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FSX Creating an acars system

E

Erik Ehrhardt

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3
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netherlands
Hi guys, I'm new here - been flying around with some ideas in my head - and decided to take the next step and started looking into gathering information to create an acars system.

Now, right now, I have no experience in such a thing, however, simconnect seems to be the way to go (although I am not sure of this). So now I have a few questions...

1. Can I create a stand-alone app with simconnect that runs at the same time along with FSX (or as a screen within FSX - for example like FSPAssengers)?
2. Will simconnect be able to receive and send data from, for example, a MySQL database?
3. If I fail miserably in connecting all the programming dots, are there people who are willing and able to assist me? :)

I hope I posted this in the correct forum here, and I hope to be an active member from now on. :D

Fly safe!
Erik
 
Hi Eric,

it all depends on what you mean by ACARS system...

just recording OOOI and similar events is... fairly trivial.

From there, the further you get into the functionality of the real systems, the more complicated it gets.

Then you get to integration of complex addons and it gets... well... technically impossible.
 
Thanks for the responses.

The main idea is to keep it simple. There once was (or still is) a program fsacars which kept track of the plane's status during flight; boarding, taxiing, climbing, cruising... etc which was communicated to webpages so visitors could see what was going on. I basically want the same, to keep track of the flight. But also, adjust weight to the plane before take-off based on passengers, luggage and fuel.

The pilot basically needs to download the flight manifest with the details to the acars system to adjust the plane configuration and move on from there.

I do not think it would be that complicated, so I just wanted to know about the features simconnect offers. And again, I am not an expert on this. And yes, of course I saw the simconnect page before I posted my question here Heretic. ;)
 
The data gathering itself is fairly straightforward.

Getting it to communicate with server backend is a bit more complicated, but not too bad with .NET I think. You'd also need a server software of course, which is getting somewhere I have little idea of.

Pushing data to the simulator is a problem, many simmers use addons like PMDG, FS Labs and whatnot, which simply do not support this kind of loading.

(also, there is still a load of these programs available, though these days many of them are programmed by VAs in-house)
 
Well, the backend will be a couple of php scripts which can generate text files to be read by the program.

I found the old fsacars program from SATA Virtual, the features are listed here: http://www.satavirtual.org/fsacars/features.html . This program also connects to a webpage to collect data from the flight and displays it live on a map.

So the only thing it needs to do is run, collect a flight plan through a PHP script, interact with the webpage during flight to see it's status (parked, taxi, t/o, cruise - and location and altitude), and disconnect after the landing and parking/gate through a button somewhere. :)

Would simconnect be able to do this, or should I try it with C++ only... what are my options?
 
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