Altimeter inoperative...

[Guest tonyc]

In my panel editing, I've lost the function of the altimeter. The needles are there, but they are unresponsive to altitude change and to the little knob that sets the altitude. The pressure window reads 00, so I must have left some thing out. In the pnl file everything seems ok. What I am missing?tony

[Roger Mazengarb 0]

G'day Tony,Do you have a pitot static system ( *.pss file) ?Cheers,Roger

[Guest tonyc]

Yes, Roger, I do. I think it has to do with some guages that I removed for the Electra panel. I did a little bit of a random removal, that is, place only the guages that I want to have in the new panel and erase all the extras. It's essentially the Kodiac files edited for the Electra. I can't seem to "find" the connection. Notice in the panel the altimeter needles. I intentionally placed them there for the diagnostics. they simply fail to respond. The clue is the barometric pressure reading, 0, instead of the usual 29.92.tony

[Guest Chris Wallace]

Tony,Are you sure that the altimeter subsystem that the gauge is connected to exists in the AMP file and is operational? If you have copied a gauge from another aircraft then its connection may not match the ALTI subsystem(s) in your aircraft.e.g. from TRI30.PNL: ==== GAUGE ENTRY ====altr ==== BEGIN GAUGE ENTRY ==== ---- unique id ---- alti ---- x,y,xsize,ysize ---- 421 530 90 90 Alt1 alti .... etc.and the corresponding 'ALTI' subsystem in TRI3.AMP: - Subsystem entry - ALTI - Pilot altimeter - Alt1 -- Port Group Number -- 1 -- unit number -- 1 The tag of the gauge message must match the tag of the subsystem (Alt1 in this case).Chris WallaceOttawa, Canada

[Guest tonyc]

Hi, Chris. This is what I suspect. I need to follow your examples to check. Thanks for the help. I've been concentrating on the flight model, and, if you can share some tips...the hardest part is figuring out the center of gravity parameters( at least with the difference between the 3d model and FLY2's) and the moments of inertia. Also, I noticed that the conversion to slugs is confusing. If FLY2 requires mass in slugs, then the aircraft weight must be converted to mass( weight/ gravity) before it's divided by the other constant( .31) for slugs. I think the term mass is erroneous, because FLY2 uses weight/.31 only for its conversion to slugs. Even these numbers don't correspond to real aircraft numbers. So....,it's a bit confusing.tony

[Guest Chris Wallace]

Hmmm...I don't really remember much about that, sorry. Some of the stuff in Russell's original Fly! Notes (in the old Fly! 1 section of the library) is still relevant to Fly! 2 I think. And didn't Rob Young set up a good web page of info for flight model tweaking? That was years ago though, I don't know if it's still around.But you're right that the weight/mass stuff is not technically correct. Kilograms and slugs are both measures of mass, with newtons and pounds the corresponding measures of weight. But just forget about that and convert the aircraft's weight from pounds to slugs using the constant 32.17 (i.e. slugs = pounds / 32.17). That's probably some default case like sea level on an idealized Earth, but it should be more than close enough. In any case, I think you will probably have to do a lot of tweaking from the "real-life" numbers for a realistic flight model...although it all looks cut and dried like you just have to plug in the real-life numbers, I don't think the flight model implementation is quite that perfect. Hence the "artificial" airfoils you will see on some aircraft, or positioning of airfoils way out of their real-life positions, to get the flight model to behave as it should. The real numbers are a good start, but they may be only that...a starting point for some radical tweaking.Chris WallaceOttawa, Canada

[Guest tonyc]

Hi, Chris. I got the altimeter to work. It appears that Panel Maker made some very suttle changes which I could not detect. I still don't know what made it work.Here's a good one: I redid the right wing in 3d max, exported it to FLY2 and , to my surprise, when I loaded the model, the right wing appeared to have picked up something else, a tif file perhaps. Any ideas? One picture is the 3d max5. The other, is what appears in FLY2.tony

[Guest CaptainJ]

Hi Tony,Just redo the UVW-map on the right wing. It happens to me very often, after I re did the UVW-map and converted the part to editable mesh (so I can't change the texture on that part) it's normal again.Take care,

[Guest tonyc]

thanks, Jarno. I was going crazy with it.tony