FSX
Repairing Saitek Pro Flight Switch Panel with Arduino
The Saitek Pro Flight Panels were awesome. I bought all of them years ago and they worked great… with Windows 7 and USB 2. Unfortunately when I upgraded my computer everything stopped working due to Windows 10 and all USB3 ports. I have followed every guide, every driver, every bios setting I could find and I can’t get any of the panels to function. I’ve been able to get the radio panel and multi panel working with Spad.NEXT but the switch panel refuses to function. I can only assume something on the circuit board has gone bad. Now that Logitech has bought Saitek this thing is basically a brick with no support. Really without Spad.NEXT all three would be bricks as the Logitech software does not work at all. I really want my simulator to work again so I set off to figure out how to fix switch panel.
TL:DNR – Check out my video of it in action and view the code on github
Read on to see how I did this.
FlightMap 2.9.0 Released to the Play Store
Over the past few months I have seen an increase in application crashes due to memory issues. Almost all of these crashes were deep in the Google Maps library which FlightMap uses for the map view. This was caused by an update to the Google Play Services on the user’s tablet in July. I have made a number of changes to FlightMap to mitigate this problem and I believe I have worked around it.
Google has been making a lot of changes to Android over the last year and FlightMap and FlightGauge will continue to get updates to keep in line with these changes. My day job and life have slowed updates down a bit but I do have plans for updates to both applications in the near future.
On a different note, I have had to remove the country of Japan from countries FlightMap and FlightGauge are sold in. As of October 1st individuals are required to pay taxes directly to the Japanese government and I do not have the resources to deal with this. If you are a user from Japan you will still be able to use the application I just won’t be selling it in that country any more and I am truly sorry for this.
FlightConnect 2.8.3 Released
FlightConnect, the application used by FlightMap and FlightGauge to talk to FSX and P3D, has been updated. This update includes support for FS9 flight plans. Third party flight plan software tends to output in the older format so FlightConnect can now utilize them. This version also better handles the situation where SimConnect is not properly installed for FSX. Users will get an error dialog on application startup letting them know that FlightConnect cannot talk to FSX.
Troubleshooting FlightConnect with FSX
For the new STEAM version of FSX:
I’ve had a few support cases from new users of the Steam version of FSX. The issue is with FlightConnect crashing on launch. It looks like sometimes the SimConnect library is not installed properly when the rest of FSX is installed thru Steam. This can be easily fixed by manually installing SimConnect from the installation directory of FSX. In my case it exists here:
VINE RIPE SOFTWARE™ 