my problem has always been sourcing parts. this problem has been 2 fold, i am poor for one, and live in the ass end of nowhere and a lot of places gouge me on shipping for it. i get a lot of parts off ebay from semi-reputable gray market chinese sellers who will sell you 10 of anything for a buck and free shipping. microcontrollers i still need to buy through digikey, and last time i ordered from them their shipping rates were sane. my other source for parts is junk. ive gotten really good at desoldering.
another thing i have trouble with is chemicals for board etching. most chemicals can be shipped ground only, and i live on an island go figure. i found a hackish recipe (peroxide, vinegar and salt) for pcb etchant and im not even sure it will work. transfer paper is another thing i have trouble getting, but i found out how to make my own (cook cornstarch till it turns brown, add water and paint sheets of paper with it). i have not tested this yet at all. i should have everything, so its just a matter of designing gauges. copper clad pcbs are kind of expensive. i got 4 8-10 sheets for $20, and so far is the most expensive thing yet. and i got me a free laser printer. i still dont have a means for cutting the boards, you can dremel but thats messy and imprecise. i hear an office guillotine would work, and ive been watching garage sales and thrift stores like a hawk to try and obtain one. i could run a test etch but given my zero budget approach id want to produce something useful. all i need is a board design that i think will work. though i think i may just do a bunch of breakout boards for various components that i have on stock for prototyping. get a good precision test out of it, see how wide i can make traces and **** like that.
3rd thing you need is materials to built the cockpit. the inlaws have a saw mill, and im sure they would let me walk off with a couple of 2x4s if i put a few nails in the house they are building. i also like to raid the trash piles at local construction sites at 3am. hardware store has acrylic in stock, its ****ing expensive, but i figure it would make a pretty good panel material if you spraypaint the back of it some kind of metallic shade or black. its easy to work too. thinking about getting a laser cutter/engraver machine off of ebay, which makes quick work of acrylic. tools are really the main thing im lacking. also seeing as i live in an apartment i dont think the neighbors would appreciate me building something like that. i wanted to get my brother in law in on the project but he isnt a big fan of freespace.
Hi Nuke,
I'ts great to see you guys are making progress on this. I have been lurking for years waiting to see if FSO would ever be modified to send out its data for cockpit builders. I have always wanted to build a cockpit around this game.
Were you ever able to export textures from the engine? There was a thread from almost exactly a year ago where it was being discussed. It looks like sending simple data packets out via UDP is simple enough, but it would still be really cool to just let the game render the radar like it is now and display that exact image on a small LCD/MFD panel.
nah its over my head. youd probibly need an arm device (raspberry pi looks promising) to keep up with the required throughput, and at least 100mbps ethernet. however im starting to consider an alternative. i started a game engine written entirely in lua. my 3d renderer sort of works, and supports textured models, quads, sprites, and text. i could fork the code and create an mfd application with the exiting engine. im thinking of using tcp/ip loopback to do ipc between this mfd software and freespace. then you could control the rendering of 2d/3d graphics over the connection. this would allow you to design mfds where video output to a small lcd screen which is driven by the same computer the game runs on, and saves you a lot of dev time. flipside is this eats up valuable monitor connections, if you ever wanted to do a multi monitor setup. im ok with this however. still need to do some hardware design, like some kind of usb hid device for interactive buttons, or you can buy off the shelf joystick controllers to save a little time.
you can do things with mfds or you can do things with a network of stand alone gauges. i figure prototyping either of these will cost about $50 each in parts. im considering it would be a good idea to sell units back to the community to help cover some of the expense. i want to make it oshw, but other oshw people are making a killing selling completed units and kits of their products to lazy foos and hobbyists, respectively (and the schematics, boars ssources and source code would all be there for the adventurous do it your selfers). i figure that 80% of the workload will be software though. ive already proven you can load lua modules in freespace, like luasocket, and ive been able to do ipc with that, so im certain its possible. the fact that i have the potential to make some money selling hardware to the community might turn out to be a motivating factor. im gonna post a poll in general fs to see how many people would be willing to buy panel elements for a freespace cockpit simulator, should give us an idea for a market.
