Better Bravo Lights (referred to as 'BBL' for short) aims to be a 'better' replacement for the Aerosoft Honeycomb Bravo Throttle lights tool (also known as "the AFC bridge").

Note that BBL is completely standalone and does not require the original Honeycomb Bravo lights software or FSUIPC or spad.next or any other software.

BBL provides a number of significant improvements over the original Aerosoft/Honeycomb Bravo Lights software:

Multi-aircraft support

BBL supports different configurations for different aircraft; this is critical because oil pressures, fuel pressures and battery voltages vary wildly from aircraft to aircraft. A configuration that says "Light the 'LOW OIL PRESSURE' light if the oil pressure is less than 30 psi" is useless on an aircraft whose oil pressure never rises above 20 psi. So it's critical to have aircraft-specific configurations. BBL supports this. In contrast, the AFC Bridge supports only one configuration across all aircraft.

Instantaneous light response

The standard Honeycomb AFC bridge only updates lights on the Bravo throttle once per second.

In contrast, BBL updates all lights instantaneously when the conditions that the lights are linked to change.

This is vital when using autopilot buttons: with immediate updates, if an autopilot button doesn't light up when you press it, it should be because the autopilot is rejecting that mode request, not because the lights tool is waiting a second or two before lighting up the button. If you use an aircraft such as the Hawk T1 which has flashing warning lights, the Bravo lights will flash along with them. The AFC Bridge only updates lights every second, so such flashing lights will behave very strangely.

Lots of out-of-the-box configurations

BBL comes with a complete set of configurations for all of the aircraft that come bundled with all variants of MSFS and several third-party addon aircraft. The list of third party addons with built-in support is increasing all the time. If your aircraft doesn't have specific support, some lights will work but not all of them. But you or other people can add the necessary configuration.

Support for addons

BBL supports both "A: variables" and "L: variables". Putting the technojargon to one side, if you want to make the MASTER WARNING and MASTER CAUTION lights work, you need a tool that can read "L: variables" from MSFS. Almost every piece of state used by the FlyByWire A32NX aircraft is an "L: variable". AFC Bridge only supports "A: variables" and so is of limited use in practice.

Easy configuration

If you need to change the BBL configuration - for instance, to add entries for a new aircraft - BBL offers significant advantages over AFC Bridge:

• Changes to the configuration file are applied automatically within a second; in contrast, AFC Bridge requires a flight restart, which is problematic if you're modifying the configuration based on a scenario that's non-trivial to establish.
• It provides a dedicated 'debugger' user-interface to help with the development of conditions, showing condition expressions for each light and a real-time view of the relevant simulator variables.
• It supports more sophisticated conditions (specifically, any combinations of variables, constants and arithmetic).
• The configuration file is a fraction of the size of the AFC Bridge configuration file, and much more readable.

What's the status of Better Bravo Lights?

• With a fair following wind, it all works fine; I've been using it day-to-day for some time, and we've had several thousand downloads on flightsim.to.
• Error-handling is minimal right now so you may not get good feedback if you get the configuration wrong.

It won't break anything - so it's safe to try it out - but it may not complete or bulletproof just yet.

Want to give it a try? Head over to the Installation page and you'll be up and running in a few minutes.