Warning Light Panel Project

[ChewyHoops]

My sim project, while on hold for some time, is renewed again with the release of Legacy!

I currently have 3 usb boards controlling a number of switch panels and inputs
, which just friggin' ROCKS for immersion. All said, it wasn't that hard. Tell the computer they are joysticks or keyboards, hook up buttons and switches, and BAM! I barely have to touch the keyboard at all.

Well, success breeds dissatisfaction. I want to build a warning light panel and I'm realizing my programming skills... who am I kidding? I learned in the stone ages. I thought serial data was the nutrition info on the side of the box of Cocoa Crunchies. I'm trying to parse the data in Processing (and then Visual Basic, and then VC++, Java, Python...) My logic extends to electronic hacks, prop design, painting and creative greebling, NOT coding.

Research has led me to a million different approaches taken by traditional flight sims, whose data has to be extracted by intercepting memory and all sorts of advanced stuff. THE DATA IS RIGHT THERE! All happy and shiny, just waiting to tell the Arduinos what leds to turn on.

I'm in the process of my sixth rebuild for my simpit. Full-on captain's chair from a conversion van, triple monitors, ambient lighting, amazing sound, and about a dozen dedicated systems panels in the works. For now, switches for autopilot, lights, gear are all "double ganged", meaning one switch runs two (or more) separate circuits. Flip switch, light turns on. If I had the ability to read the live data into the arduino, I could have lights for everything. Hits would flash my ambient lighting system and show up on the shield panel. Incoming missiles would flash a beacon. Atmospheric entry would alter my backlighting to represent re-entry burn. Oh yeah. THAT would be immersion!

EL is infinitely moddable. If anyone is interested, I'm willing to offer guidance on how to build the panels, share my info, and suggest parts that worked for me, but I could really use some help understanding the programming side of things. I'm smart enough to know what I DON'T know, and I'm a lot happier building things than spending days trying to figure out where I didn't put a semicolon. Yes, it's that bad.

Check my sig for more info on the project. I just pulled out of my slow season and I'll be back in the workshop once the temps stay above 15 degrees...

Thanks in advance!

[Marvin]

If you don't need to overlay your data onto the main game screen, Visual Basic is probably the easiest way to go. Most of the commands are listed in the program ... unlike C# where you must search elsewhere for the commands. Either way, you'll be using the game's savedata file to pluck the data you need.

[ChewyHoops]

Thanks, Martin - EMTools is a "must fly" utility, and i have a usb monitor just for it!

I had done some work with Processing reading the savedata, as the Arduino IDE is based on it. Getting one or two signals to the board was easy - it's getting a dozen or so quickly that's messing with me, with various data types. Serial communication is pretty simple, it's just coming up with a format for the data the Arduinos can use that's confusing me. I'm starting with basics - missile warning, overheat. Basic binary flag stuff. Eventually, I'd loveto have OLED displays and LED bars display engine information, shield status and a CreditNet trading computer. There's some amazing things going on with Kerbal and Space Engineers and Arduino displays, and Evochron is much more accessible to the vitals to drive them. I'm overwhelmed researching, feature creep being my biggest problem. I considered designing Android apps to display the more complex things, as I have 2 tablets, but I'm stuck on analog for much of the simpit look, and that's coding in a completely unfamiliar platform.

Baby steps.

[Marvin]

Well, good luck with it all.