrollers come with built-in RS-232 drivers. They don't come with USB drivers. The microcontrollers I've seen that do USB are surface-mount, meaning you have to get an expensive development version (that is, adapted to regular ol' DIP so you can breadboard it).

 

See SimKits. These guys are my win-the-lotto solution to flight-sim instrumentation. Very nice looking stuff.

 

Back to TrackIR, I've got one issue almost worked out. That is, how to freeze tracking so I can click on panel buttons. You can do it with the F9 key, but that's inconvenient. It needs to be fast. I hoped that the Logitech drivers would let me map a mouse button to F9, but that doesn't seem possible. However, the CH Yoke drivers will let me map a yoke button to F9. Problem is, I have to take the Yoke out of simple mode and into mapped mode to do that. Once I figure that out, I'll have a button under my left thumb that I can wack to freeze scanning while I use my right hand on the mouse to click a button.

 

The other issue is a mystery: My head position seems to drift, requiring frequent use of the F12 key to recenter the view. It's a bit annoying. I suspect it's an xplane/pilot-view issue (pilot-view is the xplane<->trackIR plugin), but I don't know yet.

 

In other news, the Piper Warrior, the plane I'm using to learn to fly with TrackIR, is kicking my butt. I think it's because I'm so awful at working the trim when I can't see the trim indicator. The trim indicator is rather low on the panel, and glancing down to look at it is an unneeded distraction when I'm in the pattern. I think I will move the pitch trim indicator up on the panel to where I can see it easily when flying. Cheating? Sure. On the other hand, I'm not sure trimming a real plane is as hard as it is in the sim. I think I need to see that trim indicator to make up for the missing control feedback (a spring in the yoke is not control feedback). It's just as likely, of course, that I suck and I'm just making it the sim's fault so I don't have to face it.

 

One more thing about Jason's Warrior: The rightmost digit in the Kollsman window is not visible. In other words, you see "29.9" with no idea whether you're looking at 29.92 or 29.98. Say what?

[Ian Elchitz 810151]

One more thing about Jason's Warrior: The rightmost digit in the Kollsman window is not visible. In other words, you see "29.9" with no idea whether you're looking at 29.92 or 29.98. Say what?

 

Yep - Add a digital altimeter gauge somewhere on the panel. Much easier to read.

 

EDIT: Keith originally told me about this solution. I wonder if anyone has mentioned it to Jason. However - I think it's a problem with the stock X-Plane gauge and not Jason's aircraft - so we probably have to take it up with Austin (who by the way I've found very responsive to emails unlike Bill Gates who never responded to any of mine regarding FS9).

[Wayne Conrad 989233]

I went to add the digital Kollsman readout to the Warrior; only then did I notice it was already there. Either Jason put it there, or Keith (I'm using Keith's modified panel). Thanks, someone. Other changes I'm going to make: Move the TAC left so it's not obscured by the yoke, switch to radios with standby frequencies, and add an EGT gauge.

 

I flew the Warrior with TrackIR on the gauges for the first time today. The sound spanking that the Warrior has been giving me in the traffic pattern was not repeated en route. It's a wonderfully stable IFR platform when compared to the Piper Tri-Pacer. I wasn't on the needles for long: I only filed IFR to get out of the San Diego scud, so I canceled as soon as I was out of the clouds.

 

I've got the Yoke all figured out. I don't know why I thought I had to use mapped mode to get the CH Yoke to map a button to a key. It works just fine in direct mode. So now there's a button under my left thumb mapped to F9 to freeze or unfreeze tracking. To click a panel button, I look, click the thumb button to freeze tracking, click on the panel button with the mouse, and then click the thumb button to resume tracking. It's not as awful as it sounds.

 

I've got a theory about what might be causing the head position drifting. I'll let you know. I was able to ameliorate the problem by changing the X, Y and Z axis tunings to the built-in "deadband" curve. It still happens, though.

[Jeff Thorsett 1034746]

One more thing about Jason's Warrior: The rightmost digit in the Kollsman window is not visible. In other words, you see "29.9" with no idea whether you're looking at 29.92 or 29.98. Say what?

 

The simple solution to this (and truthfully, most other planes' unreadable gauges) is to install this plugin.

[Keith Smith]

Thorsett,

 

Adding a digital altimeter setting has worked fine for me, and is the solution that I employed in Jason C's Warrior.

 

I wrote to Austin, and he pointed out that the stock aircraft don't exhibit the problem. Sure enough, I checked out the stock 172 and King Air, and they're quite readable. Perhaps Jason customized the altimeter graphic for the Pipers? I'll drop him an email to find out.

 

Keith