stibbons

Thanks for the speedy update for 0.90. I had to unplug my controller dabbling with the beta the other night, and it was awful.

If I get some time over the holiday break there's a good chance I'll get myself a small OLED display for my controller for Christmas. That will definitely end up using a second arduino as a dedicated display driver.

It's not impossible, but almost certainly impractical. I will admit to taking the easy way out on this one, with a pot on the panel. But honestly, I think your best solution would be a second arduino, communicating with the PC over a second serial connection (stick a USB hub in your enclosure) and with your primary arduino over SPI or similar. Advantage of that is that talking to your second serial port is very simple with whatever you like.

No pencils? How do you write things down?!

Nobody else commented here, so I will; the zip is fine. I moved from manually installed to the CKAN release as soon as it was up. :-) Thanks for the extra effort, zitronen and hakan. Now to think about how to make ckan support configuration files, so my changes don't get overwritten during an upgrade.

Actually, the hardest part is breathing through the helmet.

This is my attempt to build a KSP simpit, using Arduino microcontrollers and the KSPSerialIO plugin. It started off small and is currently a lot less small. Current status 20160815: I've been slowly refining my current build. The altitude and vertical speed analogue gauges are now hooked up and working (it only took two years). I have a digital navball that shows current vessel attitude, and have been banging my head against the KSP API trying to work out how to extract the other orbital vectors in a format I can easily render on the ball. I've also started work on machining a new enclosure, this will be more compact and more streamlined and made out of MDF and aluminium composite. It looks awesome in my head, but progress is hampered by my inability to drive a CNC well. Build log entries 20141210 20141230 20150103 20150107 20150107 (2) 20150110 20150116 20150124 20150626 20150629 20150701 20150708 20150711 20150715 20150718 20150721 20150725 20150731 20150801 20150802 20150803 20150806 20150807 20150808 20150812 20150813 20150905 20151101 20151105 20151107 20151115 20151122 20151130 20151207 20151231 20151231 (2) 20160111 20160208 20160710 20160714 20160815 Source code and hardware designs My git repository contains almost all of the details for this build. Design and implementation documentation. Part lists. Source code for the two four arduino microcontrollers. Schematics and board layouts for the printed circuit boards. 2D design files for the laser-cut panels. All under a couple of different open source licences, check LICENSE.md in the source tree. My documentation assumes some basic knowledge of Arduino and digital electronics fundamentals. I didn't bother drawing up schematics for the protoboards containing three switches with pulldown resistors, for example. Hopefully anybody who's completed a few Arduino tutorials or sample projects will get by. First build log This is still very much a work in progress, and there's some obvious controls missing just because I haven't yet figured out the best way to lay them out. These ones got done first because they were the simplest and easiest to lay out, and were a good chance to refine my method for producing the faceplates. After preparing hardware for a few of the sections, I threw together a quick mounting from 10mm perspex and a few M6 bolts. This let me lay down the basic firmware, and the panel's now in active use even though I'm still tweaking it. Because honestly, it's hard to go back to shift and control after that throttle. The panels are made from 3mm perspex, that I've painted and then etched/cut with a laser cutter. There's a longer writeup of how I'm doing those on my blog. I'm using an Arduino Mega 2560 to drive it, with a Mux Shield II to multiplex the inputs, because I was too lazy to string together my own multiplexer. On the software side, I'm using zitronen's KSPSerialIO mod to get telemetry from the game and send commands. My Arduino just communicates with the game over a USB connection. I'm trying to group the controls and readouts in to logical panels. Right now I'm designing attitude control panels, with a couple of small joysticks for translational control as well as toggles for SAS and RCS and strength adjustment. The other section in progress right now uses a couple of analogue gauges for vertical velocity and radar altitude, intended as a landing aid. Further down the line I've got plans in the works to add displays, and then I can start thinking about the size and shape of the final enclosure. Probably. EDIT: This is the panel for managing descents, with the gauges I'm planning on using. It still has the paper backing on the other side, making the lettering a little harder to read in this pic. The scales will both be logarithmic, with the vert speed covering -100 to 100 m/s, and the radar alt going from 0-10000. The switch will toggle between the radar alt showing metres or kilometres. Drawing the scales has been a big challenge, and trying to write efficient code for dealing with logarithms on an Arduino without an FPU even more of a challenge.

Hey hakan, have you updated the CKAN entry? KSPSerialIO is the one and only remaining mod in my loadout that's still installed manually, so I could test the new version. :-)

Slightly related, I'm watching NASA's stream of the Orion launch right now, and thought it was interesting how the Delta IV Heavy uses three identical engines but throttles the centre one back during launch.

I've been experimenting with thrust-limiting SRBs recently too. My standard light lifter for probes and things has four SRBs, and depending on the payload they're throttled at 100%/50% or 50%/25%. An ideal flight for those things sees me launch with the liquid engine throttled down to zero, going to 100% as the first SRB stage flames out and then easing back. By the time the second SRB stage flames out I'm in to my gravity turn and going full throttle anyway. Works fairly well.

I noticed that bug with the throttle input last week. Didn't get a chance to test it again until this evening, but with two ion-powered space probes sitting on the launchpad the throttle is behaving the way it should.

As long as all the simpit threads are in the same place I'm happy. But I'm not sure the Invention tag is the right one. Could we please get a dedicated tag at least?

I think that occasionally calculating SOI with Amelia's code is preferable to resending it every 25 milliseconds. All I need to do now is figure out how to calculate velocity vectors.

Glad you guys like it. :-) The motorised slider is from SparkFun. The motor needs 9V, so I had to put a little bit more effort in to powering the panel, but is very simple to drive. Quick question about the control packet, am I right in assuming TX TY and TZ are translation controls? I may have just ordered a couple of translation joysticks.

Well, it's taken a few months of mostly procrastinating and scheming, but I've finally got a few sections of my control panel wired up and working properly.

I've got an RGB LED that's changing colour based on stage fuel, with flashing red when it's out. And you're right, asparagus staging throws off the stage calcs somewhat. Still useful for upper stages though! Hey, if it's an autopilot that you've build and programmed yourself it's totally legit! Especially if you're able to solve the asparagus thing neatly. Maybe by watching for sudden deceleration changes... argh stop making me want to implement this!

It's looking great so far and I really love this idea and will probably borrow it. Have you considered changing the staging and RCS lights when you run out of fuel/monoprop?

I've been making very slow progress on my controller. But finally found some time last week to get the first few panels cut, and this week I wired up the staging interface and had a quick stab at writing some software for it. It even mostly works!

Oh man. Every time I think I have my layout sorted out you go and release something new and awesome. Now I've got to go and buy a graphical LCD and redo *everything*. ;-)

Adding some duct tape to the fender would be both Kerbalish and realistic.

I am, quite simply, using a key switch in series with my stage button.

I haven't tried kOS in Linux yet (have been playing KSP in Windows for a little while for various reasons). But a little while ago RemoteTech had the same sorts of problems that you're getting reported here - keypresses in kOS windows also being interpreted as general key commands. From memory, they were ascribing it to weird Unity behaviour, and happening to all mods in Linux. Probably not much help, sorry. But might give you a little more to look in to?

When that happened to me I had just enough fuel to lift off and get a low orbit around the Mun. So, back at KSP I took an identical craft, slapped a Stayputnik probe core on top, and sent it up unmanned. Did a rough intercept, sent Jeb on a 20km spacewalk from his stricken vessel to the rescue ship, then turned it around and burned hard for home.

My career save is "Jeb Kerman is a steely-eyed missile man"

Did you mean that you're seeing torque on your vessel even with engines and SAS off? In that case, make sure that you don't have any parts clipping through each other.