Oh for crying out loud. The session timeout on this board is so short, my post got trashed because I got logged out before I could hit the Submit button.
Well, I'd written a pretty detailed post, but here's the shorter version:
GoFlyKite: they are good at extracting money from the customer; they are selling FMS along with a cable for their controllers. I'm curious as to whether they actually have permission to sell FMS. They sell a CD-R with cable for $55 Singapore; it's probably worth about half that much, counting the cable and the home-made videos that are included (the sim is obviously free and so contributes no monetary value to the CD-R).
The controller: it appears to be custom for the GoFlyKite folks (haven't looked up the FCC ID yet). It does use a USB interface. But, it won't send any data over the interface unless it's in "Training" mode (there's a setting called "Training" that can be set either to "Training" or "Normal").
Also, the powered kites they sell have a pair of elevons as their only control surfaces, so the two sticks get mixed into two channels of output, plus throttle. That's how the controller is configured when you get it from them. For the flight sim, unless you find one that supports that input, you'll want to configure one of the six presets (presumably not the one you use to fly the powered kite
) to have a more conventional output (i.e. four discrete channels, rather than the 2-mixed+throttle). The sim itself may also require configuration to map the specific output control channels to the appropriate flight control surfaces.
That's all for now. I am still figuring everything out myself, but happy to share what I know if there are other questions.
Of course, if I could figure out how to get FMS to work on my Mac running Parallels 6 hosting Windows 7, now that would be dandy.
I boots, but all I see is a window, the menu bar, and black.