Flight Sim Remote Panel / 2

Flight Sim Remote Panel (or its alias name, “XPlaneRemote”) is an application that shows the basic general aviation instrument set on your Android phone or tablet. It is not a flight simulator – a copy of X-Plane 11 should be running on your desktop or a laptop – this application connects to it from an Android device and displays the flight instruments, hence the “remote panel” in its name.

With the Flight Sim Remote Panel application, you can extend your general airplane instrument panel onto an Android device; you can completely close your instrument panel on the X-Plane 11 display and use that extra space for a larger view or to show different instruments.

You can use more than one Android device as an external display; each device could show the same or different instruments. You can also run a Windows OS version of this app.

To use Flight Sim Remote Panel, your device needs to be connected to the same network as the host computer, and that connection will most likely be your home wireless.

Download the app from the Android Play Market here:

This app is completely free; there are no in-app purchases. There are also no annoying ads or anything like that. If you like the app and end up using it regularly, you could always buy me a coffee!😉

Buy me a coffee

Hundreds of sim enthusiasts have used these plugins and the Android app extensively for over a decade. Initially, I developed the app for X-Plane 9 and then kept using it for all successive versions of X-Plane (10, 11, and now 12).

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Flight Sim Remote Panel provides real-time views of 6 basic flight instruments and a subset of a radio stack:

• IAS – Indicated Airspeed
• ADI – Attitude Indicator
• ALT – Altimeter
• TCO – Turn Coordinator
• HDI – Heading Indicator / Directional Gyro
• VSI – Vertical Speed Indicator
• KM24 – Bendix/King Audio Control System
• KX155 – Bendix/King NAV/COMM System (Dual)

There are three virtual panels (denoted by “A”, “B”, and “C” buttons), and each panel can be assigned any number of basic instruments. If you have a device with a smaller screen, this feature enables you to switch among all instruments quickly. If you have a device with a large screen (for example, a tablet), you would want to select all instruments to be visible on a single virtual panel.

The fourth virtual panel (marked by the “R” button) contains the radio stack.

Installation

For the XPlaneRemote application to communicate with your X-Plane simulator running on a PC, you need to download plugins for the X-Plane, unzip and copy them into your X-Plane/Resources/plugins folder.

Follow the links below to download the file(s) that contain plugins for Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit, and MacOSX operating systems where your X-Plane simulator is running.

For example, assuming that you are running X-Plane on a PC with a Windows operating system and have installed an X-Plane simulator to “C:\X-Plane,” you would unzip and copy these files into the “C:\X-Plane\Resources\plugins” folder. When copying, preserve the directory structure so you end up with folders “C:\X-Plane\Resources\plugins\AndroidPanel\32” and “C:\X-Plane\Resources\plugins\AndroidPanel\64” containing individual plugins for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the X-Plane simulator.

For X-Plane version 9, pick the correct plugin “.xpl” file (32-bit or 64-bit) and copy it into the root plugin directory (for example: “C:\X-Plane 9\Resources\plugins”.

Quit X-Plane if it is running. Copy the plugin and then restart the X-Plane.

Verify that the X-Plane plugin loaded correctly by going to the Plugins menu on the X-Plane simulator and then clicking the Plugin Admin menu item. Following this, either selection of Enable/Disable or Plugin Information should list this plugin (named “ExtPlane”) as loaded and enabled.

Download the plugin here: https://github.com/gdevic/XPlaneRemotePlugin

You don’t need a GitHub account or even git to download it. Click on the one .zip file and then on the “Download” button. The zipped file contains the rest of the files.

This repo also contains a Windows OS version of the application that looks and behaves the same as the Android counterpart. You can use this version instead, or in addition to, the Android version.

Note: This X-Plane plugin is similar to Ville Ranki’s ExtPlane plugin, which you can download here: https://github.com/vranki/ExtPlane. Since I don’t actively maintain his code, I cannot guarantee (or test) various plugin versions. Although old, the version from my link is tested and works.

If the plugin is loaded, you can move on to the next section on connecting…

Connecting…

When you start XPlaneRemote on your Android device, it will open up a page where you can select the IP address of your desktop or laptop PC running a copy of the X-Plane simulator.

Input the correct IP address consisting of 4 numbers. The address can be found by entering the Settings menu on the X-Plane simulator and clicking the Net Connections menu item. A window will open with several tabs. The IP address should be marked with “YOUR IP address is:”

On your Android device, click on the up/down icons around each of the four numbers to select a matching address. Click on Connect when you are done, and you will be taken to the main instrument panel screen. At the bottom of its screen, the application will always show you the connection status.

If you still cannot connect:

• If you have a firewall on your computer, you must allow X-Plane to accept connections on port 51000.

• From another user: “Turns out that Windows 10 defaults to a public network, and although I had enabled X-Plane permissions in Windows Firewall for both public and private, it was only when I reconfigured it to be a private network that Remote Panel would connect.”

X-Plane is a registered trademark of Laminar Research.

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