On Tuesday 25 October 2005 14:07, Curtis L. Olson wrote: > For the FAA Level 3 FTD certified sims I work with, we draw the > instruments on an LCD screen, then place a panel cutout with bezels on > top of that. Fools a *lot* of people into thinking they are real, even > though they aren't.
I did think of this trick too :) Although it also threw up a problem...... > The simkits stuff are driven by standard servos, > right? So you could get a little PIC board to run your servos and take > position commands in from the serial port ... then you just need to send > the data out the serial port from FG (with perhaps a small amount of > interface coding.) It might be a little time consuming to get all the > pieces in place and working, but once you figure out how to generate the > PWM servo signal, there's nothing technically difficult there. > > Curt. The problem being the 'setting' of an instrument. If you wanted to directly set an instrument you'd need some sort of encoder (eg: to rotate a VOR direction wheel). This could be done easily enough, of course, in the case of the LCD behind the panel, the major hurdle being the depth of the control in the panel. When it comes to physical gauges, the system itself would need to know the precise position of a direction wheel so it would have to be read from a sensor in the instrument (SimKits do this). The only way forward I spotted was using 'Phidgets' interface cards to run the servos and also read from analog sensors in the instruments. Unfortunately my total lack of software development skills and apparent numerical dyslexia would preclude this. That is, unless now or in the future enough people might become interested in doing this (I may not code but I'm quite the engineer when it comes to physical stuff ;) ) I think I could drive an ASI, AI, TC, VSI and engine guages using Phidgets just by writing FG values to a phidgets device in the correct sense but anything more is rocket-science to me due to the code involved. -- Dave Martin http://museum.bounce-gaming.net _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
