An ICP made by Realsimulator found it’s way to me.

Through a friend I got a Realsimulator ICP from another simbuilder I met ages ago for a fair price.

Sadly the needed control unit was not available – which didn’t really matter, since driver support for this hardware ended with Windows 32bit.
Realsimulator focused on the professional market and support for private users is either not existent or just too expensive to make any sense.

But I knew about all this beforehand, I planned to use just the hardware and implement my own electronics through my already finished ICP firmware (Teensy ICP Firmware on GitHub).

That’s how the ICP looked on arrival:

My first task was to open it and have a look if I can use the buttons and switches as I intended to.
But here it got quite complicated – all screwholes had been sealed of with hot plastic.
Now I know, why repairing parts is so expensive with Realsimulator.

I hoped to be able to remove most of the plastic with a milling bit so I can access the screws.
And I was lucky, after some rotations the screwhead appeared.

After all seals had been cut there was quite a lot of milling residue.
I used the hooks to remove the molten plastic from within the screwheads so I could fit the screwdriver and open the housing.

Another possibility would have been to heat up the screwdriver or heat up the screwheads with a soldering iron.
I guess that would have been the easier solution.

After I dissambly there were 3 main parts:

• the front plate
• the pcb with the buttons and switches
• and the backplate

Here a nice view how the “dobberswitch” has been implemented using 2 seperate toggle switches.
I don’t plan to keep it this way, I will use an original 4-way switch that has been sitting in my storage for about 15 years 🙂

Checking the buttons with a Multimeter showed me that I will be able to use my firmware as it is, all switches have one common connection.

The PCB is like the original one, on the front there even the solder pads for the backlight lamps. Sadly the frontplate and buttons made by Realsimulator do not support backlighting.
Maybe I will replace them later with my selfmade ones (which fit very well, since both are based on the original dimensions) but at the moment I will use it without any lighting.

But work on the ICP will be delayed until I finishe the right console – that’s just the highest priority at the moment.
Of course there’s still time for small modifications 😉 – the DRIFT C/O switch got replaced by a real military spec switch and the rotary wheels got the real color.

As soon as I’m working on the ICP again, it will of course be documented here.