(Over?)Ambitious 8-screen TB project underway

[CyBerkut]

Originally Posted by Waxer

I'm happy to say that I'm in "cleanup mode" on this project. Six touchscreens and a large widescreen monitor. Two more touchscreens to be added in version 2, after I cleanup version 1 (I've decided to replace my aging HP laptop and with its replacement get enough built-in USB connectivity to add the two additional touchscreens.

Waxer, can you feel the envy emmanating in waves across the internet?

While I don't fly an F-16 sim these days, it's not too hard to imagine just how cool this has to be. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the pics!

Be sure to let us know if you develop a DCS:BS config for your pit!

[Waxer]

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

[Wild.Bill.Kelso]

Man that looks great Waxer! No need to post all those image here, we can see them fine. Are you going to just run Vista on all of your pcs just to get rid of the headache? Those drivers can be such a hassle when they don't work. And yea, the documentation totally sucks. But your system looks great. Those profiles won't be of much use to others I am guessing, but you sure have put a lot of work into your pit.

[CyBerkut]

Waxer, that is very well executed! Thanks for sharing the details, pics and videos.

I'm sure you're basking in all of that hard-won fast mover goodness, and deservedly so. That has got to be a trip!

Are you still thinking about doing something similar with DCS: Black Shark? DCS:BS is about to get a lot more interesting with Lockon FC 2.0 making all those planes multi-player interoperable. And DCS:A10C shouldn't be too far behind that.

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Now that you've been through all the struggles with the multiple MIMO touchscreen monitors, is that still the same approach you would use if you were starting now?

How happy are you with the MSI all in one touchscreen PC?

[Waxer]

Thanks for the kind words, mates!

Originally Posted by CyBerkut

Are you still thinking about doing something similar with DCS: Black Shark? DCS:BS is about to get a lot more interesting with Lockon FC 2.0 making all those planes multi-player interoperable. And DCS:A10C shouldn't be too far behind that.

Well, that is tempting. The whole reason I went "glass pit" as opposed to Viperpits-style physical pit was so that when the Next Big Thing came out (be it an F-18 sim or a Hog sim or "whatever") I could make a new 'pit for it and not have an F-16 pit in my basement that nobody else was flying .

But I think I'm going to just "fly for awhile" before tackling anything new.

Originally Posted by CyBerkut

Now that you've been through all the struggles with the multiple MIMO touchscreen monitors, is that still the same approach you would use if you were starting now?

That's a real 50/50. There are guys over on Viperpits who've had good experiences with them.

I myself, at this very moment, am doing a very careful, painstaking, "roll back to an old system restore point" and step-by-step install/reboot/install/reboot/calibrate each Mimo monitor on my WinXP Falcon system because they were losing calibration yesterday. (I'm waiting for the rig to reboot right now ).

They work well for me as video monitors. They work well for me now on 2 out of the 3 systems as touchscreens (I had a breakthru in the calibration on the Win7 machine, and now it's running like a top). Apparently there are new models out (but they use the same drivers). Still bug hunting on the XP system.

They were cheap as compared to 8 VGA touchscreens plus video card expansions. But I bet I'da been up and running 4 weeks ago. Well see after this re-install .

Originally Posted by CyBerkut

How happy are you with the MSI all in one touchscreen PC?

That's been a gem. It was three-hundred-and-$omething, and it handles (counting its own main monitor) 4 touchscreens with lots of animations, and it's never hiccuped (Waxer crosses his fingers and touches his wooden head). Big thumbs up on this one.

[CyBerkut]

Originally Posted by Waxer

Well, that is tempting. The whole reason I went "glass pit" as opposed to Viperpits-style physical pit was so that when the Next Big Thing came out (be it an F-18 sim or a Hog sim or "whatever") I could make a new 'pit for it and not have an F-16 pit in my basement that nobody else was flying .

But I think I'm going to just "fly for awhile" before tackling anything new.

I can certainly understand that! You should definitely enjoy it!!!

Just to plant an itch tho'... Wags just posted reference cockpit pics for the A-10C in their forums: A-10C Cockpit Reference Images - ED Forums


Merry Christmas, Waxer!

[Waxer]

Originally Posted by Waxer

Re: Mimo touchscreens:
I myself, at this very moment, am doing a very careful, painstaking, "roll back to an old system restore point" and step-by-step install/reboot/install/reboot/calibrate each Mimo monitor on my WinXP Falcon system because they were losing calibration yesterday. (I'm waiting for the rig to reboot right now ).

They work well for me as video monitors. They work well for me now on 2 out of the 3 systems as touchscreens (I had a breakthru in the calibration on the Win7 machine, and now it's running like a top). Apparently there are new models out (but they use the same drivers). Still bug hunting on the XP system.

They were cheap as compared to 8 VGA touchscreens plus video card expansions. But I bet I'da been up and running 4 weeks ago. Well see after this re-install .

Just a brief update: when last I posted, I was experiencing problems with the Mimo 740 touchscreen monitors on WinXP.

Vista and Win7 were working fine. I was planning to do a re-install on WinXP.

I'm happy to report that I've solved all of the problems. The monitors now work flawlessly.

The problems were associated with poorly-documented installation and calibration instructions on behalf of Mimo. As it turns out, there is an (undocumented by Mimo) "right way" to install and calibrate multiple Mimo monitors on the same system. Do it the right way and the monitors work as advertised 98% of the time, and the other 2% of the time a simple "unplug and replug" at boot time clears the hangup.

If anyone is planning on using these monitors and would like some help, please feel free to email me at neiljohnston at earthlink dot net (you get it ) and I'd be glad to help out.