Our friend Dávid has made some good progress with the RMP interfacing. In the video below you can see he has managed to make it ‘talk’ to the computer with an Arduino board and some affordable components.

Pretty amazing! The next step is to have it functioning with Simconnect and Jeehell FMGS. Imagine using your simulators on Vatsim using a genuine RMP and ACP — this is as real as it gets.

More information provided by Dávid:

-The chip that I used to convert the bipolar RZ ARINC signal to 1’s and 0’s is an RM3183D.

-The “backlight” effect on the PC software’s textboxes was achieved by setting their text color to amber, and toggling their “Enabled” property (which makes them gray). It’s also important that the “ReadOnly” property is always on.

-The ACARS MU emulator that I mentioned at 3:15 was developed by me to have the VHF3 print “ACARS” instead of “- – – – – -” when active. It’s essentially a little microcontroller which I’ve programmed to work as a switch that listens to a Voice/Data Select discrete output, toggles a boolean when it’s received, and outputs that bool as a digital 0V/5V output. That digital output from the MCU is then used with an optocoupler to pull the RMP’s Voice/Data Monitor discrete input to ground.
Its only purpose is to make it look more realistic, and it should have no impact on whether or not the panel can be interfaced with a computer.

-At 4:35 what I was trying to say is that one chip has 2 channels. For the RMP’s full functionality (COM1 and COM2 lines, and NAV line) I’d need 2 chips. On the 2nd chip, I’d have one spare channel which I don’t think I would be able to make use of.

-At around 5:35 I got a little bit into expenses again. I looked up my eBay history ealier to find the chip. It cost me only *12EUR* altogether with shipping.

-At 6:06 I mentioned meddling with the memory of the RMP software for Jeehell to directly inject the frequency value. I took a look at it and that plan failed, however I found out that FSX stores frequencies in a much simpler way. In Cheat Engine, if you search for 4 bytes and input the frequency without the decimal point and 00 at the end, you can find the currently active freq. For example 123.125 should be 12312500. I still need to polish my C# knowledge a little because I haven’t used it in years, and then I will need to learn how to use Simconnect.