Melchior FRANZ wrote:
I'm sure he meant "boeing.com" (hey, Stacie was first!). Now with Boeing and Sikorsky on board, where is EADS/Airbus? Come on! We know you are here! And Fokker!? And *cough* Diamond *cough* ... ;-)
I get the sense (from little bits and pieces I've gleaned over time) that there are a lot more big name companies using FlightGear that we are generally aware of. A lot of these companies are using FlightGear as a visualization or engineering tool in conjunction with various high power dynamics and controls modeling software. Many of these companies are "competition" sensitive so they don't necessarily advertise exactly who they are and exactly what they are doing. Often they are just using FG as an off the shelf tool. I suspect that FlightGear's use as an engineering tool within universities and industry will continue to grow over time as more and more people discover it (and as FlightGear's capabilities increase.)
I just got back from a Mathworks matlab/simulink symposium in LA this week. (Thank you John, Alex, and Trisha for all your efforts! And I have to thank Mathworks who went all out to help us get John's 747 sim down to the show and make it a success.) Mathworks has a neat tool (simulink + aero blockset) where you can assemble a flight dynamics model and all the real time flight controls (i.e. fly by wire stuff) in a graphical format. They have created a direct interface to FlightGear so the modeler can click a button, run the simulink simulation in "real time" and see a "real time" visualization of their aircraft in FlightGear with animated control surfaces and gauges if they want to set that up in FG.
Mathworks has customers (plural) :-) requesting a direct interface to FlightGear which is why they implimented an interface in the latest release of their aero blockset (available yesterday) and invited me and John Wojnaroski to come be a part of their show. John brought his 747 sim along and it was (predictably) :-) one of the bigger hits there. This is probably 2nd or 3rd hand, but I hear that the unofficial ratio of FlightGear interface requests to X-Plane interface requests is about 5-1 which is why mathworks built the FlightGear interface first. That's music to my ears. :-)
Oh, and let me tack on one extra thought here at the end. Not everyone there at the show was a big simulink aero block set fan, so I suspect that many people are using JSBsim or one of the other FG fdm's directly. We aren't trying to eventually replace JSBsim with a proprietary flight dynamics model here so please, I don't want anyone to worry. :-) <cough>Jon</cough> :-) My main goal for attending this show was to show the flexibility and adaptability of FlightGear as an engineering and rapid prototyping tool. I think FlightGear will have a big future in that area.
Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
