richfiles

That. Is. so. AWESOME! That's gotta be a great feeling though, even if you're mentally exhausted with figuring out the how!

100K is for 5 volts. 66K is for 3.3 volts. if you use the other, you'll get more range. (60K is close enough).

I have no idea how to use kRPC, but I hear good things spoken about it. Might wanna check it out and see if it's more up your alley for a Pi based build. Honestly though, if you know the Pi well, and know how to handle the GPIO, then you should be fine. I don't know if Pi has PWM or DAC outputs. Could be a hassle to do manually controlled PWM if it don't. Arduinos do tend to excel at embedded applications. You can always do serial communication with a DAC chip, or you could send a serial data stream to an Arduino, and have the Arduino handle the hardware, and have a Pi doing other tasks.

That one's the correct configuration, but still 400 times too much for your meter. The simplest solution actually makes your meter nearly as easy to drive as a volt meter. That's a simple resistor in series. You will need to measure the resistance of your meter. Add a resistor in series so the total resistance of both combined is either 100 k ohms, to 66 k ohms (for 5 volt or 3.3 volt control, respectively). That resistance, combined with your control voltage will mean a restricted current will flow through the meter, as calculated by ohms law: I = V/R If voltage is 5 volts, and total series resistance is 100 k, then: 5 / 100000 = 0.000050 (50 microamps). If you plug that in, you find you get a linear response. VOLTS kOHMS µAMPS 5 100k 50 4.5 100k 45 4 100k 40 3 100k 30 2 100k 20 1 100k 10 0.5 100k 5 0.2 100k 2 0.1 100k 1 As you can see, you get a very linear response when you input different voltages. You might find you need to add a small filtering capacitor to your PWM outputs to smooth the PWM values. putting a small capacitor across the meter should do the trick. This is functionally equivalent to putting the cap between the resistor and the meter, and the other end to ground. You can experiment there. It's hard to calculate the exact value, but it can be calculated ideally if you know the controller's PWM frequency, the meter resistance (and the resistor that will be added to make it 100k or 66k) total, and the operating voltage (5 or 3.3 v). regarding shunt resistors and series resistors... If you have an internal shunt resistor, removing it will turn the meter into a volt meter (range unknown without measuring). If you do not have an internal shunt resistor, then it's an amp meter, but we can still use it easily, as is. You can measure the meter resistance simply by measuring across the external terminals. That's all we need (even if the meter has an internal shunt resistor, we could leave it be, and still use it in this configuration, as an amp meter). The series resistor is added externally, to get a total series resistance. PWM smoothing cap is added across the meter terminals. This is generally a small cap, something like 0.1µf to 10 µf.

Nope, that's about 400 times more current than your meter draws. That device puts out milliamps, not microamps. Correction... That device is one of the MANY mislabeled ones on ebay. Chinese to English translation doesn't always parse word order correctly, so a lot of mistakes are made with voltage to current vs current to voltage... If you look at the PC board, you see it takes current in, and outputs voltage... It's backasswards. I edited the post above with more correct info though, so check it out. I think you just need a series resistor, so the total series resistance of the meter, combined with your controller max voltage, passes only the max 50 microamps. You using a 5 volt or a 3.3 volt controller output?

✌️ I am not a Val! ✌️ @Frybert

@Ruedii My keyboard actually does use amber LEDs, but this instrument panel is meant to be loosely modeled after the Apollo capsules. They used white electroluminecent backlighting for the instrument panels. I'm going with a blue green color, cause it still looks like EL light, but I want something greener, cause it feels more Kerbalish. You might have missed the detail earlier where I states I'm already using blue-green LEDs for this. The incandescent bulbs are just what originally comes in the meters. I remove those. Shone my flashlight through the back of the case to get the white light to light the colors up. I'll probably actually aim some colored LEDs at those spots, and paint masks on the lens, to keep the light directed primarily to the colored region. This is actually print don the Nekoosa synthetic "paper". I just need more LEDs, and to put in internal shields to mask some of the side spill light. Looks like I need to make the black area a tiny bit wider, and cut the white area a little narrower. Other than that, the labels are all final, except my Air Density / Intake Air meter. Those two readouts are going to share a horizontally oriented dual meter, and I want a graphic representation of Air Density, just like the meter on screen in KSP. All the other meters were copy & paste, but AD will require new art.

Voltmeters are the easiest to work with. When you get your meter, check if it has an internal shunt resistor. If it does, then it's a volt meter reading across the shunt. If it doesn't, then you'll have to build or buy a circuit that converts a voltage to a current. I've seen a circuit that does this on ebay for about $4-5. I can go into more details later, but it's about... 2 hours before I have to get up for work! Need some sleep! Welp... It's later now! + o--vvv--•--vvv-- a | b | | | > | s > (m) > | | | | | - o-------•------- So this is a simple schematic of the meters that I got. These meters, were incredibly conveniently modable. The resistor "s" is a shunt resistor, and is how my meters can measure current. Most of the electricity goes across the resistor "s". The meter "(m)" measures the tiny voltage across "s". Resistors "a" and "b" are basically to calibrate the meter and to set it's ranges. You may or may not have "a", "b". or "s", depending on how your meter is wired inside the actual meter winding. If you have the "s" resistor (any resistor that goes across the "+" and "-" sides of the meter circuit), then it means you have a voltmeter that is measuring voltage across a shunt. It'll be far easier to control a voltmeter from your controller than to control an ammeter. If you remove the shunt resistor, then you convert your meter to a voltmeter. You'll need to adjust "a + b" (this can be replaced with a single value) to adjust your range so the meter peaks at 100% when you output 5 volts. Once you've done that, you'll have an easy time controlling the meters. if you do not have a shunt ("s") resistor in your meter, then the meter is wired fundamentally as an ammeter. You'll need to convert the voltage output from your controller to a current output. I've been playing with an ohms law calculator, and I think you can do this easily. One thing you should do is measure the resistance across the meter, and then put a resistor in series with it. If your control voltage is 5 volts, you want the TOTAL series resistance to be 100K ohms. If your control voltage is 3.3 volts, you want the total series resistance to be 66K Ohms. At 5 volts, passed through 100K, you get 50 microamps. Turns out, thanks to ohms law, reducing the voltage gives you a linear conversion to microamps on your meter. 5 volts gives you 50 microamps, 4 volts gives you 40, 1 volt gives you 10, and 0.1 volt gives you just 1 micro amp. Even at 5 volts, you're also only drawing a quarter of a milliwatt through your meter+resistor. I think most controllers out to be able to direct drive that! (don't quote me on that) I think you can make that meter work!

Also, I did another test fit, now with he new LED color! I learned the Nekoosa paper is more opaque than the integrated diffuser. To get consistent brightness, I can either look for a more translucent diffuser (to match the modded meters to the factory backlit brightness), or I can fit all the meters with he nekoosa paper, and add more LEDs to bump the brightness up to overcome the dimmer material. As it stands, I'd like to find lighter material for the diffuser, cause I want as much brightness to pass through as possible.This is still a paper scale test. It's dimmer than the stock backlight as a result, but it definitely looks good! The dimmer illumination left the picture a bit grainy. Can't be helped, till i make the LED pc board and figure out the ideal diffuser, and upgrade to the nekoosa paper. I'm gonna finish making the other labels (super easy, as I can copy paste the scales, and just change the text. Lookin' good! **EDIT** Eew! This looks so bad compared to the new pics where I actually use the Nekoosa synthetic "paper"! I printed my first test run on the actual Nekoosa paper... It looks nice, but I have to get up for work in like 2 hours... Gonna have to wait! Well, I waited!

I made an interesting discovery about my new 1251 dual edgewise meters... They are 4-20 mA current loop meters. And they are not wound as such. They appear to be voltmeters wired across an internal shunt resistor... To convert them to read volt, i only need to remove the shunt resistor and then install a resistor in series to scale the input so 5 volts = full scale. These meters just went from needing $16 in additional drivers, to being able to run straight off the Arduino! Sweet! I still need one current transmitter to run my single edgewise meter. Sadly, that meter is wound for 4-20 mA measuring. If I replace the single meter with my broken dual meter (which is essentially a single meter), then I could eliminate ANY need for the 24 volt supply or ANY of the voltage to 4-20 mA current loop transmitters. It's tempting...

I'm gonna agree 50 micro amps makes the most sense.

Any kind of label on it at all? Do you have a power supply with current limiting? You could turn it to 5 volts, set it to full current limit, then attach it. Slowly turn up the current limit (don't let the meter peg) and see if the meter rises. You want to slowly adjust the voltage and current up, but stop if the needle pegs, or if the movement isn't responsive (then adjust the other dial). Once you have the meter needle at the maximum position, note the voltage and the current settings. If the meter has a linear response to voltage adjustments or current adjustments. You can fine tweak it at the top, but you're testing to see if the meter is current or voltage limiting the power supply when it's at max readings. You can then double check to see if voltage adjustment or current adjustment gives you a linear response on the needle. If you don't have a bench meter with current limiting... Hmm... You might have to experiment in other ways. You could try feeding it power through a potentiometer and see what it does.

I always remind people to remember their frosty beverage holders! It's almost as important as snacks!

As a hardware guy... I plan on fine tuning the LED brightness with a current limiting resistor in series with each LED. The main power for that will come from a 555 based PWM circuit tied to a slider style potentiometer. A couple other slider pots will be arranged in parallel to control desk lighting, and even the display shelves around my room!

I love the fact that Sputnix is in Australia, at a perfectly normal and reasonable time right now, as Sputnix, Kotagi, and I all revel, in nearly the same moment, at Kotagi's KickS rig! The one thought I get from this (after ERMERGHERD, AWESOME!): "Holy $#!?, the time! I gotta work in the morning!"

My brain just did a Philae seeing those pics!!! Bouncing and tumbling, stunned at the influx of data, but sorta dazed... WOW! That's Kerbal Kool You know, before paneling in those side consoles... Make sure you remember the frosty beverage receptacles! Highly important to secure your hydration/inebriation source! With a suffient power source, you could probably even look into Peltier devices to literally keep your beverages frosty cool!

Amazing! I'd love to see more (we'll see more pixels of you ro-ro-rotate your owl phone) Sorry! I LOLed when I thought that though! It really is awesome to look at though! Can't wait to see it with the main screen in place! I've been thinking of upgrading from a Radeon 5770 to possibly an R9 280x or... go Nvidia... I run a Hackintosh, so my card selections can be limited sometimes. I'd love to be able to drop in the visual enhancements. I already run a quad i7 at 3.5 GHz (trying to figure out how to OC it to 4.1-4.3), so physics processing is a breeze. I just have an old GPU. I run triple monitors, but only use the center for KSP. What you're doing though... with the camera views and the side monitors! It's just simply INCREDIBLE!!!

Man! That pair of International Instruments 1251 Dual Edgewise analog meters showed up int he mail only 2 days after I ordered them! Replaced the incandescent bulbs with "aqua" blue-green LEDs to mimic that lovely glow of EL illumination. I just formed the leads into a spiral that would screw into the lamp sockets to take the photo. Eventually, I'll have a small segment of proto board with the aqua LEDs, but also some dim red and yellow LEDs as well. I want to edge the color a little tiny bit closer to white, while also leaving just enough red and yellow wavelength light in the mix to let the red and a yellow bar on the scales light up correctly. I'm going to attach the Nekoosa synthetic paper scales a little differently. I may also find myself having to remove the raised center scale's elevated "rail". I think I can do that with a sharp side cutter and some sandpaper to buff out the edge left behind. This means I now have 2 factory backlit meters, and now only have one meter left to mod into a backlit meter. Also saw how they diffuse the light inside. Real simple.

I had an idea... Now that my mill is usable, It occurred to me I could still use those incredible masses of yellow annunciator LEDs that I salvaged, after all! If I put a 3 mm end mill into the thing, and clamp one of the LEDs into my milling vise, I ought to be able to mill out the existing yellow LED, and then glue in it's place, a 3 mm LED of any color I like. I can get on ebay, for under $10, an LED assortment that contains 10 different colors of LEDs, including pink, blue, and purple... That would allow me to make the vector indicators on my DSKY color coordinated with Pro/retrograde, Normal, Radial, Target, and Maneuver node colors. Even if the LEDs in the assortment don't "feel" like the right color, I could always get a few RGB LEDs and fine tune the color to my personal liking. Catch is, I need to have 8 LEDs per annunciator to get good spread of the light. There's a few other tricks I might be able to do, I might be able to do multicolor annunciators, but they will have bleed through of the colors. Could be interesting to have pro vs retro/anti LEDs have a green or red dot (respectively), as an added visual cue. If I mill deep enough, and insert the LED with a barrel to mask it... that might just work! All the annunciators are a milky white when unlit. I found green ones at Digikey, and can get them for a very decent price, better than ebay. I'll also get a couple red ones too. Ebay has some available for a good price. I'll only need a couple (for things like Temp, Master Alarm, etc). It's not worth modding annunciators for red and green, but all the other colors, sure. They don't make this style of bar LED annunciators in any color other than red, green, and yellow. By the time I'm done... I'll have red, green, yellow, cyan, blue, pink, and purple! Don't worry, i'll post pics when I get the time to experiment with the idea. Hopefully I can mill out the existing yellow LEDs cleanly.

I've not gotten back into playing, with the release of 1.2 (or 1.1, LOL ), but that's only because I want to finish my controller and dive head first into gameplay with it. BBT will definitely be a permanent fixture for my mod list though!

Check your local hardware store or Walmart, etc and look for furniture slides. They are (usually) a teflon foot that slides really easily over carpet and other flooring. Put those on the bottom of the seats, and they should slide really easily. Some should even be meant for permanent mounting (by screw or nail). Should be perfect for you!

Awesome! Don't feel too bad. Best the mistake be in the thread post and not the code!

The target stuff is SO incredibly useful!!! I'm confused... I had this up on my computer: public UInt32 MNTime; //41*Dt Time to next node (s) [0 when no node] public float MNDeltaV; //42 D Delta V for next node (m/s) [0 when no node] So... Wouldn't MNDeltaV make more sense to read deltaV remaining... Knowing the time to a maneuver node (MNTime) seems pretty important? Why would MNTime be changed to deltaV remaining? Or am I grossly misunderstanding something here?

**UPDATES** I managed to snag the better (priced) of the two meter deals! I got the pair of meters for $42 each, $97 shipped. What's more... They look like the rather uncommon factory backlit models! Sweet! That's two meters I won't have to mod! I can also see how they do their light distribution, and maybe mimic it when I install the lighting on my own! Had to turn down the counter offer for the $130 shipped pair. Those would have been the easier meters to use, as they take 0-5 volt DC inputs, aka... Arduino voltage levels. The cheaper meters are 4-20 mA current loop meters, so they will need to be driven by a driver circuit, but that circuit is only about $4 on ebay, and I have the parts I could just simply build it with too. It'll depend on how lazy I get! Anyway, It looks like I'm getting rid of three of my GE 180 style Single Edgewise Meters. I'm keeping the one I modded. I'll likely redo it's scale to be atmospheric pressure, since the single meters have a large scale space, and that meter is mostly visual in KSP. I'm debating how I want to handle this. One of my dual edgewise meters has a broken pointer arm. I repaired it, but the arm moves slowly due to increased mass from the repair. The irony, is that I now have more meters than I actually need now... I'm actually looking for data in the packet that even needs to be shown! I can do a couple different things with the meters I have: A: I can install the single and the repaired dual meters in my overhead instrument panel. (2x extra readouts though) B: I can install the single and the repaired dual meters in my overhead instrument panel, but remove the broken pointer arm, running the dual meter as a single meter. (1x extra readout) C: I can run a single dual meter up top for the two atmospheric readouts, and the single meter below for Temp. I would not use the repaired meter at all. (correct number of readouts) Either way, thanks to the presence of the GS meter in my navball (Glide Slope), which has divisions that match the "Gs" meter in KSP... Yeah... I kinda sorta NEED to be using that one! How could I not! Well, It actually potentially leaves me with extra analog readouts, based on the data sent in the packet. Personally, I'm liking option B, but also totally cool with option C. I just really don't like the repair on that one meter. //6 A0︎⃣ vertical velocity (m/s) - (Round Vertical Velocity meter) //21 A1︎⃣ Liquid Fuel remaining - (Default readout A on Dual Meter 1) //23 A1︎⃣ Oxidizer remaining - (Default readout B on Dual Meter 1) //35*A1︎⃣ Liquid Fuel remaining (stage) - (Alternate readout A, selectable by toggle on Dual Meter 1) //37*A1︎⃣ Oxidizer remaining (stage) - (Alternate readout B, selectable by toggle on Dual Meter 1) //25 A2︎⃣ Electric Charge remaining - (Readout A on Dual Meter 2) //27 A2︎⃣ Mono Propellant remaining - (Readout B on Dual Meter 2) //31 A3︎⃣ Solid Fuel remaining - (Readout A on Dual Meter 3) //33 A3︎⃣ Xenon Gas remaining - (Readout B on Dual Meter 3) //48 A4︎⃣ Max part overheat (% percent) - (Readout A on Dual Meter 4...) ... ... I wanted this to be a dual meter, but what else can I show for readout B? If I swap the single meter and this dual, I get option C, but I mix meter styles. //29 A5︎⃣ Intake Air remaining - (Readout on overhead converted *Dual Meter 5.) *Broken pointer removed to convert it into Single Meter ... ... If I swap meters 4 and 6, I can remove this meter entirely //13 A6︎⃣ air density (presumably kg/m^3, 1.225 at sea level) - (Air Density Readout on overhead Single Meter) ... ... I wanted this to be a single meter, but if I swap the dual meter and this single, I get layout option C ... ... With layout option C, Readout A will be Air Density, and Readout B will be Intake Air) //9 A7︎⃣ acceleration (Gees) - (GS meter on left side of navball) So that's where I sit... I'm kinda out of 0-100% based packets that seem worth displaying. The remaining values are all numeric values, like velocity and such, or total values. They don't translate to a meter... I honestly think I'm gonna go with option C. It uses every single meter, and keeps all air related readouts on the overhead panel. It also lets me eliminate the meter with the one broken (and poorly repaired) pointer. Side bonus to arrangement C... If I am only using 4 dual meters and 1 single meter... the two duals in the mail are factory backlit, I have one single and one dual backlight modded... That means I literally only have one meter left to backlight mod, and I'm done with backlighting them all! Woot! I amy still have to do a minor mod to the two backlit meters, but it's a mod I can likely do with just a side cutter and a file. 3 duals + 4 singles = 10 readouts 4 duals + 1 single + navball GS meter = 10 readouts! No loss in readouts, and no unused meters!

Oh yeah... Looks like you doubled up on the winky guy.