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Sometimes an application starts with a grand plan. Other times, it starts because you simply need to understand what is happening behind the scenes.
Netsim Scan was the latter.
Coming soon, Netsim Scan is a troubleshooting and diagnostic application I developed specifically for X-Plane 12. More importantly, it became the project that laid much of the technical groundwork for my upcoming CFI Station application.
While developing Netsim Scan, I wanted to get much deeper into how X-Plane communicates outside of the simulator itself. That meant learning how to monitor DataRefs, work with UDP communication, receive live simulator telemetry, and build a reliable connection between X-Plane 12 and a native iPad application.
What started as experimentation quickly became a genuinely useful tool.
Netsim Scan connects to X-Plane 12 through my CFI Station 12 plugin and turns the iPad into a second-screen diagnostic console. Instead of wondering what X-Plane thinks is happening, I wanted a way to actually see the data the simulator is producing.
Is a DataRef reporting? Is the simulator paused? What is happening with frame rate? Is the aircraft position being received correctly? What is X-Plane seeing from the controls? Is the problem with the simulator, the aircraft, the network, or simply a machine struggling to keep up?
That is the idea behind Netsim Scan:
Stop guessing. Look at the data.
The application can monitor areas such as aircraft and system data, controls, position, weather, simulator performance, network activity, and DataRefs—all from an iPad on the same local network as the X-Plane 12 computer.
But Netsim Scan also became something bigger for me personally as a developer.
A lot of what I learned building it—particularly DataRef monitoring, UDP telemetry, plugin communication, network discovery, and handling live simulator data on iPadOS—became part of the foundation for CFI Station.
In many ways, Netsim Scan is where CFI Station began.
Rather than letting the original project disappear once CFI Station grew into something much larger, I decided Netsim Scan deserved to have a life of its own.
Netsim Scan is currently in development and should be coming online soon.
