NeoMorph

I think that the LV-N is all about dV and fuel efficiency... but above all it rewards PATIENCE. The long burns are easily done with MJ and/or remote tech. I love setting a ship on a long burn and then doing what mission control does (go get a coffee?) while waiting to see the result of a burn.... though waiting to see what the LV-N has pushed you into takes time it does reward your patience by saving fuel.

"AVAST YE KERBALS... Time to be walkin ye gangplank and be fallin through that thar hole in ye world!"

What the.... lol. Did he melt?

I've got one idea.... It's called the eggbot... in this case it is the ostrich eggbot as I want to make bigger versions as well. To get the markings I will paint the item in the base colours... ie black and white as it is an Apollo version or maybe the orange and blue for a terrestrial version like KSP is currently using (they made the mistake of looking at airplane attitude indicatiors). I then paint over the black and white sphere with masking paint and then put it into the Eggbot with an engraving bit instead of a pen. I then draw all the markings on the sphere. I then spray paint the markings by covering the whole sphere black and white (but the opposite to the base.. ie the black side I will paint white while the white side I will paint black. Now comes the tricky bit. While the paint is slightly tacky I gently tease the masking paint layer away... leaving the paint markings behind. Black markings on white and vice versa. An alternative method is going to be making the ball in quarters on a 3D printing machine. I have one KSP guy working on the prototype for that as well. It's early days yet but I have seen a test piece he printed off and it looks very nice as the material ends up being a lot tougher than the polycarbonate spheres I was using. _____________ New Stepper Motor Arrives I had some good news this morning as well. The new Nema 17 stepper I ordered the other day arrived. So now I have the controller AND the stepper to test. I just need to work out some figures as it is only a 2.8V motor instead of the 12V ones I was using before. I need a better PSU as the 5V one I was testing with was overheating as it was drawing too much current.... BUT IT WORKED GREAT so I will be ordering two more. Another thing I will have to think about is weight as the motor is rather hefty. I had a sleep this afternoon (as I had been up late into the night working on the design for another part of the system) and came up with a way to both balance the internals AND control both axes. I will try to draw it up later on today and publish the pictures here in the next day or two.. Edit: UGH!... Impulse buy of this stepper may have been a mistake. I was looking for a high torque which means that this thing draws 1.6A per winding. Get two steppers working and it is going to be a possible 4 x 1.6A which means 6.4A which is WAY beyond what the card can handle (it is supposed to handle 3A peak). Looks like this stepper is going towards my CNC unit lol. Oh well, you live and learn.

Shortly after that he fell through the ground and started "Journey To The Center Of The Mun". You've heard of the Man In The Moon... well now it's The Jeb In The Mun. Jeb is currently bouncing around the Center of the Mun and there is no rescue possible... Where is Arne Saknussemm when you need him? Oh yeah... DEAD!

Not photoshopped. Just added the speech bubbles and cropped a bit. I think that glitches like these just add to the fun you can have in this game. It just makes me giggle when it's Jeb who seems to get the worst of it (and yeah, it is Jeb that is missing his body in this picture).

Well good news... I will be building a new test rig this weekend after my new V2 motor drivers from AdaFruit arrived this evening. Adafruit Motor Shield V2 for Arduino - Each daughterboard controls 2 stepper motors which is why I need two daughterboards (for the 3 Axis) As it runs on I2C it means that the input/outputs of the Arduino are fully free to be used for other things, like the various indicators I will have on the Nav Ball. The needles for the pitch, roll and yaw (error from selected angle and rate levels) will be controlled by another I2C board by AdaFruit... the 16 channel Servo Controller Board. Adafruit 16-Channel Servo Driver for Arduino - Each servo can drive a single meter This will control the 6 needles for the Nav Ball and will have another 10 outputs that I can use for other meters such as fuel levels, battery power left etc. THIS WILL BE A OPEN-SOURCE "FREE TO ANYONE" DESIGN Once I find a control system I am happy with I will finalise the design for the nav ball's hardware. Up to now I have gotten systems working but haven't been fully happy with the performance. I will also need to work out a foolproof calibration and holding system. Once that is all done along with the software to drive it and then it will be made available to the community... free of charge. You will be able to make your own and improve on my design. My only limit is to not sell the stuff for a profit. This should be a community project. The whole purpose of using readily available Arduino boards is to reduce the need to buy more expensive purpose build boards. I'm talking about what has happened in the Flight Sim Community. There is a whole bunch of snobbish players who pay ridiculous sums for their system and look down on those who try to make their sim on a budget. I remember talking about using recycled materials and was pretty much shunned by this one site lol. Now ready built boards are fine but if you want to expand on what you have and include custom hardware/software then it is a bit harder to do, let alone there being only a minimal number of suppliers selling the things. The philosophy behind my system is that you can readily expand the system. You could easily have 50+ meters attached to this current system. The only custom PCB I will be making is the rotary contact that is necessary for connecting wires to a rotating object. Rotational Contact Plate... AKA Record Player I've still not decided on whether to have the brains on a Mega or a plain Uno. The Mega has better memory and more outputs so that is tempting... but I am wondering if I will just make this Nav Ball system on a Uno to see if it will run on a cheap microprocessor. If I could tell you guys how much money I had already spent on this project, getting parts from all over the world, I think your jaws would drop. Still, it's actually fun trying to do something other people have said couldn't be done. And to think I started off only wanting a joystick interface heh. John (NeoMorph)

Project has now been screwed by Apple... iOS 7 came out the other day and totally trashed my project planning App on my iPad. I was making do with the iPhone version but that crashed as well tonight. All the details of what I had planned and my ideas are now stuck in a file and the App just crashes when you start it. The mobile App (iPhone) does the same thing but that throws up an "Auto Recovery" dialogue that gives me a choice of saving my work or cancelling. Hit save... crash to desktop. Hit Cancel and what do we get.... crash to desktop. Ugh! The company that makes the App say they are working on a fix but for now I'm stuck trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing and all the project notes are stuck in the file lol. Oh and to top it off I blew up one of my arduinos today when a wire came loose from the 12v PSU and shorted the main board out. I bought spares so have about 9 more Unos and a couple of Mega 2560's to work with.

I've also ordered some new adafruit stepper controllver boards (the V2 model) that runs on I2C which means that instead of my distributed system (needing more than one arduino) I can actually run the whole instrument panel off of one. The option to run it from extra arduino's is still possible so if running too many meters, gauges and indicators slows the system down I can still expand as needs be. In fact the one part of the project (the DSKY) will need a dedicated system but will still link to the central brain board. This means that the system will still only need one lan cable to connect to the system. It will be cool when it is finished to link to someone in another country and watch their ship control my instruments.

Yup... but that would only have two axes of movement. The Apollo/KSP nav ball has three which makes it a challenge. This is what a normal avionics nav ball looks inside... Notice that the ball is mounted in the C clamp in a left/right config. In an Apollo/KSP nav ball the C clamp holds a fixed disk in the up/down configuration and then has an extra axis added by going through the centre of the disk and then a hemisphere added either side of the disk. It was that third axis that really stumped me for a long while. So as you can see, they are built quite differently. It's like comparing a Car to an Aeroplane in fact.

Yay, forums are back... Well here is a stumper... the core systems in the brains were working flawlessly (and fast)... but for some reason the motor controlling the sphere axis keeps cutting out. I don't know what is doiing this but I need to find out what is causing it pronto. I've just ordered some new stepper motors to try out. Hopefully they will fit into the new smaller sphere and have a more reliable state.

So someone thought that having a thread would get more views than a blog so I thought, what the heck... For those who don't know what this is it is me and a couple of others who are working to get a real KSP nav ball made... but made in the image of the the Apollo Flight Director Attitude Indicator (or FDAI). This will be part of the Hardware Interface Project (HIP) that will encompass ways and means of building real instruments for your KSP sim. I will be releasing EVERYTHING open source so you can rip it apart and change it as long as you give a credit to where it began is all I ask. So to start... what does the FDAI look like... well it looks like this... The housing is about six inches high by six inches wide by eight inches deep which gives you some idea how big the thing is. As I don't have space rated engineering tools I think my case is going to be a LITTLE bit bigger. Working out how the ball worked took a while... until we realised the ball isn't actually a ball at all but instead it is a central stationary disk (stationary in the horizontal axis that is) and a bar through it which is mounted the two hemispheres that make it look like a ball. So currently I am working on a prototype to check out how it works... Here is a picture of my prototype and how it is bigger than the final version that I have planned. I am using a larger version to prototype with so that it is easier to work with. The smaller ball on the left is what the final hardware will have to squeeze into. I will be using different gears for that. The size of the motors which drive the axis from inside the ball are tiny for what they move... but with the miniature gearbox they have quite a lot of torque for their size. They are rated at 12v but they even move the sphere with no problems at 3v. For further info on my blog go to http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entry.php/936-Hardware-Interface-Project-%28HIP%29 - From now on I will be posting updates on here and include more detail in the blog itself. Hope you like it...

One thing that I keep wondering about is the shape of your craft. KSP doesn't seem to take this into account when aerobraking. I made a ship with big aerobraking inflatable modules (like in the 2010 movie) but it didn't make any difference if I did or if I didn't inflate. The path was identical.

So it's been a while since I built prototypes of any sort so I am getting back into the saddle... and keep falling off lol. My problem is gearing. The kit I have isn't that... accurate when drilling. I really need to get a better pillar drill tbh. The problem is the axles are either too close together and end up binding or they are too far apart and have horrible slack. I've been cheating and having the main axle fixed and then the other gears are on slide paths so that I can move them in or out and then tighten them down. I miss my old rock solid pillar drill that I had at my old place. That with my small XY table meant that I could get gear axles perfect first time. Now it's cheat city lol. Anyone have any suggestions when building gear trains?

I use the same (but you missed out HN for thrust forward and back). Docking mode is... redundant imho. Having to shift in and out of docking mode just to kill rotation when your RCS isn't quite balanced right is crazy. Using normal mode plus the IJKLHN buttons means you have FULL control of your ship without having to switch modes. When I first tried docking mode it made docking sooooooooo darned fiddly that I just wanted to give up... the Scott of the Manley persuasion pointed out that the translation controls are active all the time on the IJKLHN buttons and I was like "OMGYES"... You just have to be able to control a ship with both hands... That COULD be tricky for some people but if you have played any console game you have been training in two handed controlling for a while. Yup... I so disdain docking mode that I assign some stupid key shift so that I don't accidentally enter docking mode (which I did on one launch... the results weren't pretty). Docking Mode... or as I like to call it... Crashing Mode.

4/10 Mind you my memory is kind of shot... Anyone seen where I put my bearings?

The secret to docking is when you get close (ie less than 2km) you zero out your relative velocity and then aim towards the target and burn... then when you are getting closer but off target you zero relative velocity again and then burn towards the target again. The secret really is relative velocity. Oh and putting your camera in Chase View. Oh yeah and balancing your payload's RCS system (I wrote a tutorial to do that). Check my sig for tutorials on various stuff.

I was expecting the new munar hills and valleys to make it next to impossible to land right way up but instead I found that you just have to plan your landing is all. Use robotic probes to survey the area and then and only then do you send a manned (Kerballed?) mission. Not lost a Kerbal on the Mun that way (and I did lose some in previous iterations of the Mun).

Welcome to the Space Addicts... May your boosters never fail. And always remember that if they do fail... ADD MOAR BOOSTERS!

Sounds like a translation problem to me (that's translation in the language instance and not translation in orbital mechanics instance - English sure is weird). See, I'm an even bigger nerd heh

Actually the staff has said they are not going to redo the physics... they are actually going to ADD the physics (because it sure as hell ain't there at the moment heh). In the meantime, you don't have FAR to go for a phyx.

I was wondering who would make a LADEE.... Did you do the 2.5x slingshot to get to the Mun though?

We sooooo need an asteroid belt with at least some Ceres sized planetoids. Hey, if newbies get a fit about not being able to land on them we could then say they are suffering from " 'Roid Rage ".

A few Jebs in alternate dimensions slipped through into your KSP dimension is all... Meanwhile.... this bug is really annoying and one of the reasons why I tend to save every few minutes and after every major event. The duplicates could be down to a symmetry bug that keeps appearing. I've never had multiple command pods though... Had numerous booster segment though.

Didn't know that Goddess. I kind of like the simplicity of ProjectRho... Makes me think of the classic boys scifi... Anyone remember Tom Swift? Oh and the reason I ended up there was that I was looking for pictures of the translation control handle... and ended up thinking "This is perfect for teaching newbies what translation control actually is."