richfiles

I just put together a nicely comprehensive compilation of info on some of the nicest edgewise meters for the application. Rather than repost the same data, I'll just link the thread. OP had specifically asked about the Apollo/Shuttle edgewise fuel meters, and was wondering if there were similar meters. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/104969-Custom-Controller-Parts?p=2098492#post2098492 Haha! Another nixie fan! As much as I LOVE nixies, they wouldn't fit the look I'm going for. It's okay though, my computer has nixies to make up for it!

Those meters, as in just like what's on the NASA hardware, specifically are not typically common. I've never seen ones identical to the fuel meters in the Apollo/Shuttle. What comes INCREDIBLY close, are a number of edgewise panel meters, particularly the ones manufactured primarily for industrial and power generation applications. First, for those with less available budget, and possibly not as much space to spare in their control panels, the GE/Yokogawa 185 Edgewise panel meters are a great choice. Yeah, stick with the 185 if you are on a budget. They are smaller, but still bigger than most cheap chinese made edgewise meters. These measure in at approximately 3 inches (7.35 cm) tall. I see them on ebay all the time, and you can find them for $10 to around $25 USD. Just be patient and wait for the right ones to pop up for sale. Ideally, you want 0-5 volt DC. 5-0-5 is also doable, but you need a dual supply driver, or a driver with a voltage divider derived ground to control them. If you end up finding a deal though, say, like 0-10 volt DC meters, you can just use the PWM outputs to drive a single transistor/MOSFET driver to boost the voltage. If you want TRULY epic meters... Go with the GE/Yokogawa 180 Edgewise panel meters. I have four of the 180 meters... They are BEAUTIFUL! 6 inches (14.7 cm) tall! You can remove the screws in the back, and the whole outer shell slides off, so you can replace the scale and label panels also! Sadly, the prices on these are ridonkulous. I settled with 20 mA DC meters. It'll take a little extra hardware, but basically, I'll build a voltage controlled current source (x4) to power them. I got these meters for a STEAL. The guy didn't know what he had, and had a "Make an Offer" button on ebay... He was selling 2 pair... I offered $11 a pair, for both pairs... and he accepted! That is WORTH building voltage controlled current sources for! :0.0: <--stereo amazement... cause you know... got the pair of pairs! And if you want to go WILD... Go with International Instruments 1251 Dual Edgewise panel meters... They are rare as can be! I'm aware they are upside-down, but the three on the right... Those are the 1251s. The two on the left are 1151s. The pics below... I'm negotiating for some of those meters. First time ebayer... Very... frustrating. They don't get how it works, and I'm just being patient, cause I KNOW I will never get a better deal in my life for these 1251 meters. I'm trying to get 3 of them, but the person who handled the auction is now out on business, and all communications have been through him, away from his office, back to their company... Fun. Totally worth it! Ah, found a nicer picture of them: The 1151 and the 1251. Both are the same size as the GE 180 meters. - - - Updated - - - Oh! Remember! You can replace the legends (the label plates). Just print up ones that look like the Apollo/Shuttle ones (with the white on black scales), and you'll be rocking the retro(grade) look in no time! - - - Updated - - - Oh! Another trick you can do... If All you can snag are the 185 meters, the little ones, you can technically flip one upsidedown and butt it next to another one. If you redo them with white on black labels, like in the NASA hardware, then the labels may slightly mask the seam, and you can "fake" dual edgewise meters, like the ones in the photo. They'll turn out a tad bit wide, but keep an eye out on ebay, you sometimes find slim versions. Two slim version butted together would be almost the perfect size to mimic the NASA ones! Also, if the tiny, anemic needle style indicator of the 185 doesn't float your boat, cut out a triangle of paper (colored to your liking), and glue it to the needle. As long as it's light weight, the needle will still move. Be aware that if you peg the meters, you could damage your paper arrow. If the meters have adjustable stops, make sure they are adjusted so they don't let the paper get slammed into the ends of the meter movement's travel. As for driving them, you have to be a teensy bit creative. On the arduino, you have to essentially invert the PWM output for the flipped meter. 100% output for nada, and 0% output for maximum scale. That's the cheapest way to do dual edgewise meters... Unless you stumble upon an ebay noob and get epic lucky!

The Apollo navball diagram. Here are my basic sketches of how a homemade navball might come together. This isn't complete, nor tested, nor set in stone. The basic premise, is you have to transfer power INTO the ball. To do that, you use slip rings, or you can try to make it work with something like maybe spinning it on earphone plugs. You need to get data into the unit too. If you can get a 1 wire serial interface working, then you can use the third conductor of the earphone jack, or you can have a hollow tube and shine an LED through with a phototransistor at the other end to pick up the signals. The data sent is real simple, just 2 floating point numbers, in degrees, probably with a checksum, since the signal might not be very clean. You could even send the data three times in rapid succession and do a 2 of 3 selection for each bit, to try to filter out electrical noise. All the motors need to be gearmotors. These are simply small motors with built in gearboxes at the end. The motors also all have an encoder attached. 1000 - 1200 count is probably more than plenty. That gives almost a 1/3 degree resolution, I think. Too high a count, and the arduino has a lot of trouble reading the counts if you use an interrupt based PID library (that's for speed control of a motor). What happens is that the motor is controlled just fine, but it misses incoming data on the serial. The yaw motor (My) has to have a shaft on both ends and is secured to the central disc. It spins the two half spheres to show yaw. The Pitch motor (Mp) tilts the central disc to show pitch. The motor is attached to the disc, and the shaft attaches to the wishbone. The other side freely spins against the wishbone. This free spinning side is actually a very good place for the slip ring or for the hollow optical tube, or for the headphone jack based slip ring. If you go with optical transmission, you'll need to also add a small signal amplifier to power the LED on the wishbone. With slip rings, you don't need that, but you risk a noisier signal, since you have contacts rubbing against each other. The roll motor (Mr) needs a slip ring. If the motor shaft is hollow, you can feed your wires THROUGH it, and hook up a headphone jack slip ring to the other side of the motor. If the motor shaft is not hollow, the only way to transmit power is with a slip ring between the motor and the wishbone. You can get a better slip ring signal by having multiple wipers. Wipers at the springy metal contact that touches the slip ring. There is more than one way to make a slip ring, but you'll just have to figure out what works. The apollo used a GIANT slip ring, and sent at least 12 signals into the ball! With a tiny arduino, you only need 2 power wires and one or two signals. 1 signal if you can utilize a 1 wire serial connection. ***NOTE*** Looked on ebay, slip rings can be had for UNDER $10 each, and you only need two. If you buy ones with extra conductors, you can double up wires for extra signal noise reduction, and even do full SPI serial interface... Looks like it'll be WAY easier than I though! 6 wire: http://www.ebay.com/itm/12-5mm-300Rpm-6-Wires-CIRCUITS-2A-Capsule-Slip-Ring-240V-AC-for-Monitor-Robotic-/171247673771 and 12 wire: http://www.ebay.com/itm/300Rpm-Capsule-Slip-Ring-12-Circuits-Wires-22mm-2A-AC240V-Test-Equipment-/281270446236 Two more things... If you can find a larger bearing of some kind to support the weight of the wishbone, it's better to turn the wishbone, by a gear, or even a rubber belt. That takes the weight of the ENTIRE assembly off the motor shaft, and lets you have room for the slip ring int he middle, with no problem. A large, heavy duty bearing with a pipe through the center is actually a VERY good option. You can mount the slip ring tot eh end of the pipe, and feed the wires through the pipe to the wishbone. You have a cog or toothed pulley around the pipe, and that leads to your motor. The motor can have the same size gear/pulley, or it can be half the size and then you just run the motor twice the speed of the other ones. You COULD put the pitch motor outside the wishbone, and have the shaft attached to the central plate, as it looks like it'd be easier, but it really isn't. It's easier, AND more compact to have both motors inside the ball, and to drive them both with the arduino inside the ball, and just communicate via the slip rings. If the slip rings on ebay are reliable enough, I'd just say forget the optical thing all together. Good quality slip rings will have at least two wipers, and should transmit a fairly clean signal. I was thinking homemade slip rings would be likely used. Also, have capacitors inside the navball, on the central plate. Attach them (in the correct polarity) to the (+) and (-) power supply. That lets the slip rings keep the capacitors well charged, and any time the motors draw extra power, they pull from the caps. You can also position the capacitors to try to balance out the weight of the pitch motor. ***EDIT*** Well... I took a close look at that schematic, and Apollo used resolvers, instead of synchros for the motor feedback... Well I'll be... I used to work with resolvers all the time! It's irrelevant to this project, since a custom home made one won't use them, nor does my synchro based F-4 Phandom FDAI/ADI... But it's just interesting, I think! I strongly suspect they had finer resolution of the ball, as synchros have a dead zone near the peak amplitudes, where the signal can be... imprecise... Only by a tiny fractional bit, but I suppose in space, that extra bit counts. That's just interesting! Also... some NSFK smexy-smexy topless pics of an Apollo FDAI! Needless to say, a homemade one will not be such a... precision instrument, but it IS possible.

Over on Curse, this was released... http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/232908-chute-safety-indicator Maybe you can contact the developer and see how they are doing this? They are using the parachute staging icons to visually indicate unsafe, risky, and safe to deploy (using colors on the staging icons themselves).

Oh man... that's beautiful!

Hmm... I'm considering, after finishing interfacing my real navball... Possibly seeing how hard it'd be to do a homemade navball, using off the shelf components. I used to work in manufacturing aerospace/defense motors, synchros, etc, so I'm very familiar with a lot of precision motor tech. I also have a complete understanding of the mechanical makeup of a navball. I even came up with a means to build one without the complex slip ring mechanism (you provide power with the left and right "wishbone" feeding power into the right and left side of the disc through very simple wipers. No date is sent this way, only power. You then have a phototransistor/LED pair at the pivot on either side to transmit data into and out of the ball. A few capacitors filter the DC bus voltage, and an arduino pro mini or something small like that sits inside the ball to communicate with the outside of the ball, and to run the two internal motors (for yaw and pitch). Externally, you have another small arduino drive the wishbone motor, optical communications to the ball's internal arduino, and the flight director/rate meters. Alternately, you can actually get away with only one motor inside the ball but then you have to place the pitch motor not he side of the wishbone. This requires you counterbalance it on the other side, as well as add more side clearance to accommodate the added width. You still have to have one internal motor to handle the yaw. Probably best to keep both internal. You can drive the motors using a low resolution encoder and a PID library for arduino. Not certain if you can run more than one PID loop on a single arduino though. They use interrupts to handle the encoder ticks. You also need to have a motor with a lower encoder rate, to prevent interrupts from interfering with the serial in. Serial between the external and internal arduinos should be handled with a single wire interface, so you can feed it via LED. Note, that the wishbone needs a second set of wipers at the roll pivot to transmit power, and a second set of LED/phototransistor sets for communication. It really ought to be possible. I know there is a thread where someone was trying to do this, but I've seen no progress on that, sadly. If I play is careful, it can be kept on the cheap. Cheap enough for anyone to put together.

Yup... Been working on a small novel over in that thread the entire time! I also brought up the possibility of getting rate of yaw, pitch and roll, not by consuming data, but by sampling the already existing yaw, pitch and roll data and measuring change between samples against MET. That should be both a very simple calculation, i would think, and get the data without consuming more precious bytes, right? Yeah, those 5 vectors are pretty much critical to anyone flying by instruments. I'm considering, after finishing interfacing my REAL navball... Possibly seeing how hard it'd be to do a homemade navball, using off the shelf components. I used to work in manufacturing aerospace/defense motors, synchros, etc, so I'm very familiar with a lot of precision motor tech. I also have a complete understanding of the mechanical makeup of a navball. I even came up with a means to build one without the complex slip ring mechanism (you provide power with the left and right "wishbone" feeding power into the right and left side of the disc through simple wipers. You then have a photodiode/LED pair at the pivot on either side to transmit data into and out of the ball. A few capacitors filters the DC bus voltage, and an arduino pro mini or something like that sits inside to communicate with the outside of the ball, and to run the two internal motors. Externally, you have another small arduino drive the wishbone motor, optical communications to the ball's internal arduino, and the flight director/rate meters. If I play is careful, it can be kept on the cheap. Cheap enough for anyone to put together. If that becomes possible, then having those 5 vectors becomes significantly important to anyone that want to fly by instrument.

Nice for my staging button. I can have a simple stage counter above it, and control the LED in the button! With my recent FDAI/ADI (Flight Director Attitude Indicator) "navball" acquisition (My navball came from an Israeli F-4 Phantom simulator), this stuff is critical to me! In order for the Flight Director crosshairs to guide me on my physical navball, I need to have the pitch and heading of not just Prograde, but all the heading vectors. I think stibbons is correct. If you send prograde, you just flip it 180° in the arduino to get retrograde. True of all the vectors. Sending Prograde, Radial, Normal, Target, and Maneuver Node is critical to be able to fly with a real navball. You can also flip every one of those 180° to get it's inverse. I want to have a pair of rotary switches (5 position and 2 position) to select my desired vector. That would then display on the navball's Flight Director crosshairs. Without those 5 sets of data, the navball can't display markers. In the mean time, I'm teaching myself coding for Arduino with this project. The big thing for me is creating an arduino program that reads the data over serial, converts it into the polarized attenuation multipliers for each of the three windings of a synchro (emulated), and then applies those multipliers to the reference 400 Hz sine wave. In the end, there are 10 signals that go to the FDAI to spin the Attitude Indicator ball. 1 reference, and three triplets of signals per axis. The angle is determined by the polarity and attenuation (in relation to the reference) of the three inputs (per axis). You do that for each of the three axes, and then for the Flight Director crosshairs, you run them exactly like regular analog meters... Cause they are analog meters. My goal is to as much of the work in software, and limit hardware to low cost DACs and op-amps and such... I want to make it CHEAP to interface an FDAI to Kerbal... The FDAI will still be expensive as hell... but hey, Anything I can do to keep the costs as low as possible. For reference, my unit is an ARU-11/A, I think made by Lear-Siegler, but the label came off at some point, and only the model/serial number label and the Israeli company that did the sim still has their label on it. So if it's 8 bytes per vector, that's 40 bytes to get that data out, plus 9 for the next orbit patch info, plus 2 to cover staging... That's 51 bytes of 66 remaining... That leaves room for 15 bytes. I personally wouldn't mind rate of roll, pitch, and yaw... That'd be 12 bytes, to add three floats, right? Pretty expensive for what little is left, and not NEARLY as important as the heading nodes though. I can look at the navball to see if I'm spinning... But rate of change would be nice... Those values would leave only 3 bytes left. Thing is... That can be calculated entirely inside the arduino though, right? If you sample the yaw, pitch, and roll periodically, and sample the MET, and then sample it all again, periodically, it should be possible to calculate the rate of change from those values, correct? Going based on MET also keeps it game time accurate, adjusting for physics lag, right? Parachutes Safe to deploy status... A MEEEELION times yessss! Any way to have a means to select MechJeb Smart A.S.S. vs stock in the config files, if this gets implemented? Can an extra 2 bits be packed in there somewhere to select Stock nodes, MJ Orbital, MJ Target, MJ Surface modes? Stock has SAS Stability, Prograde, Retrograde, Normal, Anti-Normal, Radial, Anti-Radial, Target, and Maneuver Node. MechJeb has the three tabs with the normal orbitals on one tab, but things like Target + and Target - and relative + and - and such... It'd be super cool if we could select those modes and be able to reassign those inputs to the different tabs/stock. I'm probably just being confusing at this point... I better go to bed. I'm just REALLY excited to have a real navball, plus other gauges and readouts and such! I just REALLY want to be able play KSP with an all new level of immersion! I'm so exited! And I just can't hide it!

Awesome! Always appreciate the work! And I DID find the original thread and found This gets my basic navball spinning... but not maneuver nodes and heading vectors. I still need to be able to guide the targeting crosshairs. What I don't see is degree values for the heading vectors (Prograde, radial, normal, and their inverses)... I suppose it's probably possible to calculate those from the orbital data (Ap, Pe, inclination, semi major axis, semi minor axis, eccentricity, orbital true anomaly) though I have no idea how to do that yet... I guess. The thing I don't see any way to do, is to get a reading on maneuver node heading or target heading. Those two are MAJOR requirements for implementing a hardware navball... And I don't see them... I wonder if MechJeb could be used as a bridge to get the maneuver node/target/heading vectors. Obviously Mechjeb has full access to all that info, so it presumably can calculate the necessary data. Might it be possible to extract the necessary data from MechJeb, when installed? Kinda like how the NanoGauges mod extracts Mach Speed and a few aero numbers from FAR if it's installed, but ignores that data otherwise?

Yeah I did eventually dig up the original plug-in's thread, and found the attitude data was part of the packet. My reply ended up being in the "Arduino Addon for Mac" thread, since it seemed more specific to there. I will be posting to the original thread about a few things. I wonder if MechJeb could be used as a bridge to get the maneuver node/target/heading vectors. Obviously Mechjeb has full access to all that info, so it presumably can calculate the necessary data. Might it be possible to extract the necessary data from MechJeb, when installed? Kinda like how the NanoGauges mod extracts Mach and a few aero numbers from FAR if it's installed, and ignores that data otherwise?

All I can recommend, is use the Thread Display Options at the bottom of the page and search by the [Hardware] prefix. See what others are doing, get ideas, and all around build up a list of all the different features you want to add. Add each one in as you go, and figure out what kind of enclosure you want. This is a GREAT project! I know you'll love it when it's done! As for being a readout display, if you have the funds for some more LED readouts... Consider Ap, Pe, Time to Ap/Pe/SoI/Landing (you can always use one display for this one, as only one can be "next" at a time. The arduino can toggle mode based on the which item has the shortest "time to event" data, and indicate which mode you're in with an LED readout, or a text abbreviation on the display (Ap, Pe, SI, Ld). Other useful data can include Velocity, Altitude (sea), and Inclination. If you did all the suggested displays, you'd be looking at 7 LED display readouts. Another cool option is to buy some transparency film compatible with your printer. Print out labels (Ap, Pe, Radar Alt, etc) You can get VERY CHEAPLY at many dollar stores or office supply stores, VERY cheap colored plastic folder and binder inserts. If you get some red green and yellow ones, you can print your text labels, cut them out into little squares, and then cut the color panels for them too. Behind your panel, you can use them as indicators, and light them from behind using LEDs. I have found that to be one of the most ridiculously cheap ways to to the annunciator lamps. That can cover not only your Master Alarm, RCS, SAS, etc... but it can also serve as permanent labels or even mode labels for your LED display readouts. Or, if you want to spend the money, you can add an extra LED digits and hard wire them to light up Ap, Pe, etc. if you want displays that can change modes, you can control them one of two ways. You can drive them just like the regular displays, or you can drive them like single indicator LEDs, by connecting diodes to the individual segments you want lit, and having a different set of diodes per each indication mode. This is probably cheaper than an LED driver chip of you only have 2-4 modes to display. Just a few ideas for potential upgrades, if you find them useful! Always keep your options open!

THANK YOU!!! I've been going all out with the feature set of my build, very MUCH worrying about how far behind the Mac version of the plugin actually is! I do have a question... Do you know if the Mac version of the plugin streams attitude data... Aka, the Navball values? Yaw, pitch, roll, the various markers (prograde, etc)... I actually have a real navball, but I don't even know yet if there's even support for it in the plugin's data stream. I'm working on creating an arduino program and some support hardware to drive the synchro control signals required to move the ball, but I have not yet looked into whether the plugin even outputs that data. I'm actually using this project to TEACH myself C programming. I haven't done programming since the old days of BASIC, so I have a way to go yet..

You win KSP... My God... That was beautiful! Neither my rover, nor my boat are that cool!!! Yours are all in ONE! Have my shock and awe in stereo! :0.0: Of course, you now answer some questions... Like yes, you can go faster than 45 m/s on those intakes. Also, that jump was exquisite! I never take risks like that, cause I fear for all my Kerbal's lives! - - - Updated - - - "It's coming right for us!" **BANG**

I saw another one pop up on ebay. They ARE expensive... Just so you know... I've seen them sell for over a grand before, so the one listed is... not terrible... http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-USN-USMC-A-4-Skyhawk-Attitude-Indicator-Gauge-Instrument-Type-AN-AJB-3-/371357712620 The good news, is you also see them sometimes pop up for the $150-300 + shipping mark. You just have to be on top of them and react fast. Also... MAKE SURE it included the servo amplifier in the back. That's the little "backpack" thing attached to the rear of the unit. It needs that to function. It's probably possible to recreate that function as well... The circuit isn't complicated, but you'd have to reverse engineer the ENTIRE UNIT to do that... Not a simple task. It's better to pass on a real cheap unit and wait for one that has everything. If you find a sub $100 3 axis unit that's missing the backpack, it may actually work, but the electronics package may have failed. The controls are actually quite simple. You have servo motors and 3 synchro receivers. If you can figure out the pins to those, you could control the servo motors directly from an arduino, while reading the analog value of the synchros. You'll still need a 400 Hz sine wave for reference, but that's no problem. It's POSSIBLE, but more complicated. not that much more complicated, but you have to aim for a completely different direction of control (reading synchros instead of emulating the outputs of them). You also need to be aware that some units might be sold to collectors for show... and might not actually work at all. Pay special attention to what you're getting... There are VERY MANY 2 axis units on ebay. Practically ALL the units with a blue sky are 2 axis units. Sad too, as it'd match Kerbal nicely. 2 axis units only have pitch and roll. No yaw. A lot of those types of attitude indicators actually have built in gyros too! Either and electrical power source or a vacuum line spins the gyro and the "ball" simply reacts to the local gyro... No electrical command signals at all to control those types of navballs. If you look inside a 2 axis navball, you'll find it's actually a nav-donut. If you want to fly a lot of planes, you can get away with one, but it'll be of limited use in space. Patience is a virtue. I've been looking for one of these since the beginning of the year. The one I bought left me with under $20 left in the bank account for two straight paychecks (after bills). This was after also getting my renter's tax refund as well!!! Also... The US tax system is idiotic... Tax you for stuff... then say, oh, I guess you can have some of this back, cause we asked for too much... How 'bout you have a system that actually gets it RIGHT. Okay, enough ranting about that... Onto important things! Everyone knows velcro is a space age fastener used to secure checklists and snack holders to your instrumentation panel! See! it's legit! Velcro everywhere! Adds to the authenticity!

Should be recoverable... You'll want to transfer to the retrograde side of Minmus's orbit, so Minmus is on the correct side to gravitationally aid you in slowing down for your circularization. <--⟲--< Minmus orbit ....↗ .↗ ⟳ Kerbin So, retrograde Kerbin orbit. basically, move to the other side of Minmus. It's gravity will pull against your vessel+asteroid, and aid in your deceleration. It's a lot like the free return trajectory used in Apollo. A figure 8 pattern. I think...

Considering the term "Dresteroids"... The "s" seems pretty much like it belongs... as an "s". I just pronounce it exactly like it's spelled. Dres, like "Drez". Makes sense with saying "Drez-ter-oids". I'm not sure how many other ways one can actually say that. Although, seeing as how it's a model of Ceres... I could imagine some very creative alternate pronunciations... "Dee-rees" being one, like "See-rees".

I've never tried an aerial circumnavigation before. Does "pizza" mean something special in this case??? Cause I am confused... No challenge that prohibits pizza can be good, and must, by default be EVIL!!! That's like denying Kerbals their snacks! Unless pizza refers to a non food based "pizza"... I just can't place the term with any applicable meaning other than yummy pizza.

Get creative, learn a new skill! I'm building a physical "Kommand Module" to control KSP. I've never been passed Eve and Duna, and I've committed myself to not doing so until I can use physical controls and gauges to control it. When I DO have that hardware complete... I'll add the Outer Planets mod as well! There will be PLENTY for me to do! Thank God for Kerbal Alarm Clock! I'm nearing the point I was at the end of my 0.90 game, in terms of having multiple probes headed to both worlds (2 probes per ship, with 9 sets of single use science per probe, with one probe meant for the planet and the other meant for it's moon). I'm sure I'll be able to spam plenty of science there, and transmit it all back, but I still have not done hardly any Kerbaled landings in my 1.0.x game. I had started to explore Minmus again, and even had several biomes flagged and collected... Till a derped quicksave erased a month's progress. I still have not recreated my Minmus base, my Mun base... None of it! I have two stations. My Skylab station around Kerbin, and my Minmus base that I decided not to land, cause I knew from experience from the lost save, that it was badly engineered, and would always run out of power during Minmus's nights. My solution was to launch tiny probes that were all batteries and solar panels, with a docking port, and land it on TOP of the base to dock it... and then do it AGAIN when I STILL didn't have enough solar to charge the batteries. Long story short, the base was starting to look like a rocket on the pad... It was getting TALL.... So I made it a station. Also been working on a Mun base, with an ascent stage. No need to keep my pilot on the ground, and someone needs to carry all that science home. Still... I plan to use Kerbal Space Program as an excuse to learn to program Arduinos. I even have a REAL FDAI (Flight Director/Attitude Indicator... aka, the navball) out of an F-4 Phantom simulator!

I pronounce it as a single syllable. Similar (but not identical) to the word lathe (the wood/metal cutting tool) with a "y" in the middle, and a slightly different "th" at the end, to make it roll off the tongue naturally... As a single syllable. **EDIT** YEAH! Like the post RIGHT after mine!

Kerbalstuff says this is stuck on 0.90? Has this/will this be updated for 1.0.4? I'm building a Kerbal "Kommand Module" controller, but also run on a Mac. Also, are the attitude values and vector indicator values transmitted (aka, the navball data)? I have an FDAI (Flight Director/Attitude Indicator) that I REALLY want to connect to KSP. To use it, I'll need the roll, pitch, and yaw angle of the vessel relative to the orbited body, as well as the angle of the various vector indicators (maneuver node, target, prograde, normal, radial, etc). I don't know if it's better to math the "anti/retro" values in the arduinos, or just transmit everything over USB... It's already gonna be hard enough to generate a 400 Hz sine wave and 9 amplitude modulated copies of that wave to emulate the three synchro transmitters required to drive the FDAI hardware. I don't even know if an arduino CAN do that! It might be easier to have an arduino command 9 digital potentiometers, and feed it an externally generated 400 Hz sine wave. At least then it's not responsible for that too. I can just feed the outputs into 10 amplifiers to get the 115 volts, 400 Hz AC signals to drive my navball.

Considering the garage is unheated, a tiny little heater might not be a bad option. Doesn't need to be very many watts. You could even wire a mains voltage switch into your control panel to activate/deactivate it. You could have some ventilation fans as well, also commanded by switches on your panels. I'm actually planning on integrating the sliders for my display case lighting in my apartment into my command module control panel, which will be built into my desk. I mean... Why stop at controlling Kerbal Space Program alone. Let it run your heat, your lighting, etc!

Is it possible to easily mod this mod to swap the names of Plock and Eeloo... Or is that something well and truly buried in some hard to alter code or something? I'm fine with Eeloo being remodeled to be a better Pluto analog... I just feel if Eeloo is being kept as an outer planet, it deserves the position of outermost planet... Plock can be a moon in my game... I'm talking a mere name swap, basically. I want my Eeloo to still be my Pluto analog. If I instal this... I still want Eeloo to be my extreme destination.

9 out of 10 Kerbals agree that fudging is almost as good as actual fudge! The 10th skipped out of free fudge and is actually fudging moar boosters to a rocket right now.

She's real beaut, this one... That ball turns smooth as butter! OHCRAPOHCRAP!!! Neilmon, you're getting mighty close to gimbal lock... Oh wait... Kerbals DID get an extra gimbal for Khristmas! The reason a Kerbal Pilot can hold vectors and nodes and such, is the Scientists and Engineers ask what direction "Z" and "M" are. Jeb says "You're kidding, right?" That Raytheon "chip in a can" has a date code of 1974! This puppy is 5 years older than ME! This type of FDAI uses a 115 volt 400 Hz signal, driven through synchro control transformers (rotated by the gyro assembly). There are 9 synchro signal lines (3 per synchro/axis) as well as the base inverter reference signal going into it. My FDAI is an ARU-11A, from an Israeli F-4 Phantom simulator... Mil spec site says 3 axis, specifically "Three axes attitude indicator used to provide continuous pitch, roll and azimuth information". Funny, I used to BUILD synchros for both the US DoD and some weather tracking equipment suppliers at my old job! IF ONLY I STILL HAD SOME SYNCHROS!!! Elsewhere, I found the pinouts: "The heading, pitch and roll can be moved using synchros. Pin connections are: A=Ground, B=115 V- 400 Hz, F=Heading-x, G=Heading-y, H=Heading-z, J=Glide-slope-flag+, K=Glide-slope-flag-, P=rate-gyroscope-power-warning-flag+, R= rate-gyroscope-power-warning-flag-, S=glideslope-pointer+ , T=glideslope-pointer-, U=vert-ptr-flag+, V=vert-ptr-flag-, W=horiz-ptr-, X=horiz-ptr+, Y=vert-ptr-, Z=vert-prt+, a=pitch-x, b=pitch-y, c=pitch-z, d=roll-x, e=roll-y, f=roll-z, g=lighting (5 V), h=lighting (GND), C,D,E,L,M,N and j not used. Funny thing, I almost panicked and thought that I had bought a 2 axis unit by mistake, cause I couldn't see the yaw X, Y and Z in the pinout. Using heading as the label threw me WAY off! I eventually figured it out. The flag items are small solenoid like actuators that flip out warning flags on the unit. The pointers are basically analog meters. I do not know if they are voltmeters or ammeters. I have not yet determined this information. The lighting only requires 5 volts. A person could operate this two ways... Software emulation of the three synchros. You could use something like an arduino with 10 analog outputs (smoothed PWM, I guess) and processing to simulate the the 400 Hz reference sine wave needed, plus the amplitude multiplier for x, y, and z representative of the angular position of the rotor on a real synchro, and feed those into an amplifier that can drive the 115 volt outputs at the 400 Hz frequency... The other way is to buy three synchros, and mechanically pair them to some stepper or closed loop servo motors, and drive the motors using a more traditional motor control program to represent the three axes. Then all you need is a single 115 volt, 400 Hz inverter to supply the FDAI and synchro control transformers. Also... It is painted with a thick paint (I know... I've DONE THIS to products we made back at my old job)... Any trace of screws are well and thoroughly covered. I do want to pop it open at some point, but not if I risk damaging it in any way shape or form... So for now, I shall resist the urge, and just focus on getting it to work. i also gotta say, the pics don't do it justice... It really looks bigger in person. The visible portion of the ball, the aperture that it is exposed though, measures 3 inches in diameter (7.35 cm). That size quite literally doubles the width of the ball I have on screen! It's also QUITE visibly pleasant to look at. You don't EVER strain to see the numbers or markings. They are simply clear, and highly contrasting. I certainly still wanna see this project come to fruition. Not everyone can get their hands on one of these. Also, to an earlier post regarding tape gauges... If one were to go to a vinyl/screenprinting shop, I'd say price out a strip of vinyl from them, screen printed with the gauge. If you go with something on a clear base (not sure if you can do that or not), then you could make the tape wider than the display glass, and have an encoder strip on the side. That gets you your position feedback. To reset, roll to zero, detect index, and then count up and down as your values fluctuate.

My FDAI arrived in the mail on Thursday, literally MINUTES before I was leaving town to go to a robotics meet up that I have not been to for 5 YEARS... On a side note... another member... an Engineer named Bob... Hmm... Musta traded careers with Bill... He moved out of state 8 years ago, and has been half way across the USA since then... He was back in state for family stuff... and randomly decided to show up again, after 8 YEARS... at the same meeting I showed up to after 5! Talk about chance encounters... Anyway, I edited my synchro post earlier in this thread... He shared some interesting information with me. I may have been mistaken, and had been confusing some elements of synchro operation with resolver operation. What he told me suggests emulating synchros may actually be MUCH easier than previously anticipated... I need to only generate one 400 Hz sine wave, and then simply calculate 9 multipliers to that reference, and output the reference and the 9 derivative outputs... No phase shifting, just amplitude shifting... Nice... Anyway, I've not had time to do anything yet... but, you know... pics! Look at my ball, my ball is amazing! That ball turns smooth as butter! OHCRAPOHCRAP!!! Neilmon, you're getting mighty close to gimbal lock... Oh wait... Kerbals DID get an extra gimbal for Khristmas! The reason a Kerbal Pilot can hold vectors and nodes and such, is the Scientists and Engineers ask what direction "Z" and "M" are. Jeb says "You're kidding, right?" That Raytheon "chip in a can" has a date code of 1974! This puppy is 5 years older than ME! Anyway, I'll have a rotary switch that has several positions. I'll be able to select prograde, retrograde, normal, anti-normal, radial, anti-radial, node, anti-node, target, and anti-target, and that particular vector will then appear on the ball by way of the deflecting crosshairs. Might do two rotaries... one to select mode (grade, normal, radial, node, target), and a second switch for pro, and anti/retro. I have 3 flags on this unit that read OFF, LOC, and GS. maybe i can use LOC to indicate a target is LOCked? GS... It stands for glide slope. Any other ideas? I can tie the OFF to the inverter/amplifier that powers the unit. If that's not on, then OFF will be displayed, and my AC bus will have no voltage. The inputs show signal inputs for the glideslope pointer, which is the arrow not he left of the unit, right above the GS flag. That's an analog deflection meter, same as the two heading crosshairs. I'm considering using that one for *atmosphere. It's unobtrusive, and the divisions I think would work out well. Not sure if there is an input for the "fat T" shaped bit at the bottom, and that ball at the bottom, directly above the afore mentioned "T" is literally a fluid filled ball level. *I need the maneuver ΔV to display somewhere... I might use this for THAT purpose instead. Or I might just get another meter. Who knows...