Review of
Boeing MCP737 EL-ries
2017年清宫表Produced by CPFlight
Hardware –the new generation of ways to expand the virtual experience. Flight simulation has been around for now many years, but lately I have noticed that many flightsim enthusiasts are taking the virtual experience to a more sophisticated level and have started the creation of their own home cockpits.
Looking back the past 5 - 10 years the most common hardware to be found was joysticks and basic throttles. Today this has completely changed and there are now veral hardware manufactures that produces and delivers high quality modules, MiPs and controls that are more and more true to real life hardware.
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This is a new and very exciting era within flight simulation and I have had the pleasure of testing a very interesting piece of hardware, the Boeing MCP737EL-ries from CPFlight. This unit is a light replica of the real MCP found in the Boeing B737NG ries and supports veral flightsim platforms as FS9 and FSX together with various Boeing B737 add-ons.
雷字成语Intro
I purchad this unit directly at CPFlight, Italy and the purcha and delivery went smooth and without any issues. A short delivery time using the transport company UPS, and with the possibility to Track & Trace the unit throughout the complete transport. Super!
The MCP was packed in a hard cardboard box that had some internal support special made for the MCP. Furthermore the MCP was placed in an airtight plastic bag and the cardboard box was then filled up with small pieces of polystyrene to complete the protection during transport.
When purchasing the MCP unit it includes the MCP, a USB connection cable and a t of small clips/jumpers that are ud when the firmware has to be updated.
Installation & Programing
The MCP is a plug and play unit that connects to the computer by USB either directly or through a USB-hub preferable with an independent power supply. If the MCP is ud as a stand-alone unit it can be powered directly by the USB connection, but if the MCP is ud together with the various radios and the EFIS, an additional power supply is needed. This can be purchad directly at CPFlight.
A tup could look like the below where you have the MCP as primary unit and to this one you connect a string of other units as the EFIS and the various radios. The image below also includes the MIP-board which is a PC
B that controls all the annunciators etc. for the complete tup. If you don’t need the annunciators but just the MCP, EFIS and radios, they are just connected directly as a string without the MIP-board. This connection is done by a DIN 5-pole connection.
居民委员会是Even though the MCP is a plug and play unit it cannot function without the proper drivers installed. S
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tandard drivers can be downloaded from CPFlight website that will cover Boeing B737 variants the default FS9/FSX and the PMDG737NGX for FSX etc.
Other variants of the B737 the PMDG for FS9 will require payware drivers that can be purchad and downloaded from FlightSimLabs website.
One note though is that to be able to u the MCP together with the PMDG 737NGX the simmer will have to manually add two lines into the 737NGX_Options.ini file but this is very well described in the downloadable manuals etc. that you can find on CPFlight website.
Here below is a matrix of which B737 variant that the MCP currently supports and to what detail the MCP support the specific add-on.
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The way that the MCP communicates with your flightsim platform (e.g. FSX) is through the firmware. CPFlight has chon the idea that the MCP has its own memory hereby enabling the possibility to upgrade the firmware. The newest edition can be downloaded at CPFlight website and by using the t of jumpers included with the MCP and following the manual, the simmer can easily upgrade the firmware by him or herlf.
After I had installed the drivers to my configuration (FSX, Default B737 and PMDG 737NGX) I plugged in the MCP and started up FSX. I tup a flight from EKBI and when FSX had finished loading the flight I went to the topbar menu Add-Ons and lected the CPFlight entry. Now the computer asked me which communication port the MCP were plugged into and I lected the corresponding port and clicked apply. Now my screen went back to the FSX flight and the MCP light up and was now ready to u.
Basically it is really easy to t up, but I would most certainly recommend reading the instructions in the included manual prior to the installation. The manual is well written and provides quite a few good tricks that answer the most FAQs for sure. No programming of the MCP is needed – just download and install the drivers and you are ready for take-off.
Look & Feel
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The MCP is a real size scale 1/1 of the real Honeywell MCP ud in some of the Boeing B737 aircrafts. It is made as one large PCB with all buttons etc. mounted directly on to it and then packed in a metal casing with a front plate made from lar cut metal with engraved legends.
The pushbuttons are soft press buttons with dual LEDs that works perfectly and has a very nice realism to them. The rotators are single encoders with standard caps and the few switches are also standard switches.
The reaction/respon time when making changes on the MCP until the change is implemented and shown on the FSX MCP is only ½ - 1 cond. This is quite fast and I was very impresd by it since this is actual data that has to be transferred from the MCP and into FSX.
Another really superb feature that this MCP unit has is the backlight. The MCP is fully backlighted and this can be controlled in various ways. One way is to connect an external switch to control the backlight – this switch can be connected on the back of the MCP where there is a socket for this feature.
Another way is the default way where the backlights are connected to the NAV light On/Off switch meaning that if the NAV switch is ON, the MCP is fully backlight etc.
Mounting the MCP can be done in various ways but here CPFlight has already helped out. There is a corner hole in each corner so that mounting can be done into a frame just by applying a screw into each corner.
For the flight simmer that does not have a home cockpit with frames etc., CPFlight has created a desktop metal frame that can support both the MCP and the captains EFIS. This desktop frame can be purchad directly from CPFlight also.
The MCP is fully operational and is pure eye candy. The remblance with the real world pictures that I could find of this MCP version is stunning and the quality is certainly high. The fact that the remblance with the real world Honeywell MCP is spot on and that the MCP is made from metal etc. really adds a huge amount of realism to the unit and my experience of the product.
There were only a few things that I noticed was not 100% accurate, as example the HDG lector rotator which should have been a dual rotator to support the bank level lection. This is however not created in that way on the MCP-EL but that does not mean that the feature is not available.
CPFlight has included this feature but this is activated by pressing and holding the HDG SEL button for 2 conds. Hereafter the HDG display converts to be ud as the bank level display and the HDG lector rotator can now be ud to change the input of bank level in the specified degree ttings. To exit the change simply just press the HDG SEL button once and the display and the rotator is now again functioning as the HDG lector.
The cond difference I noticed was the color of the MCP. The CPFlight MCP is blue and perfectly colored but the images that I found of the real MCP had different color shading. This I am positive is j年轻人为什么会低血压
ust becau the images that I found was all of ud MCPs which could explain the difference, but this is of cour just a minor detail.
The last difference is the vertical speed rotator. In the real MCP this rotator ems to be smaller than the CPFlight’s one, but again this is just a very small detail which has no effect on my overall experience of the product.
Real
CPFlights
