KSP controller Ideas

[HighFructose]

So after seeing @richfiles, and @stibbons controllers, I've started thinking about maybe (key word maybe) making one of these things. Bear in mind that I have no experience with arduino, or anything other than wiring motors and lights to batterys.

Here are my basic ideas. Please tell me if some really aren't possible.

1. Kindle fire for streaming navball from Telemachus
2. 7 segment displays for velocity, altitude, apo/periapsis
3. Joysticks for rotation/translation
4. Toggle switches for SAS, RCS, and etc
5. keypad for action groups, maybe a gutted computer numpad
6. Stage button, one of those buttons with the clear cover for abort action group
7. Master caution, like when my ship reaches critical temperature
8. I don't know if this is possibe, but a terrain alarm, with a button that would light up and yell "terrain!" at you, if the ship is under a certain altitude, going above a certain speed
9. throttle lever
10. ???

 

I might add more to this list, remember that this is all in my head, and I don't know all that much about electronics, so keep that in mind. The main problem about this is money, as I'm not an adult, and I don't have a job. I would love to make this dream a reality, but we'll see...

[stibbons]

5 minutes ago, Scout1218 said:

I don't know if this is possibe, but a terrain alarm, with a button that would light up and yell "terrain!" at you, if the ship is under a certain altitude, going above a certain speed

I'm doing something similar to this already, the terrain alarm goes off if your radar altitude is below a given threshold and vertical velocity is negative (you're going down).

The important thing for a build like this, I find, is to start small. Focus on just one of your wishlist items, and see it through to completion. You may like to start with the first, because if you've already got the tablet it's probably the cheapest option.

After that, buy yourself an Arduino and a few components, and work towards just one simple little component at a time. It's easier to fit it in to your budget that way. And I find it much easier to stay motivated to extend an existing system when I'm able to see how much progress I've made on finished and working parts.

[HighFructose]

Ok, thanks for your input! I was planning on definitely spreading out the purchasing of the components. I'm thinking a modular setup might be the way to go here, or something that is easily expandable.

By the way, your project is really awesome. That project is really what inspired me to start thinking about creating this controller.

Edited August 7, 2017 by Scout1218

[HighFructose]

Which arduino board would be best for a project like this? I'm thinking the Uno, but maybe the Mega is better.

[monstah]

I have spent a long time cobbling out together an I/O expander for my Uno, only to buy a Mega and not have to worry about not enough pins anymore. Also, more memory for your programs.

I strongly suggest it.

[HighFructose]

Perfect, I will be looking for mega starter kits then, also, just tried to use Telemachus (used the 1.3 port by @mikelikes, (https://github.com/mikelikes/Telemachus/releases/tag/v1.5.2-ksp1.3) and it connected to my computer, but I couldn't figure it out for my Kindle. Also, does anyone know of a 1.3 port for Houston? (https://github.com/tcannonfodder/houston) because I want it for the navball. As far as I know, basic Telemachus doesn't have a navball, and that is what I need it for. Also, I'm looking for toggle switches, and I'm not sure what type to buy, I'm thinking on/off ones, but I'm not sure at all. 

I also found perfect buttons for the master caution and terrain: https://www.adafruit.com/product/491 it's 30mm, I can put a label on it, and I can change out the LEDs to a different color. 

for the throttle, I would like to use a t-bar fader, but I can't find one on Amazon for cheap. Anyone know of other solutions for a throttle?

 

EDIT: I've found this mega starter kit, seems like it's good enough to get me going, and I can use some of the parts on he actual controller.

https://www.amazon.com/SunFounder-Project-Starter-Tutorial-Mega2560/dp/B00D9NPP1E

not sure if it's good brand, but seems alright.

Edited August 7, 2017 by Scout1218
Mega kit

[Freshmeat]

If you don't mind the extra waiting time, Ebay is a lot cheaper for parts. Beware of import taxes though, and if you want to get serious, it will be expensive no matter what, a little at a time. I think I have spend around $150-$200 on stuff related to this project over the last couple of years, starting from absolutely nothing but woodworking tools and basic knowledge of electricity. When I started, I just threw a rotary pot unto an Arduino to get a throttle. Then I sort of just kept going from there. T-bar fader can be done with a slide pot, I recall someone showing it on the forums (probably fan works).

I bought an Uno first, but had to change to a Mega, and can warmly recommend it. Also, unless you have a standalone numpad already, I would recommend against gutting a keyboard. The wiring is embedded in some form of plastic sheet, and the num keys are not on a separate circuit. I use a keypad from an old desk telephone, but have begun wiring up a push button based keyboard for better responsiveness. For action groups toggle switches work better. Both @stibbons' and @zitronens plugins are designed with toggle switches in mind. I use cheap ones like these, but these look better. Shop around.

Are you sure you need a button for the alarm? A deeply set LED could do if you don't need to push it, and comes at a few cents. You can throw warnings for almost any conditions you can think off, I have low fuel, low charge, low altitude, high velocity (context sensitive) and high temperature. Arduinos talk a dialect of C, but programming can be learned as well.

[HighFructose]

First off, thanks for the input.

I'm into commercial aviation and I would like to have a button I could press to turn off the alarm, like on commercial aircraft, I'm thinking of doing a little anonciator panel that would just be LEDs, but I want these two to be special.

I will defiantly start small and make it better, possibly a modular approach to the panel.

 

EDIT: I was just using cardboard to make a rough diagram of how much space I'll have, and I ran into a problem. The kindle will be behind a bracket that covers the bezel of the screen, and I can't go inside and turn on the kindle via the on switch. My genius idea is to use a toggle switch that interrupts the micro USB's cable that goes to the charging port, so I can turn on the kindle by "plugging it in" since whenever it receives power, it turns on.

EDIT EDIT: does anyone know where I can find amber colored 7 segments? They're used in commercial cockpits but they are pretty much nonexistent, exept for SINGLE DIGIT ones for $23! I guess I might have to go with blue, I guess it would be easier to find anyways.

 

Edited August 7, 2017 by Scout1218

[HighFructose]

Okay, I've been starting to think about what my short term and long term goals should be, since I won't do it all at the same time. Ive split the project into 3 phases so far.

First phase: Navball on Kindle fire, SAS, RCS, brake, gear, lights, and Stage and abort. This will also include a potentiometer as a throttle. This will be assembled on a basic wood platform probably wired on the breadboard, so basically the prototype phase. I'm going to need to get the arduino in this part too.

Next will be the building of the panel itself. this phase will be the alarms, and the action group keypad, and the 7 segments.

Last will be the finishing touches with the throttle, joysticks, and wiring everything onto protoboards, or I might go get some custom PCBs, but I'm not sure into planning this phase.

Phase one shopping list:

Spoiler

1. Toggle switches: I'm thinking of using these as suggested by @Freshmeat, since they're cheap, and I can always change them later on.
2. Arduino Kit, I'll probably use the one from SunFounder, here. It comes with  parts I can use in my project e.g, the potentiometer, and the reviews are good.
3. Stage button: I want to use a rectangular shaped red button, but I might use a big red "mushroom" button
4. Abort switch: I'm not sure what they are called, but I want one of the ones with a clear hinged cover. I call them "missile buttons" and I can't find a button and a cover, but I can find the cover itself, and the button separately. Hey @Sputnix, mind sharing the links for those abort and stage buttons you have?
5. Seems to be all for now, but I might add more to Phase one as I go, but I'm close to that $50 mark, might go over.

With these phases, I'm going to try to keep the cost of each expansion around $50, but I'll go over that probably. There's only 2 weeks till school so I'm not sure if I should start this summer, and get some stuff done in phase 1, or wait until next summer. I guess I could do it on the weekends too, but I don't know yet. 

 

[richfiles]

Can you settle on yellow LEDs? On ebay, there seems to be quite a few lots of "yellow 7 segment LED" displays to be found. Me personally, I went with green for an Apollo look, but I dig going for amber for the aviation look too. My keyboard is 100% custom, with blue and grey "aviation" themed keys (It's the "Danger Zone" key cap set), and amber LED sublighting. I actually did spend the extra on legit amber LEDs, vs yellows, so I know what you mean with he price difference. These days, amber is something of a "specialty color". It doesn't feature the same level of mass manufacturing red, yellow, green and blue have, thus the slightly higher costs.

Also, I was the one that posted the idea for a homemade T-Bar lever, using a slide potentiometer. I'll drop the diagram below. It's pretty straight forward. the one non obvious element is the bottom is two horizontal segments, with he t-bar lever sandwiched between. Tightening the bolt at the pivot adds resistance to the lever. You could drop some nylon washers in there to serve as friction bearings.

It's also very easy to make this with a rotary style potentiometer. For rotary, you just mount the handle to the potentiometer shaft, but you must take care to support the shaft, or the pot will be stressed if you apply lateral forces to the lever. This home made t-bar below is not mine, but was posted on my build thread, and I really like the design, mainly cause it's SIIIIIMPLE! 
It's just a piece of angle stock with a slot cut for the lever, a few mounting holes drilled into the top for actual mounting to the panel, and a mere three drill holes (4 if your pot has an indexing pin) in the bottom angle for mounting the pot and the t-bar pivot support. The pivot support consists of two parts. One part has slots for adjustment and mounting to the angle stock, and holes to clamp down the other part, which serves as the top half of a clamp. This adds resistance to the lever, giving it a better feel. A nylon ring serves as the friction bearing.

I also concur with the suggestion to go big from the start... Don't even bother with the Uno, go for the Mega. I'm already at the point where I know I'll have multiple Arduinos, each working their own subsystems. A Mega will be at the heart of it all.

I like the idea of your terrain alarm. I'm doing something a slight bit different on my build, though I'm not against implementing an idea not unlike yours as well. On my instrument panel's "DSKY", there will be different LED readouts for things like Apoapsis, Periapsis, Time To Event, etc... I have some nice rectangular annunciator LEDs that will serve as indicators for different functions, states, and alarms. You can actually snag some very nice ones off ebay. To be honest, I have a pile of yellow ones I'll never use... Salvaged 'em from surplus medical equipment... Not a green one in the lot!  I've literally been drilling out the leads and LED dies from the back and epoxying other colored LEDs in place of the original LEDs... Anyway, kinda went on a tangent there... What I'd like to do is keep a set of constants for each body in the Kerbal system (plus any planet packs I install, such as OPM) stored in the Arduino handling the digital LED readouts and annunciator LEDs. The stored constant will be either A: the edge of the atmosphere, or B: the highest point of the terrain (for bodies with no atmosphere), or C: The lowest altitude where thermals are survivable. Any time Periapsis is lower than one of these values, I want a chime or tone to ping, and a red "LOW" annunciator LED will light next to the Periapsis indicator. It simply means that your orbit is no longer stable, and could become sub-orbital, either due to the potential for terrain collision, aerobraking reducing your periapsis even further, or eminent thermal destruction. It simply indicates that you had better intend to either land or burn if you don't take action.

Other annunciators I want to support would include Chutes Unsafe/Risky/Safe indicators. I'm not certain if that'll make it into the packet, or how hard it would be to actually add it, if it's not.

An actual terrain alarm is relatively basic enough. You need a variable to represent wether you have silenced the alarm or not. Pressing silence with no alarm active should do nothing. Just monitor your radar altimeter value and your vertical velocity value. If your vertical velocity is greater than a set downward amount, and the radar altimeter drops below a set point, and the silenced value is not set, then you activate your alarm and indicator outputs. Pressing a silence button would set the silence flag to true, silencing the alarm, and keeping it from being retriggered. The LED indicator would stay lit as long as the vertical velocity and radar altimeter both exceed safe limits. If you go into safe limits, the indicator should extinguish, and the silence flag be reset.

I think... 

[HighFructose]

Wow, I'll definitely look into yellow displays. And I'll see about the slide potentiometer as well. And that is basically exactly what I was thinking for the terrain alarm, I do want to put a speaker that does the whole "terrain, terrain!" Thing as well. I think arduino can control speakers with a sheild, but I don't even have one yet! So I don't know really.

I see your typeface for the labels is mostly Futura, but I don't want to spend $30 bucks on a font for this project, do you know of similar typefaces? I would like to label everything in a font like that.

[richfiles]

I ended up either buying or downloading the font (I can't even remember), and I bought an actual rubber stamp set too, shipped from Australia, made in South Korea... And far too expensive to ship to the US!
...
And then I ended up maybe finding a screen printing company that could maybe possibly do the job for me... 

I think you can get a variety of speaker options. There might even be a speech synthesis shield. One quick and simple option might be to get a cheap <$5 ISD1820 audio recording module. Record your terrain warning, hook it to a speaker, and an Arduino, and it can trigger the playback of the warning. The module will record up to 10 seconds, and can loop.

Also, I'm 95% sure those toggles you posted are tiny toggles. If tiny toggles are your thing, then those are absolutely decent for the job.
If you're wanting bigger toggles (like what often are used with the flip top safety covers, you'll need to get a different part than that.

Couldn't for the life of me find a big toggle, so took a pic of a small toggle, next to one mounted in a piece of vintage test equipment:

[Freshmeat]

Switch with cover. If you want one with light, be advice that they run 12 V, which means some external power source.

[HighFructose]

Thanks, I'll look for other ones too, maybe a red one.

Wait, actually just found this, and this, which looks more "abort-y" to me. It's a little bit more expensive, but I really like those kind of buttons.

EDIT: was just trying to come to my Kindle to Telemachus and it keeps saying "refused to connect," but I'm wondering if there is a better way to go about doing this. Does anyone know of a way to make a Navball appear on my kindle screen? I can't think of anything other than Telemachus.

Edited August 8, 2017 by Scout1218

[zitronen]

@Scout1218 if you go to a electronics distributor like Farnell, Mouser or Digikey, you can find 7 segment LEDs of all kinds of colours. Also try "orange" instead of "amber".

[HighFructose]

I've found some yellow ones, which look Amber enough to me.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/811

[monstah]

Long live Ladyada!

I love this little baby (https://www.adafruit.com/product/938), but on the shop they also have 16-bit color versions

Only downside to it is that the I2C address is hardwired, and you have only 2 to choose from by a jumper.

Edited August 9, 2017 by monstah
durrr, forgot the link

[HighFructose]

I'm confused what those are for... I'm looking for 7 segments.

[monstah]

Oh, sorry, these are just more ideas. The seven segments you found seem good enough, for me  

[HighFructose]

Ok, sorry, was confused. I like the look of those, maybe I could make them display some bars that show fuel and oxidizer, and electric charge. Maybe one for each,,and I could make it flash red when it's low, or the master caution could do that.

[stibbons]

2 hours ago, monstah said:

I love this little baby (https://www.adafruit.com/product/938), but on the shop they also have 16-bit color versions

Those things look super fun, but I suspect I'm going to go ahead and refer to my long standing complaints about how terrible Arduino's Wire library is. Driving them quickly enough to work with a decent refresh rate with KSPSerialIO or Simpit would be a struggle.

[HighFructose]

Well, just an idea. What about these? I could put the, for LF/O and electric charge, maybe 2 side by side for a longer scale.

[qzgy]

25 minutes ago, Scout1218 said:

Well, just an idea. What about these? I could put the, for LF/O and electric charge, maybe 2 side by side for a longer scale.

Oooh, that would be nice. Maybe it might be nice to dedicate one for LF and the other for Oxidizer

[HighFructose]

That's what I'm thinking, so it would be 2 displays side by side, and there would be three rows of them the top would be elec. charge, the middle would be liquid fuel, and the bottom would be oxidizer.

Edit, I would need a driver, or I might run out of pins on the mega.

Edited August 9, 2017 by Scout1218

[richfiles]

Definitely look into the bar graphs. What about these? 
They have 4 red, 4, yellow, and 4 green LEDs, and the LEDs are endwise, so the bar is physically longer.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/12-Segment-LED-BAR-Indicator-DIP-4Red-4Yellow-4Green-/301996008039

At only $1.39 each, it'd be less than $18 shipped to get 10 of them, which would cover Liquid Fuel, Oxidizer, Monoprop, Solid Fuel, Xenon, Electric Charge, Temp, G Forces, Intake Air AND Atmospheric density! Pretty much ALL the analog readouts! If you want more resolution, you can go with the traditional horizontal style segmented bar graph LEDs like you found. If you stack two or three of those end on end, you can get a lot of resolution out of them.

If you want one color, but more segments, these will bump you up to 20 segments, and the seller offers them yellow. 5 for $20. I think you have to specify that you want the yellow ones if you order. Seller sells them individually, by color, but they are more expensive that way. I'd contact the seller and verify color.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/5x-20-Segments-LED-BARGRAPH-Array-for-VU-METER-Driver-Arduino-Bar-Graph-USA-/380099290188
(The second item is a chip that can control the barograph LEDs)... See below for a description of how it works... If you want to do 10 bargraph displays, each 20 segments tall, then the bulk quantity of chips is exactly the number you need, and only $25 for all the chips combined.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/20x-LM3914-IC-LED-Bargraph-Display-Driver-Dot-Bar-Mode-LM3914N-1-Arduino-USA-/332178917347

Now... If you want to make a couple of those readouts be REALLY special, you could splurge for one or two of THESE puppies... 101 segments for $22!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BARMETER-180mm-LED-Bargraph-display-101-Segments-light-indicator-color-yellow/152638333037
It would honestly take TEN of those chips just to drive one of these... But woah nelly!  How cool would that be! 

I'm personalyl considering buying three of those to use as rate meters! It's WAY cheaper than the Russian micro bar LEDs... I think... 

Anyway, to control these bargraph LED displays, you can do a couple things. You could even use something like the Max7219 control boards to do it. If you go that route, try to use a segment display with 8 LEDs instead of 10 or 12... or 101...  There's a way to make it work for bigger LED bar displays, but you lose the total number you can drive, per chip, and have to deal with things like diodes and stuff. A single Max7219 can drive eight separate 8-segment bargraph displays, or four separate meters made of 16 segments.

I think the better option, especially if you're using multiples of 10 segments of LEDs, is to use an LM3914 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12694 (the bulk link above is cheaper in quantity, by A LOT) to convert an analog output to drive the LEDs. Since the Arduino code for the analog metered values actually makes sense to output as an actual analog value, you can get those chips, and just send the value to each of the Aurduino's PWM/Analog out lines. The Mega already supports 15 analog PWM outputs, so you're covered, wether you decide to do 3 meters, or all 10 analog readouts. You'll need a simple resistor and capacitor to smooth the PWM from the Arduino into a genuine analog signal, and the chip can handle the LEDs from there! There is a way to chain the chips, to get 20 or 30 segments, or even more if you wanted it. You set your analog range with the R_lo and R_hi inputs. All you need are resistors to set those. The first chip, you set R_lo to 0 volts, and then whatever value gets to the top segment of the first display, you set that value as R_hi for the first display's chip, and as R_lo for the second display's chip, and you continue that, till the last chip's R_hi is the max voltage. Sounds complicated, but it's not that bad. In the case of the 12 segment displays i suggested, rather than buy an extra chip just to cover a measly two LEDs, it might be better to have the max and min LEDs be manually set with I/O pins, or to even rig something else to handle it. You could even wire the top and bottom LEDs to stay on as "end markers" for the 12 segment LEDs I showed, and then only change the middle 10 LEDs.

Edited August 10, 2017 by richfiles