FMS Flight Sim on Plantraco HFX900 Transmitter

[Plantraco]

You may already know that our HFX900 series of transmitters ships with the FMS flight sim (freeware bundle) and a connector cord. It's a great bonus feature included with the starter set we sell.

http://www.plantraco.com/hobbies/product_hfx900.html

http://www.plantraco.com/hobbies/

What I am wondering is - is has anyone tried it with other flight sims?

The cord we supply comes with an RS-232 serial connector, and I have been able to plug it into a laptop using a keyspan USB-serial adapter cable.

I hear from a customer that he was able to use it on another simulator, but I can't remember which one it was. Maybe some guys here have our HFX900 sets for Micro R/C and have tried it with their other flight sims?


This is what I am hoping for - if you have tried it out on other sims, can you post here your results?

[rutat]

Be aware that serial port devices and XP get along like fish and bicycles. Unless you tweak. Of course if it will talk to XP at all, you could run the G3 demo with it.

[Plantraco]

Be aware that serial port devices and XP get along like fish and bicycles. Unless you tweak. Of course if it will talk to XP at all, you could run the G3 demo with it.

Well, with the serial adapter from Keyspan http://www.keyspan.com part number USA-19QW, I am able to use the FMS flight sim that we include with our Butterfly etc. And it's working on a MacBook Pro (dualcore intel), running XP on a partition (not emulation) with Apple's beta of "Bootcamp" (which allows you to boot XP on the new "intel-macintosh's"

So for Mac users, it's nice to know that you can now run R/C sims on Macintosh.

Next I am going to try running RealFlight G3 on my MacBook, and then I'll see if our HFX900 Transmitter with built-in flight sim interface can also work with the Realflight G3 - maybe it can, maybe it cannot. I'll post what I find.

Anyone who has our HFX900, and has tried to interface to other flight sims, I would like to hear about it. It saves us from having to try everything out, which is just not always possible here.

[Zaragon]

If it works with FMS it is likely it will also work with ClearView. http://www.rcflightsim.com/

[spirko]

Plantraco,
I just emailed this to you but now see you're on the forum.
I’m a r/c helicopter enthusiast and am looking for a small Tx for use with a flight simulator to take with me on business trips and for breaks at the office. I’ve seen your well made Tx at hobby expo and see (on your website) that it connects to a PC with either serial or usb connectors.
I’d buy the Tx right now but the best flight sim for helicopters is Reflex XTR that unfortunately connects to a dongle with a RJ-11 connector from the Tx. I guess I could just use trial and error and hopefully not short anything out while trying to build my own connector, but thought you might have already thought this through. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want to bring a huge Tx to the office to unwind between meetings.
Any help at all would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Craig
PS. Any plans to make a micro helicopter system like your Carbon Butterfly?

[jcerne]

Hi All,

I just tried interfacing the Plantraco HFX900 Model 2 TX with FMS using the cable that came with the TX and my PC com port. The operating system is Windows XP SP2 and the processor is a Pentium 3. FMS is running fine and my Hitec TX works fine with it using a TX-USB adaptor cable. However, I can't get the computer to respond to the Plantraco TX. I set the baud rate both in FMS and my PC com port device settings to 19200. I haven't touched the other serial port parameters such as number of data bits, parity etc. Perhaps these settings need to be changed? I would like to avoid buying a serial to USB adaptor.

I've searched the web for more info but only found this thread and another post that one needs to activate the com ports in BIOS when running Windows XP.

Please let me know what I should try next. The Plantraco TX looks great and I'm very excited about trying it in both the real and virtual worlds. If it works with FMS, I'm also looking forward to trying it with Clearview. If anyone has seen the Plantraco Micro-racer versions for Clearview, please let me know.

Thanks in advance.
John

P.S. I'm sorry to bring up another question, but do rechargable AA (for example NiMH) batteries have enough voltage for the Pantraco TX, or does one have to use alkaline, as the manual recommends, to get reasonable functioning and range?