stibbons

All good. I'm looking forward to seeing you post your own progress! As far as the Windows 10 thing goes, real life and other projects have been taking priority over this for the last few weeks, so I haven't really had much to do with it. Do check out the last few pages of discussion on the KSPSerialIO thread though. It looks like a lot of progress has been made, just needs more people to test and confirm it's all working.

I run on an i5-4690K and a GTX970 and have no problems with frame rates. We need more detail about your operating system, which driver and version you're using, and your logs. It may also be worth trying to see if you have the same issue on an unmodded installation.

[citation needed]

Very minor update. It looks like u8glib has all of the graphical primitives I need without extensive library hacking. I've started playing around with it for another project and am pretty keen to see how well it runs for complex graphics. That said, I've since found another use for the display I bought. So right now the display stuff is on hold. Do want to see what I can do about getting my controller running properly on Windows 10 and on Linux, but it'll be another week or two before I have time for it.

I only keep the most recent version, sometimes lagging a little after a new release. But I do have five separate installations across three computers (two dual-booting), covering Windows, OS X and Linux. CKAN to manage mods and git to back up and keep save files synced.

Action groups are designed to work with toggle inputs. They're only on while the appropriate bit in the ControlGroup is high, they can't be pulsed. If you want to use momentary buttons or similar you'll need to latch your inputs. I talked about some code I wrote to do that back in this post. Stage does just have to be a pulse. Pretty sure everybody does it by just sending the current state of the stage button, so their pulse is as long as they hold the button. But I strongly suspect pulsing it for a single packet will work too. There's been a bit for precision in MainControls since forever, but it's never been hooked up. I vaguely recall zitronen complaining about his attempts at it being too unreliable to ship. I haven't had much time to play with this plugin for a little while, but I wouldn't mind trying out the ides from this thread for that though. - - - Updated - - - You initially set the serial port speed to 38400, but then immediately set it again to 9600. I guess that's left over from previous LCD test code? Remove that second Serial.begin and you're probably good to go. But I'd check the rest of the LCD code you added to make sure there's no other debug stuff being printed to the serial port.

The first line, that I most commonly hear referred to as a shebang, specifies the interpreter to use to run the rest of the script. In this case, /bin/sh , the good old Bourne shell. After that, you're right. The script uses the 'cd' command (identical to cd in a windows command prompt) to change current directory to where KSP is installed. The third line executes KSP, adding an LC_ALL environment variable to the start. LC_ALL controls the locale, and setting it to C is a good universal default.

Heh, I chose that display because a) it has an RGB backlight and I'm a huge sucker for blinkenlights and littlebird had it in stock for overnight shipping. They're also pretty cheap, somewhere around twenty bucks a pop. I may just buy a display using another controller and put this one in the parts bin for a less demanding project.

I say we start with the asteroid redirect and then proceed straight to the final goal: stealing Phobos.

So glad you're back up and running. I wish it were easier to set Serial buffer sizes than hacking system library source code though. This week the graphic LCD I ordered to experiment with arrived. It's a little on the smallish side, but not too bad. But Adafruit's library for it is a lot slimmer than their other display libraries. I spent a little bit of time trying to port catmacey's external navball code but got a little bit discouraged when I realised the library currently doesn't have anything for drawing triangles. So updating the library to work with Adafruit-GFX-Library just got added to my todo list.

Try getting them to follow you with the EVA Follower mod.

Both the same controller, and that was my build. I had a pretty hectic few weeks trying to get it ready in time for Maker Faire, but it was a really awesome weekend. There's a pretty good chance I'll be taking my controller along for the open hardware miniconf at linux.conf.au in Geelong in February too. Come hang out at the open day if you're in Victoria.

Time warping for weeks and weeks with nothing happening just feels like wasted time to me. I know that it's a very arbitrary thing but I still don't like doing it. So I end up spending all of my time launching and maintaining stations and bases around the Kerbin system.

Nice work! I finally found the time to get my gaming rig dual-booting Windows 7 and 10, but you seem to have fixed it before I had a chance to be confused by the serial code. Any chance you care to share your code? I'd be happy to help test it on Windows 10, and I also have OS X and Linux boxes I'd be keen to give it a bash on. Would be nice to unify this and Marzubus' previous efforts.

Worst case, use the unix 'find' tool to find the KSP application bundle. Open a terminal and run find / -name KSP.app

Oh awesome, glad that helps. I floated that suggestion to Sputnix as well, and they said they'd give it a crack this week. Should hopefully have some confirmation soon.

It kind of depends on your hardware on the PC side. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Sending delta data packets sounds like a fun thing to try, but it complicates the protocol significantly. I do like the thought of eliminating floating-point jitter in the plugin rather than relying on arduino code to do it. A couple of other thoughts for increasing the refresh rate: * Bump the serial speed to 250000. Because of the way the Arduino generates clock pulses for serial data, that speed has much lower jitter and error rate than others. It's a popular trick in 3D printer firmwares for this reason. * Increase the serial RX buffer. Right now the arduino needs to do three or four Serial.read() calls to assemble a full KSPSerialIO data packet. I suspect that increasing the buffer to reduce the number of calls required will mean less load on the arduino. But I'm not sure yet.

Oh wait that's actually in the config file now? Nice. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll have to get Linux up and running on my gaming PC again and give it a try.

That sounds very similar to my experience on OS X. But my Mac machine is a 2013 Air with the slowest CPU - I turn all of the graphics settings way down and the Kerbal X still lags sitting on the launch pad. I just assumed it was too slow to play and went back to the slightly longer development cycle on my gaming rig. I did find that decreasing the serial port speed to 57600 helped with the dropped packet count some. Could be worth experimenting with the speed to see if that helps for you. I think that your root problem is explained by this section of the cross-platform plugin's README: That means your arduino is being hammered with 60 packets a second, whereas the default config file in current versions of the plugin sends 5 packets a second. When I get some time this week I'll dive back in to the plugin code and see if I can add a multiplier to the callback so it only sends every x refreshes. But apart from that I'm not sure if there's much else that can be done. :/

They're a pretty cheap solution if you need more than 2-3 amps. I'm planning on scrounging up another one for a string of neopixels that pulls 16A at full brightness. But for small projects it's definitely overkill. I only bothered because I needed a higher voltage for the motor. Otherwise a simple 5V power brick is plenty. Haven't tried to measure how much power it pulls. My back of the envelope calculation for the lights and displays came to peak of around 8 Watts. Average usage is much lower.

First serious attempt at an IVA-only mission to the Mun. Pretty straightforward focussing just on the navball and an occasional look out the window. An instrument Mun landing was nerve-wracking stuff.

Thanks. It's sadly not on my laser, I made them at my local maker space (obligatory Robots and Dinosaurs plug. if you're in or around Sydney check them out). - - - Updated - - - My day job is a system administrator, most of the code I write drives cloud-based infrastructure with a couple thousand instances. Coming home and counting bytes in order to program a real physical device is a very nice change of pace. Nope! It took me about three minutes to remove them all with a pair of side cutters. That said, all of the different voltages those wires carry are grouped together on the PSU PCB. You can see the black regions for each bus screen-printed on the right-most corner of the board in that picture. And at least on my board all of the wires in the same bus were under a single huge glob of solder. Probably could have desoldered the whole lot in much shorter time than you'd expect.

Hey mulbin, when you get a chance could you please update the picture of my controller in your first post? The current one was just after getting the hardware assembled, and it's come along a little way since then.

Today I set out to fix the bodgy power supply situation for my controller. The majority of the system runs at 5V, but the motor in the throttle slide needs a little more juice. I'd been running the system from a 9V wall wart for a long time, and when the display stuff was finished I'd planned on using a 5V boost/buck regulator to step that down for everything else. But the module I'd ordered from eBay was DOA. Time was short and I didn't have much option but to run up a quick and dirty power system using my original 9V power supply and a second 5V supply for the maker faire. It worked, but I wasn't happy about it, and kind of glossed over the power supply whenever anybody thought to ask. I have a couple of ATX PSUs spare though. They have 12V, 5V and 3.3V rails, and without knowing for sure the rating for my volume control motor, I figured she'll be right. So today I voided the warranty on a power supply. I needed one molex connector, so saved it, the rest of the wires were ruthlessly snipped off at the board level. The only one I needed was the green wire from the motherboard connector. That's the PS_ON pin of the motherboard connector. It needs to be pulled low to ensure the power supply actually switches on, so I just removed the circuit board from the base and soldered the green wire to the bank of ground connections. Put the case back together again (looking very bare with only a single connector coming out of it ), and was quite happy to find the fan spinning up when it was powered it. I'm too lazy to expose the back of the PSU through the enclosure, so I bought a panel-mount IEC socket. I grabbed one of the thousands of power cables I've accumulated, cut a short length from the IEC plug end, and wired it to my socket making a short panel IEC breakout. Mains cables have a standard colour code, and the back of the socket is clearly labelled with which connection needs to go where. But I still checked my wiring at least half a dozen times, and then asked somebody else at the maker space to double check my work before I applied power to it. 240V is not to be mucked around with. The final part was quickly drawing up and cutting a new back panel from 3mm MDF. Assembled everything, after carefully heatshrinking and taping up the mains terminals, and it was all good to go for installation. The other holes are for the display mode switch, and a hole for a panel-mount USB socket that's currently on its way from a Chinese factory. I had to use a keyhole saw to enlarge the hole in the back of the enclosure slightly, because I'm using up a lot more room on the back panel. But after that the replacement panel screwed in quite nicely. The switch on the back sets the display mode. On and off should be obvious. I wrote a separate demo mode just for the maker faire, with the expectation that I'd actually have a chance to leave it alone for a while. That mode just flashes random coloured lights across the annunciator panel while printing messages on the seven segment displays. Seemed like a fun hack to keep the display looking interesting while not actively playing the game. And then inside the PSU is just fixed in place with some double-sided tape. I used a spare molex line socket to break the 12V and 5V from the PSU out to my terminal block, and from there feed power to my two arduinos and the LED bus. I was still pretty nervous about powering everything on, my other project right now is getting a 3D printer up and running and last week I managed to short out its power, killing an Arduino Mega, controller board and Raspberry Pi in one fell swoop. But after some careful testing I hooked everything up and was very relieved when it all came back online first go. The PSU fan running in such a large hollow box sounds a lot louder than I was expecting. I may end up replacing it with a quieter one, or disabling it altogether and adding some other ventilation to the enclosure to move air through it.