There is nothing bad about offering/mentioning alternatives - the more the better - but when this is done in a certain way - like highjacking a thread with a clear purpose or posting/seeding misleading information - that is a "disservice" in my dictionary, innocent mistakes notwhithstanding (and definitely when it seems that there is hatchet grinding below the surface).The main message was "down the road of disinformation" not of providing realiable and true information. You are far from being new to the forum or to the hobby and you know what I mean.

>So not really "event driven",>"interrupt driven" hardware-driven event for SIOC/OA ->sorry.From the users point of view it is. I dont care how it is done in hardware or inside SIOC, as long as it works. The way SIOC language structure works is based on events. It's irrelevant in *this sense* to argue if the events are actually generated by polling inside SIOC/hardware.>Polling is not necessarily a bad thing, but its important for>SIOC and non SIOC users however to understand the true extent>of SIOC's abilities.Why? As long as it works and is fast enough to handle all the events, there is no real reason for the user to worry about this. We are not building realtime stuff here anyway, because we have FSUIPC there in the end which is very much a polling interface. No matter what you strap in front of it.>Well - elevating SIOC to a "neural netowrk" status just does>not fit in with anything. If an algorithm reacts to some "If A>then B" condition does not make it automatically a neural>network - LOL! I used to simulate Neural Netowks in Prolog on>multiple CPUs some years ago when I was playing with AI>concepts for medical diagnostic expert systems and I can>safely say that SIOC is not anything "like" a neural network.Lets not make this into a "I have NN years of experience in Cobol, so I must know better than you" - I have no experience in programming. I just wanted to say I have been quite happy with what is possible using SIOC. The people are friendly, try hard to help me in english despite it being not their native language, and the hardware is reasonably priced and they send the orders very fast. This is what matters to me. And I hoped it would also matter to the person originally asking the question. IOCards is not a bad option. Of course it is not the only possibility. But I cannot comment on other solutions I have not personally used...>One thig is true though - it is a scripting language with a>very specific purpose working with a very specific HW device.>No special glory (or lack-of) in that respect.That's exactly the point I wanted to make in the beginning: It's designed for cockpit building and does quite good job at making it possible to program logic in a home cockpit. It does not attempt to do anything else.How does one program stuff like a simulated APU unit with the betainnovations tools? Does the board you have support digital outputs too? From what I tried to look, it only does inputs?//Tuomas

Can you please explain this statement a bit, it's very vague and hard know what you mean exactly?

Indeed, and maybe Alex can point out what his contribution to this community is, other then starting up lengthy discussions that novice users certainly will not understand. ;-)Nicowww.nicokaan.nl

>From the users point of view it is. I dont care how it is done>in hardware or inside SIOC, as long as it works. The way SIOC>language structure works is based on events. It's irrelevant>in *this sense* to argue if the events are actually generated>by polling inside SIOC/hardware.Exactly, like I said, "ease of expression", that's where its all about, a language tailored to the needs of its application area.Topic closed (at least for me ) ;-)Nicowww.nicokaan.nl

I certainly won't go down THAT road Nico... pity you seem to having missed the point of the entire "lengthy discussion".

This is a "merged" answer so not all the text applies to you, Tuomas. You'll know when to ignore it.I never pulled ranks in the first place - it was not me who has said as having XX years programming experience - if my memory does not fail me. And who talked about Cobol? FYI at least 80% of banks still use Cobol-based software so you may want to be careful with that when you say this in a bank :-).I also never mentioned SIOC in any of my postings - not until invalid claims were made as to its features - especially in a thread which was NOT started as "what can SIOC do for me and how?". Would you want novices here "who do not understand anything" fall for that?Moreover - I never hijack or even post in threads which do not conern what I use and/or have knowledge of.Tuomas - use any solution you like to your own delight and recommend it to anybody, but for God's sake, try and be candid and accurate about that.Re BI, you may have missed it but Beta Innovations has a product which has been selling since Feb-March which does outputs too: it's the ElectronFlux card. All the info is on their website. So BI has a now full set of I/O products now. In the past they did not have an output solution so I had to use GF radios and autopilot formy cockpit. I have ordered an EF card and it should reach me during the following days. I'll be happy to report my initial impressions about it once I get it through its paces.Nico:I don't have to prove to anyone what I have done for the community (and I have done more than I care to mention) for as long as my posts are accurate and legitimate, and I can assure you that they are. I am not easily intimidated so you may want to try a different approach with me. Questioning my contribution to the community instead of facing the fact that most of what has been claimed in this thread about SIOC is pure BS is not going to work. Your latest reaction worries and disappoints me.If you want to carry this on a more personal and/or professional level and spare the forum from more of this entertaining and useless "duel" - then be my guest and use PM.

>Nico:>I don't have to prove to anyone what I have done for the>community (and I have done more than I care to mention) for as>long as my posts are accurate and legitimate, and I can assure>you that they are. I am not easily intimidated so you may want>to try a different approach with me. Questioning my>contribution to the community instead of facing the fact that>most of what has been claimed in this thread about SIOC is>pure BS is not going to work. Your latest reaction worries and>disappoints me.>>If you want to carry this on a more personal and/or>professional level and spare the forum from more of this>entertaining and useless "duel" - then be my guest and use>PM.Hi Alex,Forget my last remark, that was not fair. Sorry for that.Sometimes you hit the return key too soon.I agree that this medium is not the right place for discussions like this. You must also understand that English is not my native langauge so I'm limited in expressing myself clearly and diplomatically ( :-) ). In my native langauge I have several gray values while in English it's more black or white so to speak. Nicowww.nicokaan.nl

>I also never mentioned SIOC in any of my postings - not until>invalid claims were made as to its features - especially in a>thread which was NOT started as "what can SIOC do for me and>how?". Would you want novices here "who do not understand>anything" fall for that?I still stand behind my statement that, to the user, SIOC is event-based. I never said anything about how the actual stuff is implemented in hardware. It was meant purely as a user-point-of-view explanation. And I think as a very custom language that is specifically designed for this use, sioc deserves to be mentioned. I never intended to create such a lengthy thread about this. I just wanted to explain my own experience.>Re BI, you may have missed it but Beta Innovations has a>product which has been selling since Feb-March which does>outputs too: it's the ElectronFlux card. All the info is on>their website. So BI has a now full set of I/O products now.Yep, I noticed. The statement depends a lot on your definition of "full set" though ;)But Alex, please.. Calm down. Seriously. We are not trying to attack you, just trying to discuss this topic. The way you react thouhg, makes it very hard to explain things. Read the above with thought and you might understand we have been talking about different things.Hence your claim we talk false things about SIOC and try to mislead people is just silly. As long as you don't understand this, its pointless to continue on this thread, lets talk about something else :)//Tuomas

> As long as you don't understand>this, its pointless to continue on this thread, lets talk>about something else :)I do understand much more than I care to post here but I fully agree with you - let's alleviate the forum from this discussion and move on with our hobby.I guess that whomever wanted his questions answered got more than he's bargained for.

>I guess that whomever wanted his questions answered got more>than he's bargained for.He sure got the mother of all can-of-worms! :)But hey, once you get your Electronflux, let us know how it works? It'd be interesting to know how the software side works, as it's impossible to play with Leo's tools beforehand without buying the hardware. Do you use the SDK to code things, or is there something like the FSBUS router tool which lets you map switches to functions? How about creating logical systems functionality?Anyway, no hard feelings, ok? (and I seriously mean it, we just somehow seem to have some incompatible forum discussion genes or something that always seems to cause this kind of um.. "events" here.. :))//Tuomas

>>I guess that whomever wanted his questions answered got>more>>than he's bargained for.>>He sure got the mother of all can-of-worms! :)>>But hey, once you get your Electronflux, let us know how it>works? It'd be interesting to know how the software side>works, as it's impossible to play with Leo's tools beforehand>without buying the hardware. Do you use the SDK to code>things, or is there something like the FSBUS router tool which>lets you map switches to functions? How about creating logical>systems functionality?Well, when I get it I'll really have it run for its $. And no, I do not plan to write one line of code for it. If there is something that I hate is "maintenance". KISS is my keyword - least amount of boards, wiring and yes, programming. I plan to use whatever BI offers in terms of interfacing SW. A BIFS upgrade has been promised since it was out there and I understand that it was postponed for until EF hits the market. Now that EF is here I am really loking forward for that. BI always met its promises so I felt safe to order one unit at the special price and be ready for the BIFS upgrade.>Anyway, no hard feelings, ok? (and I seriously mean it, we>just somehow seem to have some incompatible forum discussion>genes or something that always seems to cause this kind of>um.. "events" here.. :))Nothing gene engineering can't fix - LOL.

>>How about creating logical systems functionality?>KISS is my keyword ->least amount of boards, wiring and yes, programming. I plan to>use whatever BI offers in terms of interfacing SW. A BIFS>upgrade has been promised since it was out there and I>understand that it was postponed for until EF hits the market.>Now that EF is here I am really loking forward for that. BI>always met its promises so I felt safe to order one unit at>the special price and be ready for the BIFS upgrade.From what I understood, the original poster intends to create everything in a Lear45 ("I do want to follow the Lear 45 as closely as possible, and to create as much of the hardware knobs, switches, and other hardware as possible.")I would guess this includes pressurisation, hydraulics, fuel pumps etc.. So how would one implenment this kind of things with the Betainnovations software? These are not modelled in FS2004, so they need to be handled somehow outside FS.Chris said earlier in this thread: "Currently the gammaray only will send keystrokes which FSUIPC can interpret into offsets, but its a bit clunky." and then mentioned the new BIFS will be able to set offsets directly. No mention of any logic programming support though..?Then you said you want to "keep things simple" and "want to avoid programming" in this case. How will this work then? Unless there is some functionality in the software we are not aware of, I don't really see how this could be a working solution for MT..? The products do the interfacing of switches and mapping them to FSUIPC very well, but that's not everything the original poster asked for. He needs more.This is why I brought SIOC to this thread. Like you said, EPIC is a very low level solution that requires a lot of programming. But some of that functionality is needed if one wants to create the aircraft systems. Of course the Project Magenta PMSystems is another alternative - a specialized software designed exactly for that, and then you have just FSUIPC offsets to wire your switches and lights to. But without PMSystems you need to have _something_, what is it?From what I understand by reading the thread above, from the betainnovations website, and earlier knowledge from the topic, what you suggested to MT is not going to give him all the tools he needs for his task.//Tuomas

..I take it back! I would *not* buy that guy a beer... pity...http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/wor.../nimrod_mr2.jpg