Gadroc

This EOS board here will support any HD44780 controller compatible screen. So when looking for the screen check that. Will need slight firmware changes (easy to do) to support more than 2 lines.

I'm still finishing up the panels (lots of soldering at this point, so just time). I'll get another photo update posted tomorrow night. Hog, Moken - I'll let you know when I kick off another round. I need to get the patient souls who I've already committed to out of the way first. Thanks, Gadroc

You've got the right ideas. Make sure you know what you want to do with that machine. That's a pretty big machine probably closer to an industrial cutter than engraver. The higher the wattage the harder it is to engrave as you can't dial down the power enough. Tubes won't fire below a certain % of the peak amps so a 100W lowest setting is more powerful than a 40W lowest setting, making it less useful for fine engraving details. I use the lowest amps that my 40W tube fires at to do the panel engraving. Higher quality tubes usually will fire at a lower setting and I probably have the cheapest of the cheap. Usually you see 80W as the max for 'engraving' machines with 40W to 60W being most common. I'll send you a PM and we can take this off line.

LOL. Unfortunately no that's a support beam, but I'll have to talk to the wife now that you mention it. ;)

How does that compare with real dimensions on it. I thought the 5" wasn't quite big enough when I looked at this before. I hear you on the build. I haven't actually flown the sim in a month now. I keep telling myself once I get the pit more finished I'll start re-learning to fly, although I have a strong suspicion I'll start a second pit instead. :helpsmilie: BTW The bezel looks excellent. Did you do it on a CNC or is it multiple layers of layers cut acrylic?

Helios can control Phidget Stepper and Servo controller boards and be used to drive real gauges. It will get more functionality like that over time. The simmeters stuff requires the equivalent of Helios to run in addition to it's hardware as well. It's called their Workspace and Data Wrappers.

If you run it off the direct serial to USB cable it has no problem powering it. With 14 LEDs only pulling 20ma plus the display pulling 100ma you are talking about a total draw of 400-450ma max with is under the 500ma max current for even USB 1.0. I'll do some testing with various machines but I have no problem running it off USB on my MacBook Pro. There is a power connector for a 5v power supply, but if you use it you need to make sure to not connect power front he usb serial cable. You normally would use this if your running under a daisy chained EOS bus instead of direct serial. It is not exposed as a game device (this would require a full USB support chip which significantly adds to the complexity) and more importantly it requires a USB license to get a unique ID. There is a protocol over the serial bus to read the device and update it's outputs along with .net assembly and command line utility. I will be incorporating it in Helios and it will work just like everything else in Helios. Each input will have a trigger and each out put will have the appropriate actions to update them.

Hey Guys. Progress goes on. I'm a little behind but I think I can make it up the next few nights. I have 3 fully assembled awaiting backlights, and 2 more ready for wiring. I should get another finished tonight and complete the last one tomorrow night. Backlight's will get solder over the rest of the week. I will calculate shipping costs for everyone and send them a final bill over the weekend. Once I get final payment I'll ship. Thanks for hanging in there guys.

Pay attention on their site. They sell virtual gauges (like Helios) and real physical gauges. The cheaper ones are virtual.

It's done. Sorry didn't get to it last night.

Actually I think a combination of the two would be interesting. TrackIr tells me head position and frustum, but gaze tracking sets the focus point. Might help ALOT with the TrackIR hold still for mouse click problem. I'd imagine your eye stays focused pretty well on the same spot even though it's pretty hard to hold your head that still.

As being one of those developers (not games industry but still a developer) I'll tell you it's FAR more complicated to split some of these algorithms than one would think. In a video game several systems must all be synced before you render the frame. Physics, Sound and AI are all interlinked. AI has to have the results of physics calculation in order to correctly respond to the scenario. Sound has to be linked to motion of the physics for realistic 3D sounds. The list goes on and on. It can be done but the interactions between these systems gets far more complicated to trace and debug. In addition in some scenarios these may be so tightly linked that you actually could loose performance by adding in the sync mechanisms to communicate across threads. While it's true that modern CPUs are adding core's as their current marketing tactic. It used to be Mhz/Ghz but that was never a direct correlation to real performance either (Ex: AMD and Intel at the same clock speed, or Core2 at lower clock speed beating P4 at higher clock speed). Multithreading and more cores may or may not translate to usable horse power for a single given piece of software or task. We should see gains from further multithreading in games, but it may not be the panacea that some claim.

Nicely done!

Hey. I have a waiting list I'll add you to. There may be enough to do a second run, but it won't be till March before I can commit to starting one. I'll send out e-mails to those who have voice interested when I do.

Hey guys. Sorry for the lack of updates. I just got back from taking the family on vacation, which I did a forced no sim hiatus. I'm back in town and will be working on finishing the panels again tonight after work. I have two of them wired up. I should have the rest of them complete by the end of the weekend. I will then begin wiring up the backlighting and then we will be ready for shipment. I'll post another update at the end of the weekend with pictures on status.

Not all of the Honeywell are $50. The most used switched in the pit can be had new for $12 each. Still more than you but but no where near $50.

In that case, I'd recommend going the other way. Get your seat and CP done first. Then measure the height that would be comfortable to use. Your deflection will be radically different than the real thing and it would not be at the right place for you. With a traditional PC joystick you use more wrist and less arm than with real stick travel distances.

This is an area you'll need to be careful trying to recreate the actual pieces. There are many systems that are just not present in a sim which affect the stick and how it behaves (linkages, hydraulics). Unless you are ready to construct a custom gimbal you'll have to deal with limitations of the existing TM HOTAS . You will be limited to about 5 or so inches of extension before it's just to weak, even then it's iffy. With my current extension if you let go at full deflection it will just stay there and it doesn't take a large bump to just flop it over that threshold (my seat cushion leaning on it will push it off center to full defelection). Also adding a bend does interesting things to the center of gravity and changes the forces needed to move it which will compound the issue.

Most LoGet functions don't work in A-10, or return invalid data. You have to use the technique described here.

Very nice.

You can get the currently tuned frequency but you can't get to the current UHF repeater or UHF visual display.

I get my acrylic from the same place that pitbldr does. For my buttons I've been using 1/16" flange and 3/16" cap. You can see my process in this post. There is no one true way to do these and they are actually quite a bit of work. The paint thickness changes your engraving settings and doing this by hand makes getting that consistent non-trivial. I end up having to make an extra dozen or so test buttons to get my settings dialed in before I can cut a run. I have not mastered this yet. Y2kiah mentioned he does it a little different. He paints the button color, masks the piece and engraves through the mask and paint to the clear. He then spray paints white and then removes the mask. I may try this on my next run.

No you can't. The throttle does not have the electronics in it to communicate with the PC. You would have to get something like a LEO Bodnar board and wire that into the throttle. I have done this. I think I wrote down all of the pin outs on the cable colors. I'll see if I can't dig it up and post it.

SIOC Script for Helios.

You don't want to "merge" the scripts as this will break every time Helios is upgraded. Helios can daisy chain other scripts. There is already a "3rd Party" script I posted in the Helios forums which can be used to cascade Oakes SIOC with Helios. I'm at work and can't search through and find it right now. I'll try and find it to link later tonight.