A Prepar3d Based Signal Simulation System for ARINC429 Bus

The ARINC429 is one of the protocols for data exchanging between avionics. Avionics' ground testing and benchmarking environments always require simulated signal feeds using ARINC429 bus. This paper demonstrates a design and implementation of the ARINC429 bus signal simulation exciter. Desired flight status data can be simulated through a customized Prepar3D, which is an open source flight simulator. Then the corresponding ARINC 429 bus signals are generated by an ARINC429 transceiver interface board, Ballard429/717, with the input of the simulated flight data from a USB port and the output on the ARINC 429 bus. C/C++ had been used as the programme developing language. The output signals had been examined and the results show the compliance with the ARINC 429 bus protocol. The proposed signal simulation exciter demonstrates the capability of converting flight status data, both actual and simulated, to ARINC 429 bus signals.