Hispapanel MCP retrofit - square peg/round hole

It's a good sim day! I finally figure out how to make x-planes not crash on a mac!!! The answer was pretty simple: BUY A DAMN PC!!!!!!! My life is forever changed. So, i copied over my data.cfg file for simvim and reinstalled everything on the new PC, put a lid on the MCP and bob's your uncle! There are a couple of things left to do, like config the captain's course display and fix that CMD A button that got borked.

Well, this will be the end of my request for help on how to force the Hispapanels MCV to work with x-planes on iOS using SimVim (when that is just not what it was designed to do). I hope this helps someone if they got stuck at some point working on something like this. I plan to take a little break to try and figure out what the next best thing to do is. I've toyed with going forward with making a whole dashboard out in the shed, but i'm not sure if I'm ready for that. I might get a MFD set up for my desk if i can figure out how to make it small enough to makes sense. Anyway, thanks for reading. Karl i hope your move isn't too hard on you. Your community of simmers awaits when you're again airworthy!

It's alive!!! What an amazing thing to see. I have to do the captain's course display and figure out how best to attach the panel to the box so i can put the lid on. Biggest problem remains, though: x-plane 11 crashes almost every time I attach the arduino. I want to cry. I've changed arduinos, reinstalled SimVimX after flashing both arduinos, reinstalled x-plane 11, and even reinstalled iOS's latest version and the same dumb stupid thing happens. Did i say i want to cry? Anyone know how to read an iOS crash report?

adding in the seven segment displays. I know people have cautioned about using the arduino power for them, but there are only 6 and I guess i don't really want to fuss with an external power thingydingy. But just in case i need to, i did all the VCC and ground wires from the 6 displays to a seperate bus that i can then unhook from arduino and stick on an external power supply.

fitting Max boards into the world of the Hispapanel MCP is a little tough. Problem is the way it's set up where buttons are actually on shafts that press buttons on the attached PCB. I got a bunch of individual push buttons but they don't match the shape of the Hispapanel panel.... and now i REALLY want my own 3D printer!!!

The buttons that don't fit 😫

Well, thank you very much. Your videos are what inspired me to even start doing this. I wish I had your mad skills but I’ve sure had fun (when it’s not overwhelmingly frustrating!).

ok I got all switches, knobs and dials wired to 3 MUX’s and have them all wired to pins 22-25 as needed for SimVim. I don’t have the best thing on hand for making a breakout board so I used breadboards which are kind of not really the best thing. Since there are only 3 MUX’s it works. For the seven sediment displays, I think I’ll solder together all of the vcc, ground, cs and din wires together and then just run a single wire for each to the correct pins on arduino, as well as clk line to an arduino pin assigned for Simvim.

I also soldered a 10k resister to each of the blue wires for the LEDs you can see under shrink wrap.

Hi Steve, One of my favourite reads on the forum, well written and great photos! Well done in the production, troubleshooting and write up! Kind regards Karl

It's a good sim night after some recent frustrating ones. I thought i was going to be able to run LEDs using multiplexer boards but for some reason that's not a thing with SimVim (although they'll run 7 segment displays!) I was thinking of using an LED IC shift register (like 74HC165's) but those things annoyingly want your LEDs tied together by positive, and it's the ground that goes to the chip. So, the only thing i could do would be cut every LED and rewire the leads. That's a lot of soldering just to save some arduino pins. It's ok though. Since all the switches, buttons, encoders and seven segment displays all work with multiplexer boards, i'll have plenty of space to direct-wire the LEDs to the arduino.

Blue wires here are the LEDs. Since each wire needs a resistor i have to decide how i want to wire all that up before the wires attach to the arduino.

I guess it might be weird to have all those screw terminals, but i'm so prone to make boo boos that i don't mind that there's a little more cost there (vs just soldering the wires to the circuit board).

Update on the crashing. I thought I fixed the issue with a clean install of x planes, zibo and sun vim but it’s still happening!! It doesn’t happen if the arduino doesn’t have anything plugged into it. But if I wire up a max board xplane crashes. Grr!!! ive not been working on switches or lights to see if the same thing happens, but it’s made it kind of frustrating since xplanes needs to be up and running to test any of my connections. Frustrating. So I’m going to bed.

I’ve run into a snag with my computer, M1 mac desktop with x planes crashing when I plug the arduino in. Tried even a new arduino with the same results: X-Plane(574,0x2057d5600) malloc: Heap corruption detected, free list is damaged at 0x600017e3. if I keep reloding reloading it will finally work, and sometimes will stay running. but usually usually just crashes adter after a little bit. Unfortunately, I can’t get a PC (budgetary limitations with kid going to to college and wife unsure of the implicimplicationsof me building an airlairlinrin thr theback rklmroom) . Im I’mgoing yo totry a fresh install of ios iOSmontgomery Montgomerynext .

its given me time to continue wiring the MCP. all switches and things are daisy chained for ground and im running wires for all the positives now. lesson Learned: unless you’re using mobiflight, don’t bother getting the pcb from Hispapanels for the MCP. It does make wiring a little cleaner I suppose.

Hi Steve,

Sorry for the delay, Once again fantastic effort and read. Iknow how hard these can be when starting out. Just stick with it, Is very logically and simple once you do the first few.

I honeslty love your updates, keep them coming!

Kidn Regards Karl

Soooooooo…. Hispapanels mcp blocks out digit zero on altitude and vert speed displays. And, if you’ve decided to make it hard for yourself and only have max boards meant for 5 not 6 digits it’s not possible to use simvim to offset the numbers. But with some wine, thought and coming back to it after a few days, I decided to try this:

And boo-yeah!!!!

So, that’s 2 of 6 but only 2 use more than 3 digits. It’s a mind meld to think about this. And, yes, it would have been easier to just get some 8 digit max boards.

I spent some time trying to figure out how best to hook these displays to the max boards. I was blindly presuming the ribbon wire set up would work flawlessly but no matter how careful i thought i was being, none worked reliably! I blame me because the materials i got from Hispapanels seemed quite good. Ok, so no more ribbon cable. And, to match the topic of this whole post, in the spirit of square peg in a round hole, the max board i have only support 5 digits and the displays i need for this project are 6 digits. Not a problem, i just shift digits in SimVim.

However, the way the Hispapanel is made for Alt and Vert Speed utilizes the 5 digits to the left of the display. Since I have 5 digit Max boards, i painted myself in a corner again because i can't use SimVim to shift things over (the board doesn't power all 6 digits). So i have to either a) get a normal 8 segment board like normal people, or b) remap the wiring i've figured out so that dig 0 maps to the dig 1 position. I'm not sure why this is so hard to conceptualize!

Anyway, nice success wiring the displays to the max boards made for a good day at least.

working alt display (but need everything shifted to the left using a 5 digit Max board).

Since i've been focusing on figuring out the displays, the rest of the MCP got relegated to the side table and has been piled upon and was looking sad :(

ok, i went back to the datasheet on the Protosupplies Max7219 board and realized i wasn't even trying to figure it out correctly. So i found a pinout for the board and adjusted my chart to drive the 5 needed digits on my 7 segment display. I breadboarded it and wrote down everything i need to make this go. What a cool feeling it is to get this dumb part working exactly as i've been wanting it to work from the start.

you'll have to trust me the sim was set to 35500 altitude. Next project is to make it more of an installable piece. I'll again try to do it with the ribbon cable since these little displays fit so nicely, and soldering all those wires right to the display pins is going to tax my patience.

Success! What this is a pain. That's a lot of very small fussy solder joints that I think i'm going to need for each display:

My 53 year old eyes are bleary from all those small solders. I think i need to figure out another way to make all those connections. ideas?

Karl, thank you! Your videos have inspired me to continue to figure this stuff out. For now, I think i've given up on trying to make anything further fit into anything premade by anyone. I do have 100% proof that I can drive an arduino using SimVimX for XP on my Mac and all the lights, switches, and buttons work, so that battle is won. I'd just been working too hard at making Hispapanels work the way it was meant to, but i have a really cool looking panel.

Ok, continuing onward with gusto to make 7 segment displays bow to my will. I've invented MAX7219-version steve.2.0 without all the gloppy solder. I had an inspiration last night that since Hispapanels went to the trouble to building little pcb offsets for their imposssible-to-find 6 digit 7 segment displays that maybe I could use ribbon wire for them and not have to attach a wire to each of the 14 pins of the displays.

other side of the Max7219.steve.2.0 board:

Ok, job one is to figure out the pinout for the hispapanels ribbon cable. Olympics is on in the background but it's prelims of the speed skating so this was a good distraction. So, i don't see a lot of patterns here but here's the pinout i translated:

Job next is to use small pieces of wire to get from the appropriate pin on the MAX7219 IC to the pins for the ribbon, but i still have real work left over from yesterday i have to do first so more later.

Hi Steve,

A very intresting read and great to see somebody elses work. I love the fact you keep going and reminds me of myself. The countless hours i have lost trying to get 7 segements to work in the past is unreal.

I really can not help with this as i have never used XP or Simvim.

Kind Regards Karl

ok, i'm commenting on my own post. The new max7219 protoboards came today! however, if you look closely at the picture up above, there are no traces to the last 4 pins. So, unless i want to use these for 5 or fewer digits, i'm out of luck. AND, it seems, the pinouts are different than the little 6 digit displays I have. You can see that hooking it up pin-for-pin the way i had it working on the breadboard above it just does some weird lighting up of 3 of the DP segments. Drat.

Ok, plan B. I'm going to take the breadboard version where i wired the Max7219 IC to make the 6 digit display that fits the panel i have and try to do a neat Karl-inspired looking module. Here's tonight's first attempt after a long day at work:

and the back:

The complexity is the resistor on IC pin 18 that needs to go to VCC. The other complexity is that dragging solder across a pcb board is clearly an art, and an artist I am clearly not! I'm going to consider some other ways to make these connections.