Monday, September 13, 2004

Back to business

It has been a long since i last posted. A lot of personal things happened during this time temporarily slowing down the project for a while. However, i am back and active again for the past one month. I reached the major milestone in this project - I have built the key hardware interface cards using the IOCards technology. So finally, for me IOCards won over EPIC, FSBus and proton etc for the reasons i explained earlier. I have built the USB Expansion card, Master Card and Multiplexed displays card - one each. I still need to test them. I will give a detailed run down of building these cards in a seperate post.

Meanwhile, i have downloaded the Project Magenta demo and played with it a little bit. Doing a lot of research on PC hardware as i immediately need computers to run the FS9 (Flightsimulator 2004) and PM (Project Magenta).

Also, there is competition began in the panels offerings and two new players showed up in the last couple of months. They are: Robert Prather's Simwerx (http://www.simwerx.com/) and soon to be opened (may be by next week) DakenSkys (http://www.dakenskys.com). FlightDeck Solutions (http://www.flightdecksolutions.com) still the leader but definately worth watching the competition - specially Dakenskys. Dakenskys panels seem to be made better quality material at competitive prices. So, as i am not in a big hurry - i am going to wait until i see the full line of offering from Dakenskys.

So, my short term plan is to make the iocards working and hook it up and experiment in a test mode. Next build the computers (at least two) and then move onto the panels.


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