metalnwood Posted September 12, 2012 Posted September 12, 2012 It might be high, or not. Depends what their hourly rate is, how much they are charging for converting the dxf files so that they can do the run on their machine. They could be charging you around $100 for the setup and then the rest is for the machine time, tooling, material + operator if he just stands there and watches it.. The only way you will know if it is expensive in your area is to get other quotes. Make sure you have a chisel, Jeffs plans by default have round inside corners which you will need to chisel square to get everything to fit together, I changed the plans when I cut mine to add in dog bone corners so that I didnt have to chisel.
y2kiah Posted September 13, 2012 Author Posted September 13, 2012 Make sure you have a chisel, Jeffs plans by default have round inside corners which you will need to chisel square to get everything to fit together, I changed the plans when I cut mine to add in dog bone corners so that I didnt have to chisel. The plans have sharp corners but the cutting bit itself is round. It also depends on how your tool path is set up, one mode the GCode will decelerate to a stop at corners, then accelerate in the new direction, another mode will try to keep the bit speed up by rounding out corners. Another option if you don't want to chisel out the rounded corners by hand is to create a drill point at each inside corner in your CAM software. The cnc will then take care of all those corners for you, but the extra time may cost too much for what it's worth if you're paying by the minute. One of the things that makes this whole endeavor economical (to some degree) is that many people now have home-built or light commercial cnc machines. If you factor out the cost of having your own machine, the cost of cutting is basically just the plywood. But if you don't already own a cnc, vs. $550 to hire a shop to cut it for you, hands down the $550 is cheaper by a huge margin. You would have to want the cnc anyway, and use it for other projects to justify the additional cost. When all is said and done, it comes down to what your goals are. $550 + maybe $100 shipping can either get you a pile of wood, OR it will get you 1/3 of the way toward a pretty nice CNC machine.
metalnwood Posted September 14, 2012 Posted September 14, 2012 Yes, very correct Jeff, your plans do have square inside corners and the rounded part is just a consequence of the router bit. On your other note, I can't think how many times I made yet another thing using the traditional techniques of making templates with table saws, jigsaws, my oscillating spindle sander etc so that I could then make nice copies from ply or mdf. At the end of every project I wished that maybe had I spent that time working towards the CNC I would have had it by now! Of course after a number of projects I would have had it and then been able to whip out the next in no time at all. If it's something anyone has been thinking about it really is worth the effort. Long projects become short and small projects actually get done because you can design and do them so nicely and quickly. Of course, there is a space issue! The smallest I would consider when working with sheet is a 4x4 which is what I first built. It does take up a larger footprint though.
donbinator Posted September 14, 2012 Posted September 14, 2012 I would *love* to own my own CNC. I'm pretty handly with AutoCAD and have done some 3d drawing professionally (although mostly I'm just a firmware engineer) so having a CNC would be awesome for the various project. The problem is the space. I have three kids so the garage is already full of not only half a dozen of my own project areas but also all the stuff that comes with having kids :) (not complaining, just sayin'). I put another quote request out to someone who did some CNC work for someone I know. They haven't replied yet. I'm ok with a little rework on the inside corners. Much like y2kiah 75% of the fun for me is the journey and I'm pretty handy with wood. y2kiah, I don't recall seeing what you used for switches etc.? I'm having some problems with my pokeys55t handling modifyer keys such as "ctl-shift-a" very well. It only works every 15 times or so I flip the switch, vs. if it's a straight key it works every time. Also, how do you synchronize the switches to the game when you start?
y2kiah Posted September 15, 2012 Author Posted September 15, 2012 Electronics plan Here's a rundown of my electronics plan: For switches I'm using the Seeeduino Mega with the Wiznet Ethernet Shield. The mega already has lots of pins, but not quite enough for the whole cockpit, so I'm using the Analog/Digital MUX Breakout board from Sparkfun to multiplex 1 analog and 4 digital pins into 16 analog or digital IOs. This breakout board is based on the popular 4067 chip. For 7-segment displays I will be using the MAX7219 chip, and for 14-seg displays the MAX6954. These chips need to be located physically very close to the LEDs, so they will be built onto custom PCBs for those panels that need them. For steppers and servos, I plan to use Pololu boards. I have not checked their product line recently, but some of their board allow you to control up to 8 or 16 motors with a few SPI pins from Arduino. For just about all LED lighting, including general panel back lighting, I plan to use LED driver chips like the TLC5940 to get constant current and PWM dimming capability. I will be using one of these Mega+Ethernet shield combinations per module as a basic hub for each area. One for the left side, one for the right side, and one for the main instrument panel. This way, I only have to run two wires into each module; a CAT5 cable, and a power cable. Some of the more complicated panels will warrant their own micro controller, like the CDU and UFC. I plan to make those panels self-contained units, also with an ethernet interface but possibly USB. The firmware I'm writing for the Arduino will offload most of the pin logic to a central server located on a PC. The firmware will be responsible for pushing pin changes to the server via ethernet, using a very simple protocol based on TCP. All of the pin logic will be done on the server, which will use a configuration to interpret pin changes as switch events. I can easily reconfigure things without having to flash new firmware to the mcu's each time there is a change. The switch events are then sent to/from the simulator via ethernet or TCP/IP loopback. The export.lua script will read those events and translate them into simulator commands. This was a high level overview, I'll get into more detail when I post about each piece of the puzzle.
JCook Posted September 15, 2012 Posted September 15, 2012 y2kiah In previous posts you mentioned special attention needs to be made when CNC cutting the throttle platform - do you have any close up pictures and instructions I can forward to me CNC guy? Also, if the left side is shorter in height to accomodate rollers for a swing-out entry - would just extending the length to match the rightside dimensions work - if I didn't want to have the swing-out feature? Thanks
avlolga Posted September 15, 2012 Posted September 15, 2012 (edited) y2kiah, many thanks for the electronic section. Edited September 15, 2012 by avlolga
y2kiah Posted September 16, 2012 Author Posted September 16, 2012 y2kiah In previous posts you mentioned special attention needs to be made when CNC cutting the throttle platform - do you have any close up pictures and instructions I can forward to me CNC guy? Also, if the left side is shorter in height to accomodate rollers for a swing-out entry - would just extending the length to match the rightside dimensions work - if I didn't want to have the swing-out feature? Thanks JCook I'm fixing the left side plans to include the missing dado. If you don't want to bother with it, you can just cut that piece into 2 pieces to make it work. I'll post a closeup of the throttle assembly when I put the new file up. Both the left and right side are designed to swing. If you don't want it to do that, just extend the bottom of each rib by .75 inches. Another idea would be to omit the platform built on top of the ribs, and instead put a 3/4" base underneath (40.375" x 16.0").
donbinator Posted September 18, 2012 Posted September 18, 2012 Thanks for the rundown y2kiah! I have given up trying to use the pokeys to actually emulate keyboard keys as I think it's sending a single key event with modifiers for ctrl, shift, etc. states, and I'm also guessing the programmers of the game are catching their own modifiers by looking for the ctrl, shift, alt etc. keys seperately. So I spend the last two days trying to use luacom.dll in the export.lua to talk to the pokeys dll, but that apparently doesn't work either (luacom.dll is not a valid win32 application ?). I can write a lua script and require luacom and that works fine when I run it using my installed 5.1.4 lua, but it doesn't work from within DCS. So NOW I'm perusing through seeing a lot of yours and others posts about basically writing a socket server for the socket comms which aparently DO work form export.lua :). That should be fun regardless. Perhaps it's time for me to learn C# for real :).
Gadroc Posted September 18, 2012 Posted September 18, 2012 For just about all LED lighting, including general panel back lighting, I plan to use LED driver chips like the TLC5940 to get constant current and PWM dimming capability. Actually this is way over kill for backlighting which is the only real need for PWM in the cockpit. The TLC5940 takes a lot of pins to work and consumes 3 PWM lines on the Arduino proper. I would recommend just using one PWM out put and run it into a simple transistor to drive a source 5v line directly to the LEDs. Since you want all of your panel backlights to dim at the same level anyways your wasting a lot of lines, PWM and board space to use a TLC5940. You will have to put your own limiting resistors in line if you go this route.
y2kiah Posted September 18, 2012 Author Posted September 18, 2012 I suppose it is overkill for back lighting. In general I like that the chip offers a cheap way to expand my number of PWM channels, plus it's a constant current sink and I won't have to worry about individual resistors for the LEDs. The breakout board is useful for servos too. Since there are a few lighting zones, each needing individual dimming, the 5 pins from Arduino doesn't seem so bad, and with that I get daisy chaining for even more channels.
Gadroc Posted September 19, 2012 Posted September 19, 2012 Yea it's definitely nice chip and I started with that one for the first prototypes of my EOS boards. I moved over to pure on/off using a MCP23018 plus limit resistors for indicators (about 1/10th the cost of a 5940 for use cases with out dimming) and PWM direct to a transistor power circuit for back lighting.
ED Team BIGNEWY Posted September 19, 2012 ED Team Posted September 19, 2012 interested to see how you get on with the MCP23018, I have been playing around with one for my caution lights with a Arduino UNO Forum rules - DCS Crashing? Try this first - Cleanup and Repair - Discord BIGNEWY#8703 - Youtube - Patch Status Windows 11, NVIDIA MSI RTX 3090, Intel® i9-10900K 3.70GHz, 5.30GHz Turbo, Corsair Hydro Series H150i Pro, 64GB DDR @3200, ASUS ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming, PIMAX Crystal
donbinator Posted September 28, 2012 Posted September 28, 2012 Has anyone figured out how to get the contents of the CMSP screen? I was going to use a 2x20LCD and the pokeys56U which supports 2X20 LCD's but I can't figure out how to get the text from the sim....
cichlidfan Posted September 28, 2012 Posted September 28, 2012 Has anyone figured out how to get the contents of the CMSP screen? I was going to use a 2x20LCD and the pokeys56U which supports 2X20 LCD's but I can't figure out how to get the text from the sim.... AFAIK, it is not possible to get text out of the sim. The data is not available in that form, just as a viewport. ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero, i7-6700K, Noctua NH-D14 Cooler, Crucial 32GB DDR4 2133, Samsung 950 Pro NVMe 256GB, Samsung EVO 250GB & 500GB SSD, 2TB Caviar Black, Zotac GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme 8GB, Corsair HX1000i, Phillips BDM4065UC 40" 4k monitor, VX2258 TouchScreen, TIR 5 w/ProClip, TM Warthog, VKB Gladiator Pro, Saitek X56, et. al., MFG Crosswind Pedals #1199, VolairSim Pit, Rift CV1 :thumbup:
donbinator Posted September 28, 2012 Posted September 28, 2012 CMSP AFAIK, it is not possible to get text out of the sim. The data is not available in that form, just as a viewport. So are people using an actual display for that part then?? I thought I saw someone useing some I2C device to render it onto a character display (like me 2x20)? How are people doing this panel?
Deadman Posted September 29, 2012 Posted September 29, 2012 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=93930 https://forum.dcs.world/topic/133818-deadmans-cockpit-base-plans/#comment-133824 CNCs and Laser engravers are great but they can't do squat with out a precise set of plans.
donbinator Posted September 30, 2012 Posted September 30, 2012 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=93930 Yeah I saw the thread but I don't understand how a viewport can be turned into a stream of characters for the I2C controller. The only thing I can think of is that he's actually analyzing the video output from the viewport (like character recognition), which would be a pretty hard-core effort on his part.
Levinsky Posted October 1, 2012 Posted October 1, 2012 Hi Donbinator, don't want to hijack the thread but my plans for the CMSP is to basically have my application keep state of what is going on in the CMSP and control the display. You know the default values that start in the CMSP and how the display changes depending on what button you press. I looked into any way of getting the values out of DCS - there is a DLL file with some functions that look promising but they aren't implemented in LUA. Also I'm pretty sure I read on a French forum that he did use character rec. My French isn't that great but he was talking about OCR (so he truely is that hard core :). Ken.
donbinator Posted October 1, 2012 Posted October 1, 2012 y2kiah, how are you doing it? Are you using a little display? I apologize if you've already posted this but I didn't see how you are planning to implement the display of the CMSP. Has anyone put a request into the folks at DCS for LUA implementation of the display text?
donbinator Posted October 3, 2012 Posted October 3, 2012 Hey instead of hijacking this thread I'm going to start my own so I don't clutter yours up with stuff related to my build. BTW I know many have said this already, but very nice work on the drawings. I've assembed the center, left, and right sections already and everything fits together perfectly. I truly appreciate the work and would like to know if you accept donations? PM me with your paypal account... Look for my thread coming soon and thanks again for your help!
deaconjb Posted October 15, 2012 Posted October 15, 2012 Has anyone ever actually built or in the process of building y2kiah pit? If so, are there pictures? Great looking pit BTW :thumbup: [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
metalnwood Posted October 17, 2012 Posted October 17, 2012 Yep, I cut one, some pictures start on this page in my thread http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=65388&page=8 I cut another yesterday and another one probably soon, both for friends that fly online with me. I didnt think when they saw it in person that they would be up for it. They were and both said that the pictures didnt really indicate how big it was.
JCook Posted October 17, 2012 Posted October 17, 2012 I'm in the process of building the y2kiah pit. Going to CNC the left side panel next, but need some detail on cutting the throttle area correctly. Does anyone have any instruction on screwing or gluing the frame together?
deaconjb Posted October 17, 2012 Posted October 17, 2012 Yep, I cut one, some pictures start on this page in my thread http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=65388&page=8 I cut another yesterday and another one probably soon, both for friends that fly online with me. I didnt think when they saw it in person that they would be up for it. They were and both said that the pictures didnt really indicate how big it was. Very nice MnW:thumbup: Where are the files to the seat located? Thx [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
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