stibbons

Stirring it will circulate what's exposed to the top as well. Taken to extremes, if you have another pot you can pour it from one to the other a few times to maximise the surface area and help conductive cooling.

And in actually-working-on-my-controller-again news, after a couple weeks off I finally got around to ordering new LEDs to replace the busted ones. Also picked up a little graphic LCD, I'll be playing with rendering attitude info on to it. Started trying to have a crack at adding prograde, radial, normal vectors to the KSPSerialIO data packet. Currently lost in a maze of twisty little quaternions, all different.

You're asking the wrong person. I vaguely recall talk of possibly adding another packet type on the off chance the current one fills, but that doesn't seem too likely in the medium term. And it's completely orthogonal to my still untested theory.

You have no idea how many times I tried to drag the view around on that video. (hint: 3. 3 times)

I know the plugin is having issues on Windows 10, and that'll need some deep plumbing in the serial classes to fix. Are you still having the same issue as in http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/66393-Hardware-Plugin-Arduino-based-physical-display-serial-port-io-tutorial-%2806-Jun%29?p=2105692&viewfull=1#post2105692 where your code won't receive anything but the sample sketch does? My slightly-educated guess is that that's because of the small serial buffer in the Arduino library. The Serial class uses a 64 byte buffer. Anything larger than that requires multiple reads, faster than data is coming in, otherwise the buffer is overwritten and you get a corrupt packet. The old release had a 189 byte data packet, a little under 3x the buffer size. The new release is up to 190-somethingorother, a bit more than 3x the buffer size so requiring a minimum of four reads to drain it properly. The example code that is doing very little apart from running the serial connection can keep up with that. But once you start adding more and more in, it becomes harder and harder to perform all of the reading that's required fast enough. This is just a theory, I haven't really run any of the numbers and have gone to some trouble to put in other safeguards to keep it from happening to me (separate arduino for writing to displays, lots of preemptive optimisation in the input handling). But I'd be curious to see if increasing your serial buffer size (by hacking the HardwareSerial library in the IDE using a guide like http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=334116.0 ) helps. Keep a close eye on how much memory your sketch is allocating while playing with the buffer sizes, and keep in mind that the Serial class allocates itself internal buffers as well. You'll probably only be able to afford 255 byte RX and TX buffer sizes on a Mega board.

Oh woah, you had your setup on display? Please tell me there's video, or at least some photos of it in action. I'd love to see it.

Step 1: Slap a Communotron and CommTech on every contract satellite I launch. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!

The multi function readouts were something I'd planned to do right from the start, and didn't come together until the very end. I'm going to rearrange all of the options soon, but apart from that I'm super happy with how they came out. I have the packet rate from the plugin down to 80ms, and use the default 38400bps baud rate. In general I don't notice any extra lag. The one exception is lights that react to controls on the board. Right now, I flip the brake switch on, that only sends a command back to the game, and some time later the game sends back a new packet with the updated brake state, and only then does the display module find out that it needs to turn the brake light on. That can occasionally lead to visible delays. It's almost definitely fixable by just broadcasting a new data packet on I2C when an input is changed. Just haven't bothered yet. My setup survived the maker faire very well. I need to glue the key lock switch in place thanks to kids yanking it around wondering what it does, and the clip I'd quickly attached for my notepad was pulled off. But apart from that it's fine. I didn't get to properly fly it until this week, and am quickly discovering that learning to rely on the readouts is almost as hard as building them.

Sorry, my day job is all Linux, I forget to use the right terminology elsewhere. The closest analogy is probably a Windows service, but something that keeps an icon in the system tray could also work for you.

You can send complex compound key combinations - if you've got your OS binding something to alt-shift-F6, then you can trigger it with an arduino. Here's a sketch I wrote for sending keyboard shortcuts to Chrome on OSX. The other option I'd look in to would be a python daemon running on your PC, talking to the arduino over a serial interface.

Dave interviewed me about it too. But that was after about a billion kids flew rockets with it, so I was a little wiped out.

I watched those late last night. The maker faire was really, really fun.

I also use a mix of dedicated Molniya orbits and supplementing contract satellites with remotetech relay capabilities for my Kerbin system relays. But yeah, achieving circular orbits is a pretty big pain. For synchronous stuff you're better off going with a slight eccentricity. As long as the orbital period is bang on six hours, you'll have a satellite that "wobbles" east-west from a surface perspective, but otherwise stays in the same place.

Very cool. Do you have any info handy on when it will be launching?

No. There have been a handful of satellites launched from the Woomera test range. The last was a UK satellite, Prospero X-3, in 1971. There are only a handful of Australian-owned satellites in active use right now, most recently the Optus communication satellites which I believe are all designed and built in the US.

You're right, that was over the line. But I can say that the CSIRO has gone through significant funding cuts over the last couple of budgets. There's just no money for a space program right now.

EDIT: I forgot the rules. Sorry.

In that case, I hope your friends had a fun time.

Yep! The Demonstrator got a lot of use, especially on Saturday afternoon. Very nice little ship, and a fun ride to LKO. Haven't yet seen any public pics of it on ascent though sorry. I had a few folk introduce themselves because we work for the same company and saw me write about this project on the internal wiki. And I had a few who saw some of the pictures I tweeted. I'm not sure if anybody explicitly mentioned stopping by because you recommended it. But in my defence I talked to a lot of curious people. EDIT: I'm also stibbons on twitter. My timeline and mentions include a lot of pics from the weekend. The @maasmuseum and @makerfaireSYD accounts have some pics too.

I'd been planning to, but it was a very very hectic weekend. It's Monday evening in Australia and I'm only just catching my breath. The weekend went really well, but nothing like what I was expecting. I prepped a save file with an ISS replica in Kerbin orbit, a small station built from Azimech's components in a low Mun orbit, with a couple of landers docked. And then added StormKat's all-in-one station in Duna orbit, and parked MajorJim's stock Curiosity replica on the surface of Duna near the face anomaly. I hear there were nearly 8000 people through the doors over the weekend, and there were only a few times I had less than about four kids eager to try the game out. Because of the sheer number of folk wanting a turn, I ended up sticking to KSC launches, some of them achieving a stable orbit, some suborbital, and quite a few going straight up until they escaped Kerbin. That let me give everybody five minutes or so with my controller, playing with the throttle slider and thumping the big red stage button. With that in mind, I mostly only used the smaller LKO orbiters people submitted here. Sorry about that. All of them performed really really well, and there was enough variety to let me guide many people in to space without dying of boredom. So thanks again! I did manage to find time for a couple other missions during quiet moments. Yukon0009's lander was great. A friend who'd never played KSP before undocked it from a 200km Mun orbit and sat it down on the surface with more than enough fuel to get back up and dock again. Quite a few people drove a rover around a big red planet and walked away grinning. Whenever somebody tried to tell me this was their favourite game and they play it all the time, I made them try to launch one of the bigger ships to a circular orbit without looking at the map screen. They mostly crashed, sorry. Thanks again for everybody's help. There was a lot of photos and videos taken, but I'm still trying to track them down. Anybody still interested in seeing those, as well as the footage from the two interviews I gave about KSP and my build, I'll be posting more updates in my controller forum thread.

This is great. Thanks all for your responses. I've tried out most of what has been posted here, will give the rest a quick bash tomorrow. Lots of fun stuff. I've put stations in orbit around Kerbin and the Mun. Will add StormKat's tomorrow, probably at Minmus although a Duna orbit station sounds like it could be fun too. After that I want to make sure each has a couple of landers docked, and will leave some vessels in orbit for transfers back and forth around the Kerbin system. It's great to have a much wider variety than I would have been able to knock together in a couple of days. The KerbalX link in your Space Bus thread seems to be incorrect. I did find it eventually though, and it looks like fun. Also managed to park a Bush Plane on the island runway - if I can fly it straight anybody can. I ran out of time tonight so haven't tried it yet. Looking forward to an update. That looks great too.

I struggled for quite a while for a good method for making my panels before, well, lifting ideas from the flight sim pit builder community. They veer towards realism whereas I was gleefully aiming at retro sci-fi, but time lurking on simpit forums is definitely time well spent.

I get the wanting to light stuff up (I'm doing a lot of that). But I suspect you can get a pretty good effect with white printing and sneaking in an overhead blacklight.

The brightness is mostly because of my camera phone. I swear it's nowhere near that bright in real life, but I am thinking about putting diffusers over the seven segments to dim it a bit further. I wanted to write things to the displays while the system was idle, so came up with a list of phrases that can be spelt out with seven segments. "launch it" is on the list, so is "crash it". Now that I think about it, there's nothing about landing. Um.