portable-sim-panels

Currently i’m working on an solution to use web technologies to build web based gauges and panels for flight simulation enthusjasts – my portable-sim-panels.

At https://github.com/joeherwig/portable-sim-panels you can see an older version where i connected to the Simconnect API of Lockheed Martins Prepar3D and Microsoft FSX via a .Net Solution and Powershell Scripting. Together with Marcin Lizer from Luxemburg i figured out that we could easily find a solution based on his WebSimConnect Applications by just adding a few features i recommended.

At first we needed to get tagged properties to be able to skip all data that was not changed. Then all unchanged data was removed from the taged JSON API.
While still connecting to the simulators REST API via Websocket-Protocol i was able to reduce the amount of data and though the amount of executed code with Marcin’s solution.

The big advantage of that solution is, that you can easily use any kind of display that is web capable for displaying the gauges of your plane. So you can have an iPad, Panel-PC, Smartphone and take your Cockpit away. Through the reduced traffic and very fast communication via high performance networks you can control your plane without the need of having your simulator window visible.

The concept is to use basic Gauges (eg. the GARMIN G5) and aircraft specific config files (eg. for V1, Vx, Vy, Vne, amount and type of engines, max RPM, max torque, etc.) as it is configured in modern glass cockpits as well.
Those gauges are assembled in responsive web pages eg. via CSS Grid Layouts to aircraft specific panels and can be called from any web capable display.

Funny side note: The Web techs for Flight simulation were adapted within the 2020 Published MSFS.