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Uri_ba's pit

DEDuino – Some more performance tuning

I’ve been Working on some way to streamline performance as much as I could. The biggest performance limiter, is the drawing of the big screens (DED/PFD),

One of the tricks I’ve thought might help was to switch the display from 2 bit color mode to 1 bit (4 shades of “grayscale” to only “black and white”) theoretically – a 100% boost, it practice I have discovered I had a bug in the code all along. Apparently U8Glib has a switch to handle displays bigger then 240pixels, I’ve known about it but as long as I’ve been using the grayscale mode, I’ve been unaware of it (because the part that didn’t work was black). once I’ve switched to BW mode – it lit up casing stripes on the screen.

To fix this, and simply basic installation, I thought about including the entire U8Glib library, with the required change in the folder. Unfortunatly, the Arduino IDE does not allow this, So I’ll be including a ZIP file with the modified library for easy import into the IDE.

I’ve also found out that Β my plan to flip the DED display (to allow better weight distribution in the case) is a very bad idea as putting in “rotate 180” on the screen almost halfs the FPS.

I’ll be working on this some more till the PCBs arrive – but I think this is pretty much the limit as far as my ability to optimize the code to improve refresh rate.

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Caution panel – tech post

Now that we have seen the Caution panel at work,
Let’s take a step back and have a look at the technical aspect of it.

This post will have some code samples and inner workings – so feel free to move on if that doesn’t interest you.

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Caution Panel – finishing up and testing

I’ve had some time this week to finish up soldering the caution panel and control board, wiring the control board was a bit tricky, the control panel is reversed compared to the caution panel itself, Β and then I need to wire the whole thing backwards, which flips it again…

After finishing up the Caution panel, I’ve started by soldering the Shift registers outputs to the connectors

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Once this is done, I started wiring the chips themselves,
Each chip needs to have 5V, GND, CLK and LATCH, OE (Output Enable) tied low RES pulled high. And all of them need to have Serial Data chained in the correct order between all the chips. and of course tie everything into the correct position on the connector – (hoping not to mess things up).

I’ve used my control PCB eagle board design as reference with the schematics – I still hope I haven’t messed up too badly – But I’ll only know that when the boards will come in from china.

Now let’s look at how the Boards integrate with the rest of the project

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Uri_ba's pit

DEDunio Performance Tuning – Arduino Uno

I’ve been getting some PMs on Viperpits from folks interested in some configuration or another. some what the FFI, others DED, FFI and PFL.

So I’ve decided to use the time till the PCBs arrive and test expected performance

I’ve opted to useΒ my Arduino uno as he is the weakest one (the Micro has half a KB more RAM and a self adjusting serial communication, and the due – well, should be different ball game entirely…). If performance would be Acceptable on the Uno, it will be on every other device too.

I was too last night tired to finish the Β caution panel (control board wiring is still not done) – so I took the challange and played around with the code – trying to make code changes easier and more coherent and of course fine tune the performance.

This is a step along the way.
Redneck, this one is for you πŸ˜‰

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Uri_ba's pit

Helping out a fellow nut (DED’s first away game)

I’ve been contacted by “MrWell”, a BMS/ViperPits community member, to help him out with the FuelFlow Indicator after seeing my initial posts few weeks ago.

So I took some time to try and optimize the code to arduino Uno (Which I’ve planned on doing anyways) and Help a fellow nut by giving him to test out some experimental code. this is not a “numbered episode” but it’s related πŸ™‚

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Caution Panel – Initial Design and soldering

I’ll start with an apology – I’ve been working on prototyping for this for over a week, And I’ve never too a video or a photo of the prototype working on the breadboard. So this post would be somewhat less illustrated then I would have wanted. sorry πŸ™

I’ve decided to take the Indexer design concept and use the Shift register chip’s ability to be chained as a way to drive the Cation panel.

F-16 caution panel is made up of 4 rows of 8 lamps – classic for 8bit shift register, I just need to chain 4 of them and presto – the entire caution panel on 3 pins using SPI (CS, SCK and MOSI – where SCK and MOSI are shared among all the other devices anyway).

We’ll start by looking at the Caution panel structure itself.

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Uri_ba's pit

DED Adventures – PCBs are out to fabrication

I’ve had some more time to work on the PCBs and I’ve submitted them for fabrication. I’ve chose to use the ITEADstudio Service, They have got some reasonable reviews and I’ve be getting 10 boards for a fair price. I’ve looked to other fabrication options, but most of them were considerably more expensive.

I’m not doing a full post – just a quick update.
once the Boards are in I’ll write a proper post about the design, assembly and testing..

Can’t wait πŸ™‚

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Uri_ba's pit

DED Adventures – Part 6 – The connector conundrum

Well After working on the thing for two months, I’ve got a pretty good concept on what I want to achieve.

I started with DED and grew from there.
The first obvious “victim” was the FFI, as it’s “right there”.
followed by the Indexers (again, “they are just there”).

then I just got greedy πŸ™‚
PFL was next to be added – Β because “it’s basically just another DED”, closly followed by the caution panel “it’s right next to the PFL, and the code is just a bumped up Indexer”

and then I completely lost it..
and glareshield lights and TWP lights were also included on the roadmap and also the CMDS display – because I can.

But I’m pretty sure the Arduino cannot handle all of this – at least the base would be set for floks that would prefer having TWP over caution panel or CMDS over DED/PFL.

but connecting everything is not as trivial, especially in the cockpit environment – and bread board is out of the question of course.. cables are too fiddly.

So I’ve started thinking about a PCB design to accommodate all this and make it somewhat user friendly to assemble – but still maintain some flexibility.

So that would be covered in this post.

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Uri_ba's pit

Hardware Failure No.1 – PSU trouble

A quick rant… Nothing important here πŸ™‚
After setting up all the screens, including the annoying bungee jumping central console screen. My PC started hanging and crashing.. πŸ™

My specs (as of JulyΒ 2014):
I7-2700K & 8GB RAM
GTX570 – main display
And a Seasonic X-series 560W

The cockpit require a shit load of screens, however my GTX570 only supports two displays, and I needed at least 3 more with ability to expand to more in the future. That requires an additional screen.
I chose the GT750 that supports 4 displays.

But that comes with additional power consumption, which I suspect pushes it over the edge and started crashing..

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Uri_ba's pit

Getting the Pit flight ready

Well,
after the last post in which we sorted out the screens, it’s time to tackle the flight controls.

I know the posts seem a bit out of order, well because I’m using the magic of WordPress, I’m actually facing the publishing date, and everything is written post effect, well it will end at some point πŸ™‚

Anyway, yes, flight controls…

While this is written, (I’m only back logging a month or two, so don’t worry) I’m using TM warthog and Saitek combat rudder. It will be at some point replaced by cougar throttle and maybe FCC3 – but that is in the unforeseen future.

Back to mounting existing hardware πŸ™‚