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jferguson

sim which outputs "realtime" attitude and position

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I'm working on an quasi-autonomous control system for very small fixed wing aircraft. Project is non-commercial and was the hardest thing I could think of to devote my retirement to. This would include airframe design and construction, electronics, and coding - everything.  

I had planned to write code and run it in an R/C plane so I could swirtch back to manual if I didn't like what it was doing. 

After a lot of thought, I've concluded that this isn't a good idea.  The cycle times between flights and likelihood that more than one thing will be wrong would suggest that this sort of program will not cause the work to converge in a positive direction.  It would be better to do this in simulation.

So I wonder if any of the relatively inexpensive simulation packages either include or can have added to them, a subroutine which will export "relatively real-time" attitude, heading, altitude, and present position (lat/lon) ??

Best form of output would be serial datastream out a usb port or if not that sent to an ip address.  

My plan would then be to have my black-box drive the simulation using the datastream as feedback.

Is there anyway to do this using commercially available software - could be Windows, Linux, or Mac - with preference for Linux. 

'Grateful for any ideas or advice on this subject.

John

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The closest I could find was at the following link - https://www.lifewire.com/flight-simulators-for-linux-2204909.  If you want in-depth information concerning your project, I would post your questions in the fsdeveloper forums -  https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/.  This is where many of the technical experts in our community post topics and ideas like yours.  I am sure you will find a solution there!  Good luck in your retirement!  I have been fully retired 19 years now and it has been enjoyable!


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Thanks much Jim Young.  I retired in 2003.  It was that or Baghdad (consultant - not military).  I've been working on this project 4 years now.  An evening's discussion with an engineer last summer convinced me that it would be quicker to develop control software in simulation - and fewer beroken airplanes.

 

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Thanks Jim. I was going to suggest FS Developer as well. We have a plethora of tech wonks there who may be helpful.

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plethora.  Yup, That's what I need. I've had a terrible time even finding someone who understood wht I was asking.

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On ‎10‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 2:39 AM, jferguson said:

plethora.  Yup, That's what I need. I've had a terrible time even finding someone who understood wht I was asking.

Hi,

Most desktop simulators have an API of some kind, in different flavors of quality, documentation and wealth of code examples online.

The most accessible is probably the SimConnect API that is part of FSX and P3D. It can be used with C++ or C# code, is documented relatively well, and there are many examples online of how to use it. I can recommend using C#, as the language is really powerful and a lot easier to use than C++ if you are writing native Windows client software like Forms or WPF.

The use cases are probably these:

  • Read the desired data from the API
  • Send the data to your external hardware
  • Read back steering information from your external hardware
  • Inject the steering commands into the sim

Programmatically these tasks are a piece of cake, especially the first two are a couple of hours at most. The last two could probably be covered simply by implementing a USB Joystick interface in your hardware, to send bog standard steering commands to the sim directly. If that is not an option, the interface would have to be written by hand, reading the steering data from whatever data output you have, transforming them and injecting them into the sim. Also not that big a deal.

Right, inexpensive: I would use the FSX Steam Edition.

All of this is assuming that you don't need some special aircraft simulated. That would be a whole other department, and you would have to ask a skilled designer to create it for you - especially the flight dynamics.

Best regards

 

Edited by Lorby_SI

LORBY-SI

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