KISS Cockpit

[oldgreydog]

I have been "flying" MS FSX for a few years now and have been constantly striving to enhance the "flying" experience. I see the construction of a motion platform cockpit as a natural progresssion.

As I like to use a variety of different aircraft and therefore the cockpit I want to build must be generic rather than a specific aircraft. That said I prefer GA and small commercial rather than the big jet airliners.

My progress so far is as follows:-

1 I have been learning how to programme in C

2 Having posted for help on getting the necessary data from FSX on this site I was pointed in the direction of Dave Ault's website about his Learjet 45 cockpit project. One of the brilliant things that Dave has done is to write C programs to reproduce various instruments. These interface with FSUIPC and Dave has released the source code for these. With a great deal of help from Dave I have been able to take his source code and first of all make my own instrument but also pull out the data I need to drive a motion platform.

3 FSUIPC has a huge list of data that can be accessed in real time. Amongst these are acceleration values laterally, vertically and longitudinally relative to the aircraft axes. From these I have built a set of calculations in C which show how a motion platform should be moved to give the sensations you would feel if you were in the aircraft (as near as possible).

4 The next stage is to get this out into the real world. To do this I bought a Velleman USB interface kit (K8055N). This has two analogue inputs (ie. you can wire variable resistors to it and it returns a numeric value proportional to the resistance. It also has a number of digital outputs which can be used via relays or triacs to control motors.

So far I haven't been able to get the K8055N to work but I haven't finished trouble shooting yet.

Net expenditure to date - C Programming for Dummies (approx £20), Vellemen K8055N (Approx £25)

The C compiler is public domain and freeware, Dave Ault's software was free, and I already had FSX, FSUIPC, etc.

[AK Mongo]

Sounds intriguing but far from KISS, sir.

I am interested in accessing fsuipc and outputting information for gauges. I have an arduino UNO card that easily reads from the serial port and drives servos. Do you think your efforts could output to serial?

Reid

[oldgreydog]

I think quite a few people have used Arduino cards and I can't think of any reason why a C program could output to serial. Unfortunately I haven't reached that level of expertise in C.

I take it when you talk about gauges you mean actual driven by the arduino. I thought about trying that - but one thing at a time.