Re: [Flightgear-devel] Flightgear to hardware interfaces

[Oliver K. <oli...@ne...>]

It's already a while ago that I started a hardware project, involving 
interfacing to Flightgear.
The first thought was a Raspberry PI serving a swarm of Arduinos over I2C.
The Raspberry's task has been taken over by the laptop chassis that runs 
the Firefox browser providing the instruments' and radio stack images 
and displays.
The laptop runs a program that talks via websockets to Flightgear and 
with a USB serial converter to a first Arduino.
This polls the others via I2C and sends the results upstream. Commands 
from the laptop are sent to the appropriate Arduino.
Each Arduinio has a specific task and a different firmware, there is one 
for the yoke, including force feed back, one for the stuff in the lower 
half of the cockpit; including rudder and brakes,
another scans all the encoders and controls LED luminance (annunciators, 
radio backlight, etc).
There is one for digital I/O and one for all the analogue stuff (volume, 
dimmers etc).
For the digital I/O I use ready made small boards with shift registers, 
the analogue inputs use Arduino A/D converters.
Only when inputs change, their data is sent upstream; which keeps the 
data volume low.
The light controller Arduino also takes care of blinking LEDs (warning 
annunciator, marker beacon lights)

A few prototype breadboards keep the Arduinos in place and provide them 
with power and connectivity,
There is no need for a special PCB; it would be possible, but making one 
single unit is not worth the effort.

The firmware source files are between 2K and 20K, depending on the task 
(force feed back...)
The core item is the communication hub that connects to serial and 
Flightgear and translates the protocols; this one is growing and growing...

It's far from finished currently (I have other tasks as well, including 
earning the money :-)
But the concept seems to work sufficiently well.

-- 
Oliver




Am 19.06.2018 um 21:41 schrieb Patrick Callahan:
> I've started designing and prototype coding in c++ for services to 
> establish and use a connection between Flightgear and various types of 
> hardware. this will include multiplexer chips, led display 
> controllers, individual leds, meters, motor controls and any other 
> hardware needed to make a realistic cockpit from scratch.
>
> The prototype design will use telnet to interface with Flightgear 
> properties and a raspberry Pi as a high level hardware controller for 
> the numerous devices in the cockpit. Lower level control might involve 
> a second Pi, an Arduino or a specific chip on the Pi's spi or I2c bus.
>
> I can do this as an independent project, or preferably under 
> Flightgear.org.
>
> What are your thoughts about
>
>  - the best way to go about this
>  - considering this now or in the future as part of the Flightgear project
>  - who might want to be involved in design and development
>  - where the source code and project should live during initial 
> development
>  - how to ensure it supports Windows, Linux and Mac
>  - using the same license as Flightgear
> -Pat
>
>
>
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