I just heard from John Wojnaroski that you and he are going to work on getting
a flightgear demo machine up for the linux expo thursday and Friday. John
indicated that he would very much like to get a CVS version with the new
traffic code up and running before the expo.
rather than /instrumentation/comm ... we need to be a little careful here
because typically, a single knob controls power to both matched com/nav pairs.
a single apt.dat.gz file which is in the native X-Plane format.
To do this I wrote a front end loader than builds the airport and runway
list. Some of the changes I needed to make had a cascading effect, so there
are minor naming changes scattered throughout the code.
I've finished the emigration of the radiostack, and I've also removed it
completely. It turned out that the comm radio is completely implemented in
the ATC subsystem. I've changed the affected ATC files to point
to /instrumentation/com, but I guess that the maintainer of the ATC code
should decide wether to make it configureable, and how.
I also had to change some files in Network and Main. The changes in network
should be obvious, but the changes in Main were a bit suspect. The files
included radiostack.hxx, but they weren't directly depending on
radiostack-hxx. They were depending on other files that were included by
radiostack.hxx. I got it to compile, but I'm not sure if I included the
correct directly depending file.
For the data directory I changed every occurrence of /radios/
with /instrumentation/ with this simple one-liner that I found on the net:
find -name '*.xml' -type f | xargs perl -pi -e
's/\/radios\//\/instrumentation\//g'
Instead of me sending all the files that got changed by this I suggest that
you execute the one-liner yourself. Of course I can not guarantee that this
will work perfectly, but I considered hand editing to be not an option (I'm
lazy). I don't want to test every aircraft to see if everything still works,
I think it's better to wait and see if anyone complaints about broken nav
radios/instruments.
directory and over to the Instrumentation directory and make them modular
in the sense of being able to pick and choose what you include with any
particular aircraft.
We have decided that hardcoded initialization of instruments and systems is
bad. So we remove them.
Hardcoded initialization is bad because it can't be overridden from config
files or from the command line. We prefer to do it through config files that
should be, eventually, aircraft specific (*-set.xml), not global
(preferences.xml).
on the ground) -- this is based on some wild guesses, but it seems
reasonable for now.
The next step will be to give the compass some angular momentum so
that it does not snap instantly to a heading, and so that it can
overshoot a heading and oscillate.
I've made an encoder and a transponder. The transponder gets C-Mode altitude
information from the encoder. These two might not be very usefull right now,
but I think they might come in handy when the ATC network gets going.
I've added two new debug log types for the instrumentation and systems. They
used to use the autopilot debug log, because I couldn't figure out how to
make new log types. Well, now I have figured it out. ;-)
compilation without ENABLE_SP_FMDS defined gave me a lot of link errors. It appeared that symbol used by ADA was still in use in the HUD.
There is also a typo from Curt in instrument_mgr.cxx where he #include "kr_87.cxx" instead of "kr_87.hxx"
Instrumentation and systems are now configureable from xml files. The two
generic configurations generic-systems.xml and generic-instrumentation.xml
configures the systems and instrumentation as it was hardcoded. You can
override the generic configurations in a similar way as you override the
autopilot configuration.
All necessary elements for an ADF gauge had been migrated from
Cockpit/kr_87.cxx to Instrumentation/adf.cxx. Migrating the sound
related elements was apparently planned, but not done yet. This
intermediate state broke the ident morse sound: it couldn't get
turned off and it always indicated "SF", regardless of the tuned-in
frequency. The following patches continue the migration:
adf-radio.diff => Base/Aircraft/Instruments/adf-radio.xml:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* sets maximum volume to 1 (rather than 2); Not only is 1
loud enough (and 2 unpleasantly noisy), it also prevents
the knob from being turned to non-existant positions. :-)
* fixes wrong use of /instrumentation/adf/ident
* the voice/ident selector(?) remains unchanged, but as it's
not switched to "IDENT", there'll be no ident sound by default
this is consistent with other sounds and DME.
radiostack.diff => src/Cockpit/radiostack.[ch]xx:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* comment out use of FGKR_87 class. kr_87.[ch]xx is now no
longer used. kr-87adf.xml would no longer work, either, but
isn't used anywhere, anyway. Future adf radios have to use
the adf instrument, using xml/Nasal for specific hardware
implementation details.
adf.diff => src/Instrumentation/adf.[ch]xx:
---------------------------------------------------------------
* adds ident morse sound capability using two new input
properties:
- /instrumentation/adf/volume-norm (double)
- /instrumentation/adf/ident-audible (bool)
will delay it's reply by 50ms. The ground station can change it's reply delay
to trick the airborn dme unit into reporting a distance that is offset from
the true distance by some constant value. In FG we model this by subtracting
a fixed distance from the actual distance.
It is thus possible in our implimentation for the displayed distance to become
negative. This patch clamp DME distance to a minimum value of 0.00 so it can
never go negative.
- FG now directly supports Robin's native nav database file format.
- His latest data now separates out dme, gs, loc, and marker beacon
transmitters rather than lumping them all into a single "ILS" record.
- These new data structure changes prompted me to do some code restructuring
so that internally these different types of navaids are all kept as
separate lists and searched and handled separately.
- This structural change had a cascading affect on any code that
references or uses the nav databases. I've gone and "touched" a lot of
nav related code in a lot of places.
- As an added bonus, the new data (and code) adds DME bias so these will
all now read as they do in real life.
- Added Navaids/navdb.cxx and Navaids/navdb.hxx which provide a front
end loaders for the nav data.
- Added Navaids/navrecord.hxx which is a new "generic" nav data record.
- Removed Navaids/ils.hxx, Navaids/ilslist.cxx, Navaids/ilslist.hxx,
Navaids/mkrbeacons.cxx, and Navaids/mkrbeacons.hxx which are all now
depricated.
Fix the leg distance calculation to display nautical miles instead of meters.
It turns out that Simgear already has a range normalize function, so I use
that one instead.
I've added a vertical navigation capability to the GPS module. One can input
two waypoints, wp[0] and wp[1], with altitude. If the altitudes differ, then
the altitude deviation from a "straigth" line from wp[0] to wp[1] is
calculated. The true course and course deviation from wp[0] to wp[1] is also
calculated. All this can be found in the wp subdir where one also finds the
wp[0] and wp[1] subdirs.
All this has to be done through the property browser. Maybe I should make a
gui window for the GPS!
I've added a tracking bug to the gps. This is of course very similar to a
heading bug for a DG. I don't know if this is the common name, but I feel
that for a gps the name tracking bug is more accurate than heading bug. A
true bug error and a magnetic bug error is calculated and shifted into the
-180 to 180 range so that they can be used by autopilots.
I've also fixed a property name that crept in when I had to change back to
indicated-***. Back then I accidentally changed the desired course name to
"indicated-course". The property that is supposed to be the input for the
desired course should naturally be named something like "desired-course", and
definitely _not_ "indicated-course". If this name change breaks anything it
should be fixed in the other end.
I've also commented out a lot of #includes that I don't think is needed. I'm
on Suse 9.0 now, and it builds fine here, but this might be a problem for
different platforms I guess we have to cross our fingers.
I've done som more work on the gps instrument.
- You can now input airport-, nav- or fix-ID to select a waypoint.
- You have to specify either "airport", "nav" or "fix" in the waypoint-type
property (some fixes and navs have identical IDs).
- Formatted the time to waypoint output.
- Cleaned up and changed some propery names (wp-heading -> wp-bearing).
- I've also added a name member to the FGNav class so that the gps instrument
can get the name of the nav.
- Changed the airport name parsing in simple.cxx.
explicitely. This value has always been feet, but there were a couple places
in the code that assumed this elevation was meters. The result was that you
could park directly over the top of the Black Forest VOR (112.50) NE of KCOS
and get a dme reading of 2.5 or so. This problem is now resolved.
places now use sgCartToGeod() instead of rolling their own
approximation. And YASim is now using exactly the same 3D coordinate
system as the rest of FlightGear is.
