AFT Electronic Panel
Introduction
The B737 AFT electronic panel (pedestal) consists of the following components:
- Fire protection
panel
- Cargo fire panel
- Radio panels for
COMM and NAV
- Transponder and
TCAS
- Rudder and aileron
trim
- Microphone selector
panels
- Weather radar panel
- Miscellaneous
system functions and lights control
At the time when I started to build the AFT electronic panel there have been almost no solutions on the market for USB plug and play devices. Today the situation is completely different. Now there are several companies on the market that offer USB based radios, TCAS, fire panels, and some more stuff. I build them myself with parts from Cockpitsonic and interface boards from Opencockpits. This was a hell amount of work, but gave me the advantage to add own features.
AFT
electronic panel. The numerical
keyboard on the printer panel was used to control
AES. It became obsolete with AES remote.
Interfaces
Overview of the AFT Electronic Panel interface
design. The AFT Electronic Panel has not a dedicated
USB Expansion Card. The master cards are connected
to the USB Expansion Card of the MIP, located inside
the electronic compartment.
Features
- Default frequency for COMM 1 is set to IVAO
Unicom 122.800 with System-ON
- Squawk is set by default to 2000 with System-ON
- Selection of COMM1 or 2 as active radio for online
ATC voice communication
- Selection of headset microphone CAPT / FO (PTT1 /
PTT2) for
voice communication during online flying)
- Pushback control for airports without AES
installed
- Push button for the doors control (open / close)
- Weather radar implementation with SA_WX1.6
(controlled from weather panel)
SELCAL push buttons are modified for pushback and door
control
All panels of the AFT electronic have backlit. The intensity can be regulated with a PWM dimmer.
Overheat/Fire Protection
Panel
For the fire protection panel I use a utility
called 'Boeing 737NG FIRE SYSTEM', publisher is FSPS.
The FSPS implementation of the fire panel is more
detailed than the PM implementation. The utility also supports the cargo fire panel,
too. Unfortunately I cannot use this feature for the
time being, because the
layout of the cargo fire panel as I have it seems
not to be the B737 standard.
Fire protection panel.
The cargo fire panel is not in operation. Needs to
be replaced
by a panel with the standard B737 configuration.