Autopilot for custom airplanes ( P3D )

[adkuyper]

I recently bought a CLE-E yoke and the autopilot feature (yoke moving to autopilot commands) works on most X-plane 3rd party planes. Except for the IXEG 737 ?
In P3D for a large part of the most popular 3rd party airliners, the yoke does not move when the autopilot is engaged (ex. pmdg 777, 747).

If I understand correctly CLS2sim uses simconnect to read variables from the sim (P3D). Can someone explain which simconnect variables are used to set the yoke position when the autopilot is on, and which are these values that are not used by the addon planes but are required by cls2sim?
Or in other words, explain which data the cls yoke uses to set the position ?

I have an idea (but I’m far from sure it can work), that maybe using some program that can access the specific 3rd party simconnect variables and change default ones accordingly the yoke should be able to follow the commands ? A program I have in mind is for example SpadNext.

For a default plane, the PMDG NGX and the PMDG 747, the simconnect “YOKE X INDICATOR” and “YOKE X POSITION” values (yoke roll) do change when the autopilot is engaged.
Perhaps a feature can be added to CLS2sim that the yoke position is set by the above simconnect variables (which would cover most planes) ? And setting “don’t set pos in AP mode” in cls2sim of course.

It’s just an idea and I might be way off here …

But in general it would be very interesting if there was a list of which simconnect variables (p3d) and datarefs (xplane) are used for which settings in cls2sim (for example which dataref activates stick shaker etc…). Is this something you can make available?

Thank you ! It’s great to be able to ‘feel the planes’ through the yoke 🙂

[Diego Bürgin]

We’re currently working overtime on our platform, so regarding CLS2Sim, for the moment we’re keeping to bug fixes only.
But the idea is interesting. I will definitely look into it.

The behavior has to be general enough to support multiple plane models (say if only PMDG supports it, its too specific)
and I will have to do some tests to see how it behaves.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’m confident this will be doable.

I’ll get back to you later with the datarefs and SimConnect variables we use for autopilot.

Regards
Diego

[Author]

Posts