Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Setting up the FlySky FS-i6 transmitter for use with RC Desk Pilot simulator

Hi Everyone -

In my continuing journey experimenting with and evaluating the very inexpensive and capable FlySky FS-i6 transmitter, I recently set it up to be used with the free to download RC Desk Pilot simulator.

I should also add at this point that my transmitter screen may look different than yours if you have the stock FlySky FS-i6 as I have done a firmware upgrade to have a timer, 10 channels, etc.  You can learn more about how that went by watching this video.
I got the inspiration and information I needed to accomplish this in the easiest and most inexpensive way by watching this video by Mirko FPV.
I picked up the required cables from Banggood and Ebay.  I couldn't seem to find both suitable cables from just one vendor unfortunately, but shipping was free from both😊  Here are the links.

I went to the SmartPropoplus website to download that software so that my transmitter could interface with my computer.  When you clink on the link, you can do much more reading about the basics and more advanced properties of SmartPropoplus.

Once loaded up on the computer, this is what it looks like before connecting the transmitter.  A few shots taken from my computer screen, apologize for the quality😊  I should mention that I have a PC using Windows 10 in case you have another setup or a Mac, I do not know if it will work or look like the pictures below.



Since the transmitter must be turned on when using the simulator, I built a "plane" in my transmitter strictly for the sim so that I would not interfere with any settings on my real planes.
I then connected the two cables, plugged them into my transmitter and computer and opened SmartPropoplus.  If the transmitter is turned off when you do this, you will see transmitter disconnected in the bottom window.
On the Transmitter page, you want to select Standard in the PPM window, I didn't change anything else at this point. 
I did check the Joystick page to ensure that when I moved the sticks, the green moved up and down accordingly and matched the channels in the transmitter.  I have a Mode 2 transmitter, so Channel 1 is aileron (roll), Channel 2 is elevator (pitch), Channel 3 is throttle and Channel 4 is rudder (yaw).  I'm not sure why it shows channels 7 and 8 active, however, I didn't worry about that too much as RC Desk Pilot is a simple simulator with primarily 4 channel or less models in it's data base.  I couldn't really see any way to change this in SmartPropoplus anyway😊 vJoy 1 is the only selection I had available which is my transmitter.
I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but on the Input page, I selected "Auto" on the Bit Rate and Audio source channel in hope that the computer would optimize the settings.
Once SmartPropoplus is happy and the transmitter is turned on and communicating correctly with the computer, you should get this message at the bottom.😊 If not, it will give you a message of what needs to be corrected before the transmitter will communicate properly with the computer.
I then downloaded RC Desk Pilot to start setting that up.  Here are a few notes of the requirements from the downloads screen.  Interestingly, I guess with my Windows 10 computer, as I was going through the download process, it would not download RC Desk Pilot until DirectX 9.0c was downloaded, the "down loader" essentially told me this and I just agreed as I went along and it worked out fine.😁
RC Desk Pilot is fairly simple to use, to make any changes, you need to "hover" your mouse cursor in the top left corner of the screen to make changes, selecting "menu" will take you to the page you need to ensure your controller is working properly.
Once you select menu, you go to this page where you can change between aircraft and other items, to set up the transmitter, select controls.
Your transmitter may be different I'm not sure, I had to change most of the channels in this menu to correspond to the appropriate channel/axis on my transmitter controls.  
Also of note, I had to reverse three of my channels to get things working properly.  Fortunately, when you have your plane on the runway in RC Desk Pilot, you can see the controls moving when you move the sticks, so that is a visual way to see if things are set up properly.
There are several other settings you can experiment with, but I won't go into those here, I simply wanted to cover the basics so that you can get your FlySky FS-i6 connected to a simple and free simulator😊

Park Jet noise...the "other" sound of freedom😎

Cheers,

Scott
















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