On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 7:39 AM, James Turner wrote: > > On 2 Jan 2009, at 13:26, Anders Gidenstam wrote: > > > Could we find more descriptive property names for these voltage/ > > potential > > difference properties? Just to make it clear what they are (and avoid > > confusion with potential future properties, e.g. for current, charge > > or > > power). > > Good point. > > I'm hopeful that adding a simple current-draw model will be > 'easy' (for a given value of easy, naturally) if we start > standardising such things, so it'd be great to think about this now, > before people start using new property names. > > systems/electrial.cxx would be a good starting point for this - it's > simplistic right now, but a few more component types (especially a > fuse)[1], and a Nasal interface to allow the electrical system to be > controller trivially by an aircraft designer, and it'd be pretty > respectable. FGElectricalOutput is pretty close to my proposed base > class for electrically powered instruments - it needs some extension, > but it makes sense to aggregate (in the C++ sense) that functionality > into instruments. > > James > > [1] - whoops, FGElectricalSwitch provides a circuit-breaker function. > Once again proving that for everything you might want to do, FG > already contains code for it, you just need to find the code :)
However, the existing XML based electrical system model is extremely difficult to use from an xml configuration standpoint, and although it worked ok for the c172 electrical system, I began to run into core design barriers when i was attempting to implement the electrical system for a light twin. I really don't recommend the xml/C++ electrical system for future use. Instead, it's *far* easier and much more straight forward to build up a procedural model in nasal. This is actually a very good job for nasal because aircraft electrical systems are wildly different from each other, and nasal allows you to write a per-aircraft electrical system model. This point has nothing to do with voltages being normalized or not, but hopefully that provides some background. Personally, I prefer working in real volts. The one side of the equation that has never really been addressed is current draw, and again, that is probably best done in real numbers for sanity and maintainability. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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