cefs

Ian, very good questions, and I do not know the answers, my concern really is down to the area that a single led has to back light, will a single led of any variety driven by a MAX7219 be able to light that area sufficiently. I would want each indicator to have a uniform and bright display, it needs to be bright enough for you to notice and not just a 'hot spot' in one area. My initial thoughts are that 2 leds would be better.

The Max7219 is great for driving seven seg leds, but my concern would be whether it can produce enough brightness for each of the caution indicators. At least with darlington arrays you have much more control over voltage/current and could easily have 2 leds per channel. The MAX7219 though I beleive has adjustable brightness built in which could be useful as long as it can be bright enough at max setting, also the number of pins needed to control it a lot less.

My advice would be to not do that, but if you do then use extreme caution and think about personal safety above all else.

I think the Arduino site has it wrong. The Atmel manual states 200ma between VCC and GND. As power and ground rails will be tied internally then that will be total current consumption regardless of the number of VCC and GND pins. It is never a good idea to drive loads directly, even leds. One or two are fine, and that is why general purpose micros can drive them, but they were never designed for that purpose. It is always best to switch with transistors/fets instead. Pushing 800ma through a micro to me sounds crazy, think they really need to have a look at that.

Hi triise, you need to look at the datasheet supplied by Atmel, I assume its a 328p your using. The datasheet says 200ma. If you wanted to keep your existing setup you could use some uln2803's.

Hi triise, not sure what figure you are quoting when you say 336ma is within spec. The max current draw is around 200ma for the chip, you may be looking at 500ma that can be supplied by usb or the the current that can be supplied by the voltage regulator, but that is current that can be consumed by the entire board. Chips like the MAX 7219 use pwm to reduce current draw, there are plenty of different chips out there, but definately the way to go.

Do not know if you already are, but always use decoupling capacitors connected to V+ and GND of any/all IC's you are using. Usual value is 0.1uf which is same as 100nf, cheap ceramic types are fine. Connect the capacitor as close as you can to the IC.

I did a similar thing with the Level D 767 CDU with FSX and used a 32 bit microcontroller at 80 mhz. A complete screen refresh was clearly visible but fast enough to not really matter. The main reason it worked was because the output from the sim identified individual values that changed in each cdu page, so if a single value changed you would only have to rewrite a small part of the screen, there was no screen buffer, just a font in program memory. So it would be possible if you could just identify any values that have changed in a page and update those, but a complete screen refresh when a new page was selected would be painfully slow.

HarSu, you could instead try and chaange this line of code c:setsockname("*", 0) to 'c:setsockname("*", port_number)' where port_number is the port to receive on.''

You will need to assign a port to the socket to receive on, I am no lua expert like some of these guys so am not sure of the correct way of doing things, but what worked for me was to create a second socket just to receive on.

F_USB is defined in the makefile that comes with source code, it looks as though you are supposed to build the code using the supplied makefile. When you create a project with avr studio it creates its own makefile, so now a lot of the pre defined constants/symbols are not defined. You will either have to create a new header file with all the missing defines and try and fix any other compilation errors or build the project as was intended by using the included makefile.

You need to define F_USB, you will need to look through the files and you should be able to see. Can try in usb.h or in the main source file at the top, it may be one of the cofiguration fuses that needs to be set to get the chip up and running.

SOCK_STREAM for tcp and SOCK_DGRAM for udp, calling connect on a udp socket may be the problem, also trying to connect a tcp socket to a udp socket would also fail. By the sounds of it you are using udp, try deleting the s,connect() call, and use SOCK_DGRAM, that may work.

Oresther, one thing to try would be to change all the <LUFA/Drivers/USB/xxxx.h> to "../LUFA/Drivers/USB/xxx.h" . Currently avr studio is looking in the wrong place for those files. The < > symbols wrapped around the paths for the header files are telling avr studio that those files are located with the avr studio library files, and to look there. The " " will tell avr studio to look in the project source code folder and and the ../ will tell avr studio to jump up one directory from the source directory and look there. Backup existing folder structure just in case i'm talking crap.

Had a quick look at that library today and you can map the F keys, you just need to set a value for them in the .h file. Also, in would not be too difficult to return the scan code rather than the character code, just do not convert it and save it to the buffer. You could then call the function that converts the scan code yourself. I think a better way though, would be to return the character byte and a second byte that has the bit for key pressed or released and bits for any modifiers.

Have a look at this site, prices are not too bad and they have code for most of their stuff. http://www.embeddedadventures.com/ .

this may be of interest, this guy builds b206 controls, have a look at his cyclic and counterweight http://www.computerrepairs.ca/Simulator.htm

hi, bnepethomas, if you want to use windows then avr studio is the way to go. I use microchip not atmel but the process is the same. There is a version of flip for windows I believe. You would not use a makefile with avr studio, that gets generetaed by the ide automatically, you just have to set up a project folder and most probably have to select the type of chip and toolchain from within the ide. If you have not done it before it can be a bit daunting, but after using vs with c# you should be ok. You would also have to make sure that all the paths in the headers are correct. With usb, windows distinguishes each device by three values, vendor id, product id and serial/revision number. Just changing the name would not work I believe, you would need to change the serial/revision number to identify a different device. In the file called descriptors.c there is a section of code headed 'const USB_Descriptor_Device_t PROGMEM DeviceDescriptor =', in that section of code you will find the device id's. Change the value .ReleaseNumber from 3 to 4, and that should do. If you wanted to add a third device, you could change it to 5, the actual value does not matter, just needs to be different for each device. This is my understanding of how this works, maybe someone else could chip in and confirm this is right or that maybe I am talking bullshit as usual.

I'm soaking all this up for when i get my laser working. Have you tried any of the Krylon paints DC.

For me, this is mainly an interest i have had for quite some time, my intention at present is not to build panels for sale, so will be building to my own dimensions. If the panels and electronics, which i am currently working on using can bus, and data transfer through a dll loaded by a lua script all comes out looking and working well, then i might consider selling a complete system or partial system that can be added to, but that is a long time off, and as we have all seen, a lot of people who were selling stuff are no longer around.

I believe width wise, the majority of panels are the same as commercial aircraft panels which is.... cannot remember off the top of my head, and height i believe is based on 3/4 inch spacings ( the DZUS spacing size ), so with those dimensions i think you should be able to get close. Commercial aircraft use one of the futura fonts, so maybe start with that as I will most probably be looking to do some boeing panels initially. Could be talking a load of crap here (as usual) so if some one knows better.

i am in the process of building a laser at the moment, have most of the internals, just need to build the external frame and then get a tube. If and when I finally get it finished and I will post the results.

You could then try some of the car racing sim button boxes, there are quite a few of those around.

You would need to know how the device communicates with PC, by serial to usb or as usb hid device. If usb hid device then will also need product and vendor id's. Then you will need to know how data is formatted between device and PC as you will need some custom software to communicate with device. The device communicates with flight sim through fsuipc so does not look like it generates key strokes, so I doubt whether you will get any plug and play functionality with it. Contact the vendor and see if they will supply the info and then post the details.

Hi, I did some testing of the Huey radios a while back and ran into some problems, some of the lua interface functionality did not work such as set_frequency() so I used set and get _argument_value(), and some of the device id's were wrong. The ones below should be correct. ELEC_INT 1 FUELSYS_INT 2 ENGINE_INT 3 HYDRO_SYS_INT 4 WEAPON_SYS 9 SYS_CONTROLLER 15 IFF 17 VHF_ARC_134 20 INTERCOM 21 UHF_ARC_51 22 VHF_ARC_131 23 ARN_82 25 ADF_ARN_83 27 XM_130 50