stibbons

Stop using softserial for comms between your arduino. It's slow, and the UART emulation is expensive and unnecessary. Try out SPI. I've never tried it between two arduinos myself, but seems easy enough. You should get much faster data transfer without unduly burning CPU cycles.

Yep, you can attach a winch and then treat the two vessels like they're docked (with a long, flexible dock). If you've never tried it before then you should really practice at KSC, but a winch and a couple of removable attachment points are all you need.

If you're modding, a great way to go would be the Kerbal Attachment System mod. Get either a small crewed lander or a crewed rover within a few tens of metres from that vessel, get the kerbal to take the winch from his vessel and attach it to the other vessel, and you then have control of both. EDIT: KAS will also let a kerbal on EVA attach a command seat to the top of that vessel, which they can then use to control it.

Absolutely fantastic progress so far. Nice work! I'm jealous that you were able to find those buttons with 6V backlights. I spent a long time looking around ebay, accidentally bought some that would only take 250V for the lights.

Hey zitronen, sorry I threw a bunch of code your way and then disappeared. Life got in the way there for a while. You're right, I didn't have a full understanding of how the new autopilot code is supposed to work. I did update the callback handler the plugin was using to the new 0.90 input chain, but that's minor at best. Glad you liked the other changes enough to merge them though! AND IT IS AWESOME. (ignore the forward/reverse directions being back to front in that video, it's what happens when you install the probe core in your unmanned rover upside down ) The new options are great for the other axes (and I love that zitronen's set defaults that work for most use cases). But I don't think they're ideal for the throttle. I agree that setting it to 1 is usually the best option if you have a hardware throttle. 1 is identical to the old enabled option - the plugin will always use the value sent by the arduino, and ignore keyboard input. My use case for the new options is the same pair of sticks that are in the above video. For general flight I use a USB joystick for rotation control, which has a little digital hat for translation. During docking maneuvres I use the sticks on my controller for translational control, but at the flip of a conveniently-located switch they can make rotational changes instead. I've docked with that setup a couple times, and it's also pretty awesome.

Seconding MKS. My career game uses that, extraplanetary launchpads, TAC life support, kerbal attachment system and karbonite to build wholly self-sufficient bases.

I don't use a grabber. Once your ship is closer than 2km away, you'll be able to switch to the stranded Kerbal and control it like normal. I just get to an intercept of 1000-1500m, then jetpack the stranded Kerbal to the ship.

I kind of want to try this with generators from modpacks now, like the Karbonite generator, just a little box that burns fuel and produces power.

I used to get four satellites in to synchronous orbit roughly 90 degrees apart, and then edit the save file to nail their semi-major axis down to minimise drift. Now I still use four satellites, but I throw them in to highly eccentric Molniya-style orbits 90 degrees apart. The chances of all three of the sats closest to KSC being out of view at any one time are not worth worrying about.

The current story is that I have a bag full of illuminated tactile buttons but they don't even stand proud of my console if they're mounted flush with the back. So I've got a spool of "natural" PLA coming next week and will start playing around with that for button caps.

I don't really have any useful progress to report on my panel this week. But I did note with interest that somebody finally got around to getting serial port access in Unity working on non-windows platforms. Will be very happy to go back to running KSP in Linux on my gaming machine. About the only other thing, and it's a pretty minor one, was starting to work towards 3d printing translucent button caps to go over some illuminated tac switches I'm planning on using for my displays. Pretty excited to start working on that.

A handful of the simpit builders I was looking at when I was figuring out how to get my panels built mentioned that Boeing uses Futura on their instrument displays. I had a quick play with that and liked the look enough to run with it.

Most of the panel hardware I've worked with so far wouldn't really be suitable for anything much thicker than 3mm. If you need to reinforce you'll still need much larger cutouts for mounting stuff in.

A four position joystick has four little microswitches in it. When you push the joystick up, one of those switches closes. Your keyboard does some multiplexing magic, but you don't need to worry about it. What you need to know is that the W key is just a switch. When you press it it shorts two contacts together. All you need to do is take the top off your keyboard, find the contacts the W key hits, and solder leads from those contacts to the up switch on your joystick. The exact same principle applies to momentary buttons for SAS, RCS, etc. You can build a pretty great controller just doing that. For displays, or for doing things like controlling toggle switches, you'll want to learn your way around an arduino. For that I'd start with a starter kit and a good book. - - - Updated - - - Oh, I forgot the most important part of building a controller. Start a thread here, and post lots of pictures in it. Love seeing how other people do this stuff.

This happened to me just last night, had to swap the SRB-KD25ks on my heavy lifter for BACCs. Didn't know there was a fix for it, thanks!

I've been using the USI Kolonization System parts with TAC LS for a while now. It's a pretty nice pack for building fully self-sufficient orbital and surface colonies.

That is one gorgeous panel. Little bit jealous right now.

Not with this plugin. I haven't seen anywhere that sort of control is exposed in the KSP API. But it should be a fairly simple matter to have an Arduino implement USB HID functionality. Your head tracker would end up emulating a mouse, and you could control movement in the IVA that way.

I had exactly the same problem with ATM the last time I installed AVP last week - white with red textures obscuring planets with atmospheres. Came down to ATM crashing during startup (I guess it was running out of memory) and corrupting the texture it was working on at the time, which ended up staying in the ATM cache. You can try poking around in the ATM texture cache and removing anything that looks like it might be related to clouds or atmosphere, and letting ATM regenerate them. I don't recall exactly which files were involved, sorry. Worst case, clear all files from the ATM cache and let it start up again. If it crashes during startup, delete the newest cached textures from the ATM cache and try again.

I'm keen to play around with this as soon as I revive the Linux install on my gaming rig. Nice work marzubus.

Interesting! I like the idea of using Firmata on the arduino side. If you're planning on continuing with this, you might like to consider writing your Processing side as an HTTP client and interface it with an existing mod like Telemachus? - - - Updated - - - Woah, nice work! I'll have a look and see how this runs on Win, OSX and Linux soon.

I designed them with a view for fine translational control while doing things like docking. But they're also wired up for rotational control at the flip of a toggle. And they always send wheel control commands. The rover driving turned out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be. But I'm really looking forward to using them when I start building an orbital station.

The attitude control panels are wired up, and I spent some time this week fixing a few things that were bugging me about the KSPSerialIO plugin. End result, this evening I am testing rover control with my new sticks.

This branch has everything I've done on the plugin to date: the configuration changes to keep the plugin from stomping on keyboard input, using the new autopilot handlers, and extensions to the control packet for rover control: https://github.com/phardy/KSPSerialIO/tree/new-autopilot Most of it is working fine, but I'm not able to get the wheels working yet. Hoping I've just done something dumb. Doing some more testing on it now, hoping to have it finished tonight. After that, I was going to take the liberty of updating the arduino demo code for the new control packet and adding it to the repository as well. EDIT: Turns out the wheels weren't working because I hadn't turned them on in the config file.

It works great in 0.90 right now, yes.