y2kiah

Thanks guys! It's coming along, I haven't looked at it in a little while honestly. The DCS lua stuff is done. The arduino firmware is pretty much done, I need to get around to release that so people can start using it. That's only one piece of the puzzle though. I'm working on the saving/loading of project files. When you save a project in the editor, an XML file is created that is in read by the server. It's so boring to code that serialization stuff though, ugh... Cool but if you can find a flat piece of foam you'll be better off. The cup got a little hard to manage towards the end. one easy way is EL sheet, and the other way is to drill holes for LEDs. I didn't pre-drill anything because everyone seems to have their own solution for back lighting. I haven't set up any website for selling my panels, I'm kind of shying away from taking orders and think I'll just produce one-offs and sell them at my own pace instead. At least until I can get a quicker production line going. Right now there is just too much manual labor involved with creating these things.

Hi guys, it's been a while since I've posted in my thread. Thanks Avilator for saving me from having to necro my own thread. Anyway, I thought I would post pictures of some of the panels I am shipping out. I wish I had a laser engraver like some others, but I made do with what I have. Sorry the pictures are kind of yellow. These are 1/4" thick panels of layered acrylic, with 1/16" aluminum back plates. They can be back lit, except for the ground override panel. All of the lettering was filled with bright white after engraving, and they are sealed with a satin clear coat. They are shown sitting on rails made from 1"x.5" aluminum angle. I said in an earlier post that I would show some pictures of my painting station. It's nothing fancy, just very cheap and easy to make. It can be folded flat for storage. The parts you need are: 1) 5 pieces of foam board 2) duck tape 3) air filter 4) 2 safety pins - used to secure top to the sides when in use The cheap box fan sits behind the air filter and pulls air through the filter, and none of the paint spray makes it through. Here's a before and after painting the small screws that hold the panels to their back plates.

that looks really great Gus, congrats on finishing all that soldering

twobells I also run the Warthog without TARGET and this happens to me too. After I calibrated the warthog in Windows I'm pretty sure it helped reduce the problem. I noticed that the calibrated center appeared to be skewed to the right, I had never run a calibration prior because I didn't think it was necessary. After I ran through it, the center appeared more... centered and the roll on takeoff didn't happen after that, or just a little but definitely not as bad.

Green LEDs are typically 2.5V drop, 10mA, so you can run 20 of them on only .5 Watts, so yes power requirements are quite low. Multiplexing is also something I've considered, although it will cost you more for the ICs, you can run 64 LEDs on a MAX7219 at 5V 15mA. It basically has the same power cost as running 8 LEDs without multiplexing. I'm not so much concerned about the power, it's more because I'd rather not have to run a 5V and 12V line to each panel when I can light it using only a 5V line with multiplexing.

short answer: yes

the most your throttle alone could use is around .5 watts, so if you think it might prevent a bricking you're probably ok leaving it on. I leave mine on overnight sometimes, and others I hot-unplug it before shutting down. No problems so far. I have mine plugged into a front usb port. Gigabyte MA74GM-S2 motherboard, Athlon x2 processor

just remember guys, correlation does not imply causation and I believe there were some bricked throttles connected to USB hubs... that right there tells me the MB isn't the culprit, don't you think?

To press the UFC buttons would be GetDevice(devices.UFC):performClickableAction(3000+b,1) where b is 1 to 35 To get the devices table (for devices.UFC to work) you need to dofile("./Scripts/Aircrafts/A-10C/Cockpit/devices.lua") at the top of your export.lua otherwise you need to use the device number Why 3000+b? the answer is in command_defs.lua If you do your research on the forums, and start opening up lua files and poking around in them, your confusion will slowly be replaced by knowledge

Yes look at this post for devices Also a lot of the functionality for getting and setting variables is grouped under the main panel, device 0, even though they don't belong there.

pretty cool man, what about adding the elec panel switches in that extra space? or do plan to leave that open for some reason?

Yes that's a pretty good way to think about it. The template is not stored, it is generated procedurally (in real time, though sometimes in a pre-loading or caching process) and it will always reproduce the same results given the same input, perfect for replicating the natural noisiness of nature. The elevation map is very course so it can fit on your hard drive, and would produce boring terrain without much fine detail. So they add pseudo-random bumps to make it look more interesting. Trees are added in the same way, using some procedural algorithm to place them and probably using a fractal pattern to make it look more natural and "messy". But if you just add the same bumps everywhere, it looks just as boring, so they use multifractals (combining different types of fractal noise) to make things more interesting and realistic looking. The really impressive technology that I have seen that sets Outerra apart from similar engines are the roads and coastlines. Generating a high resolution mesh from vector data, and combining it into your elevation mesh in real time is not an easy problem to solve. Often times programmers just rasterize the vector data and end up with blocky and soft roads and coastlines. Looks ok from high above but it looks terrible when you try to drive on it. Most flight sims suffer from this problem but Outerra does not. There is a really good discussion on fractal noise on this site and there are many more that you can google for.

Outerra uses fractal details to enhance the terrain mesh beyond a course resolution. Whether this is acceptable in a flight simulator or not depends on how realistic you need the sim to be. For entertainment purposes, probably fine. For FAA certified pilot training, maybe not. There is no magic technology in Outerra that makes it better than other terrain engines, it is just using cheap tricks to produce better visuals without using terrabytes of storage or hurting performance too much. Sure, ED could add fractal noise and forests to their terrain, and you'd be surprised how alike it looks to Outerra.

At ZERO feet hypoxia is possible Histotoxic hypoxia that is... just have a few beers

Yeah you may be right. I learned my lesson with the panels I've designed so far, I had better be ready to produce quickly if I'm going to take orders. :helpsmilie: So to start off, I most likely will not take orders but instead produce a bunch of extras when I make my own, and sell them when they are ready with no timeline pressure. If I feel like I can make them quick enough from that experience, then I'll consider orders. I know my CNC v.2 will be up to the task though, so it will be less learning and more producing.

I will offer this, once I get my CNC machine to a point where I can quickly and reliably produce the parts

I think the stick should use an open-source and widely adopted microcontroller with USB HID capability. Something like Arduino Uno for example. That way, if anyone's electronics go bad, it will be easy and cheap for them to replace the board. Also, the firmware should be an open source project so it is sure to be constantly improved by the community, will always be free, and will never go missing.

Hey now I didn't say it couldn't be done, just said it would make me nervous. Once I convert to all SSD it would no longer make me nervous :music_whistling:

I'm starting to like the idea of having more height in the base structure like this. You could fit an electric jack to raise/lower the seat, the sub of course, even the PC itself if one were to get creative. I'd be a little nervous having the sub and PC within the same structure though.

like it, are you kidding me? this thing is fantastic, nice work.

... I guess 2 inch diameter looks pretty good answered my own question

hey fellas, what diameter joystick shaft do you figure the A-10 uses? 2"? 3"? It looks roughly the same diameter as the joystick handle grip in pictures. Can anybody make a quick measurement?

Good idea with the laser mouse sensor. One thing I think is that calibration could potentially be a big issue with this design. There is no feedback loop to directly correlate center stick position with the sensor's starting position, you just have to tell it that it is centered and it will have to believe you. This is a "dead reckoning" type positioning so it's possible that after some use, errors will build up and could cause the perceived center to creep. Or... it very well could turn out that the laser is so precise, error buildup is negligible and you would never be able to tell. edit: just wanted to add that regardless of laser sensor accuracy, tracking the position in software will inevitably end up with a buildup of floating point error. This is a common problem when integrating floating point numbers in any scenario. Because if this, I think it would be worth looking into incorporating an origin sensor so the stick can automatically recalibrate itself.

if you bought a die like this, would that work? It's kind of expensive for one stick, but you could make and sell stick extensions and recover the cost pretty quickly. I think aluminum tube would be plenty strong and easier to thread and bend than steel.

if you can stomach the shipping, you could use this plus this