Freshmeat

I have been a fan of H. P. Lovecraft since my early teens, and found the Counter Strike Cthulhu in the Unspeakable Vault of Doom. I have used various Cthulhu depictions for wallpapers and avatars, my wife embroidered it as logo when she made my tablet sleeve and a 3d printed Cthulhu idol sits on my office desk at work. For my Diablo II forum account, I made this:

I use quicksaves extensively, but I have a mission I regard as so far successful beyond its scope that I do not think I will be able to to it. I had done a manned mission to Vall, using two identical space tugs and a miner/refueler. One carried crew, the other a lander. Safe return to Vall orbit, the crew embarks home. The lander itself was slightly overbuilt, with a dV capability of some 2500 and good TWR after the base had been unloaded. And I still had the massive tug and the refuel craft. So a crazy idea pops up: Why not see if I can land the lander on Tylo? Unfortunately, the lander has ejected its rear docking port, so it cannot dock to the front of the tug, as it did on the way out. So I need to dock at a side port, for a rather asymmetric mass distribution: This was the absolute maximum thrust the plentiful reaction wheels could handle. We are talking TWR 0.1, but it managed to get from Vall to Tylo, in a something like 30 km circular orbit. Lander decouples, and after several tries: Touchdown. 22 m/s left. It might not be obvious from above picture, but the lander carries ISRU as well. So after a while: Return to orbit. I could probably have made a rendezvous with the tug and refueled from Vall orbit, but Vall is a serious pain to land on so I decided that success was success, and I had made an unplanned Tylo return mission that would have been crew capable.

I use lots of mods, but only stock engines. While almost all modded engines are balanced against stock, I do not trust my judgement in the matter. Max stack diameter is 3.75m. No 5m or 7.5m vessels. When traveling interplanetary, everyone gets ample living space. I use MOLE or CxAerospace station modules for that, as they have proper beds. Right now I build a station with an additional restraint: Every module must fit in a Mk3 cargo bay and launched by my designated cargo SSTO.

I wish I had known that a couple of reloads ago. Well, you live and learn.

No. Lets go a bit into the theory behind this, understanding it will help you later. Analog ports read a voltage, and convert 0-5V to values 0-1024. So in order to get our values, we need to supply a voltage we can control. The easy way to do this is with a variable resistor. It has three wires: is in either end of the resistor, and the last is connected so it divides up the resistance between one end and the other. For example, if you have a 10 000 Ohm (10K) resistor, and you put the slider 75% of the way towards one end, the resistance between the third wire and that end and the middle wire is 2500 Ohm, while the resistance between the other end and the middle wire is 7500 Ohm. So how does this help? Well, if you apply a fixed voltage between the end points of the resistor, the voltage will divide up in the same proportion as the resistor is divided. To continue the example above, you connect one end of the resistor to your ground port, and the other end of the resistor to +5V. Then the voltage read by the middle (analog) port will read the same ratio (25%) of 5 volt as the ratio of resistance. So to sum up, you connect one wire to +5V, the middle to an analog port, and the last to ground. In most literature on the Arduino, the analog ports are named A0-A15, and ground is GND. On the board, you will find several ground ports. The exact layout is shown on this schematic, download it and keep it handy. I hope the above helps.

Hook the resistor up as you would any other slide potentiometer. https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/AnalogReadSerial

From the OP: Gratulations, you are a one step further. Now break the code in all possible ways

From where do you have the plugin? The directory name is something I would expect of a git repository (source code). The link you should install from is the one from google sites: https://sites.google.com/site/zitronfiles/KSPSerialIO_019_0.zip

@Tobit Can you upload KSP.log to somewhere and link it to here? It might shed some light on things.

Is there a way to switch between different IVA actors using kRPC? I fly a lot of IVA, and while kRPC has everything else I could dream of controlling, I cannot seem to find that in the docs.

Just checking: Do you run Windows 10? This plugin has issues with Windows 10 and select boards. If that is the the case, set HandshakeDisable to 1 in config.xml. If doing that enables the leds, you can only use the plugin to receive data. A workaround would be buying a seperate USB->serial adapter like this one. It could also be that you run a lot of mods on a rig that takes a bit of time to change scene, then the plugin experiences timeout. That can be helped by increasing HandshakeDelay. I run mine at 3000. Is there any sort of message related to KSPSerialIO either on screen or in KSP.log? That could help narrow down the possibilities.

Not to forget Konstruction to weld your parts together in situ.

Today, I managed to break my Mk II control panel. No more KSP until I have something to replace it. Longer story: For a while, parts of the panel had been failing, so I needed to repair of replace it. The project has progressed at a speed that would envy a snail, mostly because I was conflicted on the software side. While KSPSerialIO is rock solid, it offers some data I do not need, and does not offer some that I want. The tempting offer is kRPC, that can send almost any data, but requires you to code your own client to communicate with the Arduino, preferably in Python in which I never have done anything in before. Well, I manage to set up a simple client. To test, I just send an integer variable to the Arduino. My 7-seg display does not display the integer, and 7-segs are a poor choice for writing out anything as they are highly sensitive to the input being correct. Thus, I take one of my 4x20 LCD's from the control panel to display whatever the Arduino has read from the serial port. The connector to this particular display is a female header soldered to a small piece of circuit board and then a four lead wire soldered to that. When I took it out, the connector slowly drops to the 200 W PSU I had scavenged from a computer to supply ample 5 V current to various LEDS. More precisely, the solder points come into contact with the metal on the casing, creating a short circuit. Shortly after, the unmistakable stench of overheating electronics start spreading in our living room, and when I figure out what the cause is, the PSU is dead and we have to ventilate the room for hours before my wife can enter - she really hates the smell. Fortunately, I have a couple of spare scavenged PSU's, and the next version will have it placed in a separate shielded unit to avoid repeat mistakes. The client is now able to send integers when the Arduino has emptied its buffer, and I have learned a lot of Python.

@Tobit Welcome to the forums. I am not entirely certain how far you got with the project, but unzip Demo16 in your projects folder, and extract the mod files to gamedata. In \GameData\KSPSerialIO\PluginData\KSPSerialIO there is a configuration file, change the port to the one you are using for programming your Arduino. In the initial post in this thread, there are instructions on what to connect to an Arduino to use the code in Demo16, which you can open in the Arduino IDE and upload to your board. If you can get that working, you can try to add things to it, and change what it does. Otherwise, try to ask for specific help, it will make advice a bit easier. If you are entirely new to Arduinos, run a few of the tutorial codes, understand what they do, and try to change a bit here and there. Controllers are quite daunting when you start from scratch, but definitely doable. I had not written proper code for 10 years when I started my projects, had never written in C before, and my knowledge of electrics was just about Ohms law and little more.

@Sputnix Welcome back, long time no see. I do not experience timeouts when switching vessels, so I am afraid I cannot help you there. A first thing to try would be increasing HandshakeDelay in config.xml. If there is some kind of timeout due one part waiting on the other, it might do the trick. This is however a shot i the dark. @EccentricTea I remember you popping in something like a year ago, nice to see something came of it. An impressive scale of build you got there, dwarfs the possibilities the rest of us have.

Out of curiosity: What is the slotSize variable in the ModuleKISInventory module?

I am in the process of mucking around with adding TAC-LS to some parts from another part mod (CxAerospace Station Parts), and as ModuleKPBSConverter has a 'rate' setting which ModuleResourceConverter is missing, I hope you don't mind I borrow heavily from your MM patches. However, in the process, I noted that your Electron produce H2 to O2 roughly in the relation 4:1. Given that you have 2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2, and assuming molar masses of roughly 2 for H2 and 32 for O2, the mass relation is 4 to 32 = 1 to 8. The density of O2 is 0.00014 and H2 is 0.00009, the volumes come out in roughly 2 to 1 (1.976591979 to 1 if my math is correct). Your Sabatier reactor is off by a few percent as well, again assuming I actually figured out the chemistry. My numbers CO2 / H2 / H2O / CH4 comes out as 0,010281226 / 0,038557783 / 1,55177E-05 / 0,010337125. The CH4 is really off, but we do not want to have waste as gas as it is actually used by other converters under the assumption it is more or less solid. Lastly, if I am satisfied with the results I get I could consider uploading the patches to the forum. As large parts of the code comes from you, I feel I should ask your permission before eventually doing that. EDIT: After digging more around, I found that several containers (all?) in PBInc/ModSupport/Parts/LifeSupport has the field ConverterName spelled with a small initial c in ModuleKPBSConverter. Thus they will not show what the converter is converting. It is of course not a problem with single functionality converters, but raises some confusion is multiple converters is in the same part.

I know you got a _lot_ of work on your hands, but would it be possible to enable Mini-AVC to run without starting the game itself? I often find myself looking at the update message, thinking "Oh, thats right. I forgot to update" and then proceeds to forget all about it later on. The problem boils down to you only get the information about the update when you already have started the minutes-long process of starting the game, so you cannot react on the information straight ahead. When you shut down the game it is usually because you have to do something else. I experimented with using CKAN just to get the information, but it will not check for mods it does not administrate, and I personally prefer to update mods by hand. Further, the program itself seemed quite lumbering when I ran it. This suggestion is not something that should be sunk a lot of time in, I do not know how much work it takes to go from a .dll to an .exe.

@Messernacht It is a known issue with TAC LS, when the ship is unfocused, only stock providers of EC are counted. There are a few other sources that work, but NFT reactors do not. Check the TAC LS thread for moire information. Nertea cannot help you with this one, and JPL-repro is busy but says soon(TM).

Thanks. I usually clean a dir before upgrading as most modders tell users to do that. I guess I can copy the old BuildOverlay and BuildAdvanced files from a 1.3.1 install?

While you're at it, it might be beneficial to bake the contents of SectionLibrary.xml into the save game file. My own layout is heavily customized, as most of the default information in the HUD is presented in my control panel LCDs. I am grateful for the updates, but having to redo the customization every time is rather tedious (I only this morning found out where the information was stored). A small note: I use a UI scale at about 1.2, and in the VAB/SPH the rescources readout in the bottom left is slightly overlapping the angle snap icon. I remember having found the relevant config somewhere, but cannot relocate it now. Can you shed light on this? EDIT: In the former builds, there used to be a BuildOverlay and BuildAdvanced xml files, but now they are gone? Suggestion for HUD display: I always add dV (Current/Total), and I think most others would like that information at a glance as well.

If you do mods, the Station Arm from MOLE and welding ports from Konstruction adds a whole new dimension to stations.

I am not entirely convinced that General Relativity prescribes that kind of motion. It is very much at odds with Newtonian motion at low speeds, where relativistic effects in general should not be noticeable.

Works like a charm already. For now, I learned enough MM to be able to raise the temperature tolerance to 2900°C in a three line patch.

Unfortunately, the screen captures from the weekends missions were garbled, so I have to tell the story in words: Saturday, I mounted a long piece of truss and a station arm on Horizon. The whole mission came along in a single flight without any reverts, and everything behaved very nice. Sunday I mounted a DSEV solar cell (forgot its name, the one build into a hex truss) unit on my station using two arms. The DSEV unit has rotating solar cells that rotate even before the solar cells extend, and when I lift the unit out of the cargo bay of the Grey Goose I need to turn it upside down to reach the station. And above solar cells actually have collision boxes, so I smashed the panels when I turned the unit around, as the solar cells would reorient and collide with the arm. I ended up having to grab it by the end, lift and rotate, and grab it with the arm mounted on the station so I could move it onto the Konstruction port. As the operation took some wiggling, I drifted into the shadow of Kerbin and had no illumination at the docking site. However, the station arm has a built in light, so I could twist the arm of Grey Goose to serve as a light, giving just enough to see by. Above part of the operation took more than three hours, mostly due to unforeseen problems: SAS was necessary to restore the station if the payload came to close to something and induced phantom forces, but introduced wobbling in the entire structure. It had not occurred to me that the solar unit would rotate before extension, and that the solar panel where physical, given their rotations. After that I had to get a second station arm for Horizon out of the cargo bay, as two arms enable me to moved the arms around on the space station onto the junior docking ports that are scattered all over the modules. The problem is that those arms are pretty unwieldy, and in order to have room for it I had it tucked in the bottom of the cargo bay, beneath the docking port of the Grey Goose. It turned out pretty impossible to get it out with the arm, and more than once I had the wife giving me a startled look from me venting my frustration. So Chrisrine Kerman, flight engineer of the mission, donned her EVA suit and flew into the cargo bay, pushing the arm forward until the arm of Grey Goose could grab it without it colliding with anything. Chrisrine returns, I manage to rotate the arm in the wrong direction, and everything turns to confetti. Reload. Next trip the undocking of the arm makes it float out by itself, and I grab it without having to bother with the EVA, finally mounting it. During the operation I notice a nice thing about @Snarks Indicator Lights: When two docking ports have caught magnetically, they start to blink rapidly. Thus I can tell when to let go of the arm, which attaches to the station and leaving me to go home. All in all, a hectic weekend, but I am pretty satisfied with the results. Now to find out what exactly what went wrong with OBS.