Greetings, all,
Well, that was quite the project. Details, screenshots, and links to a rough-and-ready UTube video can be found over at my FalconAF squadron's forum
here. I hope you don't mind looking at the visuals over there...I just spent a bunch of hours getting them uploaded.
I'll use this forum for technical info and Touch-buddy related issues. This was a wider project though, involving Touch-buddy, Falcon MFD Extractor Utility over at Viperpits, and F4Glass.
The biggest technical obstacle (other than the individual learning curves for Touch-buddy and MFDE) was the instability of the touchpad drivers for the MIMO USB monitors.
The monitors themselves work fine as monitors. But the install process is poorly-documented, and it turns out the fanged creature behind the curtain is the touchpanel drivers. My configuration is 3 systems: an XP3 system, a Vista system, and a Win7 Home Premium system. The touchpanel drivers only run flawlessly on the Vista system -- go figure! On both XP3 and Win7, the drivers hiccup and stumble repeatedly at load time.
The symptoms are: you go to calibrate, the calibration screen appears on the MIMO monitor, and...nothing. No touch response whatsoever.
What you find when you dig around are two things: in Device Manager you might see the driver with a [!] warning symbol on it, or you might not see it loaded at all, or you might see it loaded once with an error "Windows couldn't load this driver again because..." and only one of your screens calibrates. --OR-- the TBCALIB calibration program keeps repeatedly setting itself to only handle one monitor.
So when you fire everything up, you have to calibrate, see what's wrong, unplug the offending monitor, plug it back in, try again, and/or reboot and try again. And you have to do this multiple times each startup before, for no apparent reason whatsoever, it "takes" and you have all your touchpanels operative. Except on the Vista system, which for no apparent reason boots up smoothly every time.
The only reason I've kept my sanity is that I liken it to "playing crew chief"
; I put on my coveralls and go set up the jet; then I put on my g-suit, "salute myself" and climb in the pit. Well, it's a hobby.
Updated drivers are hard to find. The drivers that came with the install CD are quite old. The website has a link to drivers from spring; I stumbled across a link on a driver guru website to drivers from this fall. The drivers aren't from MIMO (the monitor manufacturer) they're from another Korean company; I'm going to pursue the quality issue with both companies and see what happens.
Because of the flakiness in startup I can't enthusiastically recommend multiple MIMO USB monitors at this time. I'd hate to give someone the thumbs up and have them go through a bunch of technical ordeals.
But I don't want to sound like a complete pill, either; once the systems boot and calibrate, the experience of sitting in an 8-screen glass cockpit is awesome!
I'll keep working the technical issues and, hopefully, there'll be a resolution and I can come back with a "thumbs up" on this configuration for others.
You can see visuals of the profiles I made at the link above. I'd be happy to post them, but, of course, there is one TB Tab per profile, per monitor, so it's not really a "profile" per se that somebody could use on a 1- or 2- monitor configuration. It's more like 8 separate profiles
WB, let me know if you want 'em!
Thanks to everyone here for the continued existence of Touch-buddy! It rocks!
Cheers,
Waxer