G1000 Hardware

wdelorme61 · December 30, 2015

Hello Everyone and Happy New Year!

I recently bought a G1000 hardware kit from Noble Simulators in Pa. I am running it on a PC with x-plane and simavio (NO LONGER SUPPORTED). The G1000 Kit comes with two screens two monitor control boards that I had to soldier all of the contacts and electronics (buttons encoders and chips) on to it. It interfaces all of the buttons with an Open Cockpits Board and two Leo Bodnar Joystick boards to run the encoder knobs. The bezels and knobs and labeling seem identical to the real G1000 except no back lighting. Who cares right?

I got every thing soldiered up and put together and made all of my connections. Hooked it up to my simulator system and it worked at least the video. Well not everything worked, but I was able to get Simavio with bezels turned off on the screens and tweeked them into place. Now I am thinking AWESOME!!! Well then it came down to getting all of the buttons working of which they currently did nothing.

Tyler at Noble Sims has a Youtube video on how to setup the software. So you use JoytoKey for the encoder knobs and IOCKeys to run the buttons. So I went through the setup. Mind you, his setup is proven on Prepar3D PC platform with Mindstar to drive the G1000.

Well I don't have Mindstar or Prepar3D. So I am making a go at it with what I have. Granted Simavio is no longer supported!!! So I can't get help from them. So I setup the ICOkeys and the JoytoKey per Tylers instructions, and they have to be running to interface with the simulator. So I did all of that. Then I went into Simavio and had simavio identify all of the buttons with their key mapping menu item. However, it would not identify the encoders.

So I went into x plane under Joystick & equipment and x plane sees the encoders under the Buttons:ADV. I found that you can program most of them to work correctly to a degree through xplane. However, I do have so game changing issues with it. Nav/Com’s do not completely work, and FMS I can’t map to anything that makes it work. However, x plane does see the encoder for the FMS. I just cannot find anything in xplane to map it to anything in the menu to get it to work.

Here is my list.

1. I cannot find any selection under a selection there to make the FMS knob work in the G1000 system. The button press on the knob seems to work but I can't get it to move the cursor with the outer knob and make airport letter selections with the inner knob. So without the FMS knob working, it make this about useless for flying instruments

2. Com frequency knob works, and you can change the frequency in the standby mode and press the flip/flop key to make standby active so that part works. What DOESNOT work is pressing the encoder button in does not switch from Com1 to Com2. Both for PFD and MFD.

3. This is the same for the Nav side of the PFD and MFD as the Com system.

4. Altitude up and down for the autopilot only works on one knob not one four the thousands and one for the hundreds, so you have to spin and spin the knob forever to get the altitude set.

5. Same for the Baro... you turn and turn the Baro and the Kohlman's window shows a very slow hundredth of a digit change at a time.

6. Softkeys work on the PFD but they don't work on the MFD. The MFD keys produce PFD function not MFD functions even though they are setup for MFD in simavio.

7. Can't Range to work at all.

8. OBS knob is very similar to the COM NAV knobs it will not turn the OBS for GPS of the VOR independently it will only do one even though you press the button to switch.

If anyone has experience and have worked through it and has answers, I would greatly appreciate it.

Wil