JeffSergeant

Today I got an envelope of burnt-smelling plastic in the post, I've never been so excited!

The For me, KRPC meant too many 'moving parts' and a rather fragile setup, fine for my own use but harder to roll out to people who aren't as comfortable with hacking things together. There are up-sides, as always with a loosely coupled system; it means you can change any one part without changing all of the others.. but is higher maintenance as you have more interfaces to manage.

Special Delivery! 2 Mistakes spotted already, but neither are insurmountable: 1. the holes for the 5v barrel jack aren't big enough, so either the board needs drilling out or the jack needs modifying 2. I accidentally inverted the spline reticulator, I think I can work around this by inverting the splines prior to reticulation. I'm rather excited. Edit: IT WORKS! .... Yes.. I know... it's PERFECT.... More slight issues: The usb power isn't actually connected to anything as I got two pins the wrong way around on the PCB for the USB/TTL's pinout, luckily fixable with some space wire, space solder, and space cutting-things-off-things-that-aren't-supposed-to-be-cut-off... The patent-pending blindingly bright indicator LEDs. fixable by swapping out the resistors somehow managed to get the Digit pins the wrong way around on my prototype.. very lucky that the biggest mistake I made on the prototype is 100% fixable in code.

So, I think I'm nearing a final design for my readout: I've decided to mount the LEDs and the LED Display directly onto the PCB. The PCB has to be slightly bigger, but once I realised I can mount things behind the LED Display, its' actually not such a big difference. It's still slightly bigger (and therefore more expensive) but the savings on connectors and cables pretty much evens it out. The PCB will have the function of the LEDs printed next to them. The major up-side is that the main board will just be able to be plugged directly into a USB socket and it will work. Giving me options for a phased delivery approach if there are problems in the final assembly. Other major changes include putting all of the resistors on the board (As a result of having LEDs there) and adding an aux power connection for the servo. And I've found a USB/TTL adapter, and designed in the connection for that too, it just plugs straight into the board, so I don't have to worry too much about mounting it I've mocked up the final layout on a paper print-out with the pins sticking into some polystyrene, showing both sides to confirm that the mirroring has worked as planned. Next step is a final breadboard prototype based solely on the PCB schematic, (hard-wiring the LED Display means I HAVE to get the pins right, one benefit of using a ribbon cable was that I could work out which way up it went when It was delivered) and I can finally order the PCB. The only one change (there's always one more) I intend to make, is to connect a few spare IO ports from the processor to pads for future proofing.

I'm making a simple KSP Information display panel powered by the KSP Serial IO Mod. The latest iteration looks like this: Features LED Display (much more atmospheric than an LCD a servo-controlled multi-purpose gauge, which lets me do more interesting things than a digital display, it's also a little noisy which I actually like... and some LEDs. The LEDs act as indicators to tell you what the number on the Display means. But also as a descent speed indicator. It works.. It's a bit ugly, and it requires an Arduino on a development board. It's also held together with a wire-wrapping technique that is definitely not up to any sort of code.. not even by Kerbal standards. Here's a mock-up of iteration #3: (The top is 14cm by 7cm, for scale). The only added features are a better form-factor.. and the top is a removable piece of card/paper to support re-programming the function of the gauge and display without having to rebuild anything.. Also features a PCB designed by Bill Kerman himself! Next steps: Validate the electronic schematics to confirm I can run it from a standalone Microcontroller and USB->Serial converter (I have everything I need bar two £0.10 Capacitors to do this, which is why I'm playing with 3D designs instead) -Basic test done, set up an Atmega328 chip on a breadboard and communicated with it via serial! And only bricked 20% of my micro controllers in the process, Success! Once that's done finalise PCB Layout and Order PCB. It's probably massively overkill for this circuit but A. It's cool. B. It's actually possible to get small runs printed now for tens of dollars (until the last year or two no-one in this country would touch a hobbyist PCB) and C. It's going to be a present for a KSP fan in my life so needs to be relatively sturdy and safe! Then I just have to nail the box design and send that off to be laser cut. and then wait with all digits crossed that it all comes back in one piece... and then assemble it. Costs: PCB ~£15, Laser Cutting ~£15 Components ~$10 Hopefully all done by Christmas!

sure, I found it by looking at the source for KRPC (https://github.com/krpc/krpc) , a goldmine for this sort of thing! I made this change in the update() function of KSPSerialO, no idea if it's the right way of doing it but it seems to work if (ActiveVessel.patchedConicSolver.maneuverNodes.Count > 0) { KSPSerialPort.VData.MNTime = (UInt32)Math.Round(ActiveVessel.patchedConicSolver.maneuverNodes[0].UT - Planetarium.GetUniversalTime()); //KSPSerialPort.VData.MNDeltaV = (float)ActiveVessel.patchedConicSolver.maneuverNodes[0].DeltaV.magnitude; //removed JS KSPSerialPort.VData.MNDeltaV = (float)ActiveVessel.patchedConicSolver.maneuverNodes[0].GetBurnVector(ActiveVessel.patchedConicSolver.maneuverNodes[0].patch).magnitude; //Added JS } I've also since upgraded my instrument panel to a project box. It's doing the job for now http://i.imgur.com/TNvZcfM.jpg

If it helps anyone: I was having the issue on Win10 where the Arduino worked for a few seconds then just stopped, I only need to use this to get data out for a display panel, so I've disabled handshake in the config.xml, and commented out //output() in the main loop in the example Arduino file and it seems to be stable. The problema appears to be with the Arduino sending data, not KSP trying to read it; I took all of the port.read() statements out of the KSP plugin and it made no difference. Edit: and here's my prototype display! I also modified MNDeltaV to show remaining deltav not total. https://youtu.be/h_E09jtD0vg

Hi All, Just showing off, spent the last week assembling a ship in space using modular parts, finally decided to do something useful with it, so off we went to Duna! Album here: http://imgur.com/a/JO9RU#0 So much fun.. Although I need to go and get some sleep now