Project 1: 737 NAV radio project

This week I decided to put the PoKeys56U card to good use. I want to build a NAV radio myself and have it communicate with X-Plane 9. I will split the project in 3 parts:

1. Hook up 2 5-digit boards to the PoKeys56U card and display X-Plane’s NAV 1 active and standby frequencies on them
2. Hook up the 2 buttons and a dual rotary encoder to the PoKeys56U card and send changes to X-Plane
3. Put it all together in an attractive and working fashion

For part 1 of project 1, I will be using the Display Driver Board from http://www.flightsimparts.eu. This Display Driver Board uses 3 ports on the PoKeys56U card (+ ground). Since 2^3 = 8 it allows for the manipulation of 8 digits. NAV radios have 10 digits in total. Normally I would need another Display Driver Board for the last 2 digits, but I think I found a way around this so I can use 1 Display Driver Board per NAV radio.

The Display Driver Board is on its way, so are the parts (digits and panel) from Opencockpits.

I will test as soon as I have put everything together and post my results here as well as on the MyCockpit.org forums. For the programming part I will be using Microsoft Visual C++. Need to brush up on my programming skills.

Let’s hope it will look like something below when it’s finished.

Stay tuned (pun intended) 🙂