Digital Input/Output (I/O) Bus for Simulators

The team of Pinnacle Technology, Inc. and Aviation Simulation Technology, Inc. (AST) will design a distributed digital input/output (I/O) bus to replace the cumbersome discrete wire bundle used in all commercial and military flight simulators. A smallelectronics module will be designed to interface with the digital I/O bus and provide a generic set of inputs and outputs. Each instrument, flight control, and panel in the simulator cockpit will then be equipped with a different specialized adaptation ofthis generic bus node, which will perform analog-to-digital (A/D) and digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion and will relay data between the simulator cockpit and external computer equipment via the shared I/O bus. This will eliminate the unwieldy wire bundleand associated