[Flightgear-devel] Red Bird Contact

[John W. <ca...@mm...>]

Hi Curt,

Took the liberty to talk to the folks at Red Bird, Todd (spelling?) in 
particular.

explained our relationship, etc, etc.

One of the items for your gap study to consider is how to handle the 
hardware interfacing, especially if they want to use the "modular" 
approach.  My questions focused around this idea.  Personally, I don't 
like their engineering solution but suspect it was driven in large part 
by the use of MSFS and the Garmin plug-in emulators and having to fit 
into that world.

At any rate, following are my suggestions for the gap study some of 
which we discussed:

1)  porting FG to run on a multi-core machine with multiple displays 
with OSG with an emphasis on the frame rate

2)  number and types of subsystem models required.  I would avoid 
scripting and xml stuff except as required for sim stratup and 
initialization; i.e. no run time scripts or xml logic ( again emphasis 
is on frame rate )

3)  where to do the hardware interfacing?  this might be a small 
engineering study funded by Red Bird; e.g given that we have a basic 
Avidyne display for the SR-22 do we build the interface there or perhaps 
a "personality" package that talks directly to FlightGear.   Sort of 
depends on  modeling question in #2.  For NASA these models are in the 
LFS private stuff, avoids the question of GPL and having to publish the 
source and provides better control over the source. But you've been down 
that road with ATC.  Putting the models in the Avidyne/Garmin/whatever 
code meets that objective.

4) it does sound like they've invested some time and effort into their 
"plexiglass" solution with a little pride of authorship.  But thinking 
we could build an LFS prototype for the Avidyne under some form of a 
cost-sharing and licensing arrangement and show life-cycle costing 
benefits and better quality and customer appeal.

5) finally, the nav database question.  we have software to create 
flightplans and incorporate SIDS and STARS based on Robin's database.  
If they want to use something like Jeppsen about all that is required 
would be rewritting the parser to extract the specifics.

Well, that's my $0.02.  The NASA support contract starts this week and 
suspect Ron and Glenn will be calling with a bunch of pent up questions 
and requests.  If you want comments on the study report, fire off a 
draft and I'll pass along my thoughts.

Regards
Jack