PanelBuilder

Battle? Battle??? Listen, I flew once last week and that was just because I had my throttle controlers full on when the mission started.

You say that like it's a good thing :-) Seriously, I think that if you start wiring up 240 switches, or even 100 switches, to one board you're just going to hurt yourself. What I think is the only sensible way to go about this is to break the cockpit up into subsystems (like the original). Then each subsystem talks to the PC with its own interface or on a shared interface. The most complicated subsystem is the nav coumputer which has 25 momentary buttons, a couple of toggle switches, a rotary switch, a pot, and two multi-digit 7-segment displays. That's bad enough, but it's easily doable as a stand-alone unit. Just my opinion but I think it's an approach that at least deserves to be thought about. Cheers, Colin

This is so cool. What are you using for dimensions? Cheers, Colin

I see they have a scope that looks pretty good, too.

I generally let young Sasha warm up the aircraft for me. It gives me a chance to have another cup of tea and besides, he seems to enjoy it. Cheers, Colin

I've been fooling around with this -- there are separate gear up/gear down commands for sure. Gear switches are in the CPT_MECH device. Range is 0.0 to 1.0, so of cource I hooked a pot up to it to see what would happen. Turns out the little handle just vibrates in and out as you turn the dial. If you stop somewhere and let it catch up, the lever can move up or down. I'm gussing the sim is just looking at the LS bit(s). Cheers, Colin

You are a prince. Thank you so much. Colin

He's added EKRAN.

Indeed. I can now get the states of the 8 lamps at the top of the WSC panel directly whereas before I had to calculate them from other data. Funny thing is I can't figure out how to set a switch with the new system. doesn't seem to work. Here's its line from clickabledata.lua: elements["MASTER-ARM-PTR"] = {class = {class_type.TUMB, class_type.TUMB}, hint = LOCALIZE("Master Arm"), device = devices.WEAP_INTERFACE, action = {device_commands.Button_1,device_commands.Button_1}, stop_action = {}, arg = {387,387}, arg_value = {-direction*1.0,direction*1.0}, arg_lim = {{0.0, 1.0},{0.0, 1.0}}, use_OBB = true, updatable = true} I'm still using the old This just toggles, however.

Yes. Very cool.

What I said :-)

*this* is what makes our cockpits tick.

Never mind :-) Colin

Thank you for this, DCS: http://en.wiki.eagle.ru/wiki/Export_1_0_1 You've made my week. Cheers, Colin

http://en.wiki.eagle.ru/wiki/Export_1_0_1 I think I'm going to be a bit busy for the next couple days. Cheers, Colin

Again, this is fantastic. Looks like a couple of limit switches in there. Do you want the sim handle to execute its whole travel at the beginning of your throw, or at the end, or in the middle. I guess at the beginning might be best otherwise it would look like the system's not keeping up. But then if you stop your throw half way... It would be great if they gave us gear up and gear down commands. How about handle-out and handle-in commands? You think that's too much? How about rotate up and rotate down (like the tv contrast)? Cheers, Colin

Man, this is just beautiful. Cheers, Colin

Hi gang, Has anyone got the BS Engine Info and Mech info functions to return anything? Thanks, Colin

I didn't find if funny; I found it very interesting. "Funny you should say that" is just an expression :-) Cheers mate, Colin

Great stuff! Is there a list of export function changes somewhere? Thanks a lot, Colin

Hi ruprecht, did you manage to come up with an answer to this? Thanks, Colin

Funny you should say that. For the interface I'm actually using Microchip's Low Pin Count USB Development board. I originally got because I thought I'd configure it as a USB keyboard to send keystrokes in, and maybe as a printer or something to send data out. Turns out we don't need to sent keystrokes, so I have it configured as a USB to serial inteface to handle the traffic both ways. Cheers, Colin

Hi nice to see you here, In my case I use 1 PIC per control panel and they all talk and listen on the same UART serial line. I'm using PIC16F688 (14 pin) PIC16F690 (20 pin) and PIC16F886 (28 pin). Cheers, Colin

I wrote a little windows console app that does this. I'm playing with two versions: one is synced and ensures that the lua receive function always has something, if only a line feed, to read every frame. The other is not synced and relies on the lua receive function timing out after some ms. The problem is that lua socket does not apear to have any kind of data.available type function that you can test. And if you do a receive and there's nothing there, the sim will just hang (unless you set the timeout). I'd be happy to share the executable but you need something attached to the serial port that you can read from or write to or both. You can test that with PuTTY. One switch and one LED will do it. And trust me, once you get that first switch and first LED working, it's a sleigh ride home from there. Cheers, Colin

Yes for sure, I posted about the startup auto sync a little while ago. if position ~= currentW4 then LoSetCommand(850) -- jettison arm currentW4 = position end The only command codes I haven't been able to find are for the controls that don't do anything, like the rotary switch on the lower right of the Targeting Display Control panel. But I use that one for tv scan rate.