Question: "Can up to ten kids get an A320 from cold and dark into the air and keep it there with no preparation and only with verbal help?"

Answer: "Yes, they can!" We had several dual input issues ;-) And passengers (parents) were scared to death, but they kept the airplane up and the flight was only finished after some severe engine fires...

Congrats boys! Well done!

This is not our delivery standard but nevertheless a nice idea. A workplace for simulator maintenance and flight planning. Customized for a very special room situation.

If you update Skalarki Profiler to Version 5.0.1460 please make sure you update to ProSim 1.05b84 or higher as these versions depend in each other.

We often receive message from customers who are interested in an A320 flight simulator but are also faced with room size restrictions.

For those customers we invented our modular shell frame system which allows different holds for overheads and professional or home made shell liner components.

Today we feel we should explain the principle of this system a bit. Enjoy the video...

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Major difference to our Plug & Fly products is that you will need to spend your time with assembly. If assembly time is not a problem - our A320 Home Series is the best option for you!

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During our planning phase we decided for a little fancy fun thing. This annunciator lights green when the sim is powered. The other field is red an should be connected with the door look switch to avoid any distorbance during take-off and approach (not sure if my wife and kids will comply with these signs, but at least I can show them the flight status. And that's all about... :-)

Sound in the cockpit can be rather easy or very complex. We decided to start rather easy and will add complexity later.... :-)

For this we chose two sound systems from Logitech. One for the environmental sound and one for cockpit loudspeaker.

Frankly speaking these twe sets are rather oversized. Even the small one can drive your wife crazy if you get to many master cautions.... ;-)

But we are happy with it. Depending on where you place the loudspeakers you can clearly hear the different sound sources for aircraft sound and warning.

We will come back to this topic when we work further on communication.

Well, we know that there are many experts out there - in case you have further hints - feel free to let us know!

For now we work with three different Display Global Settings.

• Low
• Average
• High

The difference is only between scenerey complexity and autogen. So before doing a flight we decided which settings might be the best for our use depending in population density and weather complexity.

From our point of view we decided for higher frame rates in order to get the correct impression of wind and aircraft behavior instead of a better scenery. For now we can perfectly live with the current compromise.

nVidia Settings are here:

 PS: Sorry again for having screens in German language.

We are currently using Prepar3D v3.4 in combination with a high performance nVidia graphics board and an Intel Core i7 7700k. You can read a lot about tweaking P3D regarding frames and stutters. We need to admit that we also did as first impression all with default settings has not been very convincing.

We did some testing. At first with standard P3D settings. We found out that our setup is quite sensitive on scenerey complexity and autogen traffic. In some regions performance was good. In other region it was not acceptable. Especially in areas with high population frame rates dropped dramatically below 20 fps.

So we did some more testing. After investigating CPU and GPU we found that CPU0 is always 100 % while the load on other CPUs is average.

Picture below is with very high autogen settings causing stutterrs on our system:

Same scenario with less autogen.

We tried some tweaks with CPU affinity which successfully reduced load on CPU0. But at the and it caused more stutters than before:

After these tests we decided not to work with any tweaks regarding CPU Affinity. Even with CPU0 on 100 % we had a rather smooth picture with 30 to 60 fps.

GPU instead did not look too much stressed.

So we turned towards nVidia settings. And here we made some significant progress. We will show settings in our next post but we will not comment any reason as we simply do not have enough technical knowledge. From what we understood from other users there are different ways - depending on your system configuration - to get the most out of P3D. But maybe our settings will give you some hints where to start.

Especially in our case with a projection area that is very close to the cockpit (remember: only around 3.20 m diameter) the view in the runway is very different for CPT and F/O. If one has a rather straight view the other sees the environment from a completely different angle. Every approach would end up in a go around...

In Prepar3D you can set so called "custom cameras" for CPT and F/O. Before or while flying you can decide which pilot will do take-off and landing and set the camera views to the appropriate position.

There are some tools in the market that allows to modify custom cameras but we decided to do it the most easy way ourselves. And that's really simple to do. You should choose your standard flight. Then right click and "custom camera - create new".

Finding the right setting has been a trial and error thing - but all in all it did not take more than 30 min to find good settings.

Important: After creating custom cameras you need to save your standard flight again - otherwise all settings will be lost after restart.

The result is only slightly different on the pictures but a complete different impression in the cockpit.

We are almost ready for a test flight.

But before we do so we need to check button positions. There are two major hints: Do not try to start up the aircraft without calibrated axis and check button positions prior to launch. In our case some buttons of the maintenance panel have been pushed causing loads of ECAM error messages...

You can access ProSimA320 IOS on http://<your-ip-address>:8080.

We made ourselves comfortable and will now start with the software installation. We have run through the installation process of Prepar3D (v3), Skalarki Profiler (Version 5), ProSimA320 (Version 1.03 latest beta) and FSUIPC4. One note if you have missed that: you will need a paid version of FSUIPC4 to run ProSimA320.

First we start with setup of the Skalarki Profiler. This is rather easy as the profiler software is delivered already with the correct matching of hardware button with the Prosim software.

If you have successfully installed Skalarki drivers (see last article) you will find the profiler like this. One hint: Profiler software starts minimzed. So search for it in the desktop tray.

We stop the SDK Mode. P & P Hardware shows YES for all components we have (hey - for sure we need the refuel panel some day.... :-)

Make sure you have chosen the right version.

After saving the general settings and doing a restart of the profiler software we select "Edit Profile" and will now calibrate all axis that are controlled by Skalarki hardware. This process is rather self explaining.

Next step: Calibration of joysticks. This is also rather easy as you need to use the standard Windows game controller calibration (search in Windows for "game controller").

Now we start ProSimA320 Systems. We already followed the instructions to install and build necessary databases so we will focus on calibration. As Prepar3D has not been started yet the red message is not a problem. We choose "Config":

The next step is very important. Choose "Directinput support for joysticks" enabled. Otherwise ProSim will not accept any control input from your steering components. If you run Skalarki hardware on several computers (which is possible) be sure you add the IP-adress of these computers.

Important! Restart ProSim A320 Systems after this change.

 Now we select "Combined config" and search for lever in the flight control section.

 Now we need to do two things. Firstly we need to assign and calibrate the standard joystick axis.

 Secondly we need to assign the Skalarki controlled axis.

That's it. Now we are good to go for the first test flight.

Next important procedure will be the main assembly followed by the wiring and the most important calibration processes.

We placed hardware components according to the floor plan and connected cables. Maybe it's time to tell you a bit more about our general computer infrastructure. As you can see we use two main computers in our sim. Both have powerful grafics boards to connect multible displays and projectors.

We decided to integrate a Power Switch Bar into our 19" rack so that we do not need to crawl behind the simulator to supply the sim with power and to make sure that the sim is totally disconnected from any power source during our absence.

First important hint on using USB-hubs. Forget about cheap plastic 7 or 10 port hubs. You definitely should buy an industrial metal USB hub to ensure proper data connection. In our case we decided to use two hubs instead of one due to the available USB ports on our computer.

Second important hint: Use active USB cables for longer distances. Do not use any USB extensions. These will not work. We decided to follow all these hints and never had any problem with any USB connection. Not a single time.

Third important hint. When adding Skalarki USB devices please make sure that you follow instructions on USB driver installation with Windows 10. Keyword is driver certification. If you don't you will have error messages in your device manager.

http://skalarki-electronics.eu/tutorials/installing-usb-drivers.html

This is how hit should look like.

Done! Now we make sure that it's comfortable to work in the cockpit. For not getting crazy with the mouse we use a laptop and teamviewer to do any further maintenance.

BTW: We love the aluminum profiles as you easily can mount a provisional table to place your equipment.

Next step: Cockpit floor.

Important hint: Do not buy the cheapest carpet you can. Simply image how many hours it will take to replace it ;-)

Placing the carpet seems to be rather easy from a customers point of view. Even cutting the carpet's edges was not really difficult.

We are happy with the result. :-)

As we have really fun working on the sim we start building the shell frame.

Also rather easy as all components have numbers on it according to the instructions.

It really did not take long.

BTW: Due to the ceiling walls we made some amendments to the shell frame. Thanks to our modular system this was really very easy.

Let's do the calibrating. We choose the hard way and don't use a camera as our screen type with its cut side tops is quit special.

First of all we define the screen settings according to our projection area.

Note: vertical center is in the middle of the screen. In our case our screen is 1.50 m high. We choose 52 columns and mark the wall with 14 cm spacers. Start numbering from the left. Do not start from the center!

After spending a lot of time with marking the projection area with measure points we finally decided to buy a cross line laser which was a really fantastic help. The human eye cheats you a lot.

In Immersive Calibration PRO you can adjust every single point if necessary. In our case this was necessary due to the ultra short throw projectors and the very small projection area with approx. 3.30 m diameter.

We don't say this wasn't time consuming and in fact we had to try it several time.

Hint: Watch closely that you combine the correct field numbers from one projector to the next and use the full visible projection field for edge blending.

Finally we follow the instructions to compute warping and edgeblending.

You can do some minor adjustments. In our case this as almost not necessary.

After being happy with the result we export it to P3D and Immersive Display Pro.

In Immersive Display Pro we added the computed projector calibration (see instruction manual) and added some masks to hide unwanted projection fields and copied the ViewGroups.xml into the according folder

Filename must be ViewGroups.xml. Be sure you use the correct folder in P3D. This folder "programdata" is usually a HIDDEN folder!

We are quite happy with the result! Let's do some test flights before continuing with P3D and ProSim setup! :-)