MSFS is back

[elaw]

No... in FSX I used the AP a lot but the one in 2020 is a bit harder to use so I tend to fly more by hand, Plus with all the maneuvering, using the AP would be tricky for that flight.

To elaborate on the "harder to use" thing a little, in FSX I would "undock" the radio stack and AP and put them on my 2nd monitor which made things way easier. In 2020 you can undock certain things, but the 172 AP isn't one of them.

[3WE]

Stumbled on this.

Kind of interesting

https://youtu.be/w-meVo-bhMw

[Gabriel]

Kind of interesting

Yes, kind of interesting. It looks like your typical CFIT accident of that time.
Also, kind of unrelated to "MSFS is back".

[elaw]

Kind of interesting

Yes, kind of interesting. It looks like your typical CFIT accident of that time.
Also, kind of unrelated to "MSFS is back".

Did you see the same video I did?

What I saw was a real-life landing of a passenger plane compared to same in MSFS. And it was damn realistic! The FS one, that is.

[Gabriel]

Kind of interesting

Yes, kind of interesting. It looks like your typical CFIT accident of that time.
Also, kind of unrelated to "MSFS is back".

Did you see the same video I did?

Nope. I open the link of the NTSB report of the CFIT and somehow thought that I had clicked in the link in this thread.

[elaw]

Hey a little OT but thought you all might get a kick out of this... with the new version of FS I've been feeling the need for a hardware throttle - mostly because they remapped the old "full throttle" key (F4) to something else.

But in addition to being expensive, all the PC throttles I could find for sale took up way too much desk space. So I made my own! It's not pretty but it works.

[Gabriel]

Hey a little OT but thought you all might get a kick out of this... with the new version of FS I've been feeling the need for a hardware throttle - mostly because they remapped the old "full throttle" key (F4) to something else.

But in addition to being expensive, all the PC throttles I could find for sale took up way too much desk space. So I made my own! It's not pretty but it works.

Respect!!! That's actually cool!! (well, maybe not so cool-looking, but still very cool )

How did you do it?

Is it analog (variable resistor) or digital (encoder)? And how do you convert the signal into a USB-compatible one that can be interpreted by the computer as an input device for games? And does it have a firmware? A driver? I would have no clue about how to do that. (it was different in the times of DOS where everything was direct 1s and 0s or volt values, without IRQs, drivers and the rest. With the MSX, I could control a robot or the house lighting from the printer port just by controlling relays directly by poking 1s and 0s in specific position of specific bytes in specific memory addresses)

[elaw]

Yeah, I've done my share of assembler and even machine language programming (sorta) but I'm pretty much over it. Nowadays with the "Arduino landscape" and C and tons of libraries, it's a snap to do this kind of thing.

Here's the entire electrical BOM:
1 Arduino Pro Micro board (or clone)
3 2K pots
That's it! Well, okay, you need a USB cable too.

Wire the ends of the pots to ground and v+, wipers go to the first 3 analog channels. Plug the small end of the USB cable into the jack on the board.

Connect the board to your computer, fire up the Arduino IDE, and here's the code in its entirety:
Well... apparently not. I tried pasting it here in "code" tags but it lost all the line breaks! But it's about 50 lines, at least 1/3 of which are comments and whitespace. If anyone wants I'd be happy to email it to them.

The Arduino IDE has to be set up with the right board definition and one particular library, but that's it.

[Gabriel]

Yeah, I've done my share of assembler and even machine language programming (sorta) but I'm pretty much over it. Nowadays with the "Arduino landscape" and C and tons of libraries, it's a snap to do this kind of thing.

Here's the entire electrical BOM:
1 Arduino Pro Micro board (or clone)
3 2K pots
That's it! Well, okay, you need a USB cable too.

Wire the ends of the pots to ground and v+, wipers go to the first 3 analog channels. Plug the small end of the USB cable into the jack on the board.

Connect the board to your computer, fire up the Arduino IDE, and here's the code in its entirety:
Well... apparently not. I tried pasting it here in "code" tags but it lost all the line breaks! But it's about 50 lines, at least 1/3 of which are comments and whitespace. If anyone wants I'd be happy to email it to them.

The Arduino IDE has to be set up with the right board definition and one particular library, but that's it.

Well, I am not at that level. What is a 2K port? (know what is an Arduino, although I have never programmed one).
Not to mention that I don't even have Flight Simulator, or a computer that can run it.

And, not with a little bit of shame, I have to confess that when I used the printer serial port to turn on and off stuff, I did that in BASIC in an MSX computer.

[3WE]

Kind of interesting

Yes, kind of interesting. It looks like your typical CFIT accident of that time.
Also, kind of unrelated to "MSFS is back".

Did you see the same video I did?

What I saw was a real-life landing of a passenger plane compared to same in MSFS. And it was damn realistic! The FS one, that is.

Disconcur!

MSFS needs some serious work on the passenger camera holding model. That part of the simulation was sorely unrealistic.

[elaw]

Well, I am not at that level. What is a 2K port? (know what is an Arduino, although I have never programmed one).
Not to mention that I don't even have Flight Simulator, or a computer that can run it.

And, not with a little bit of shame, I have to confess that when I used the printer serial port to turn on and off stuff, I did that in BASIC in an MSX computer.

Doh! Sorry about that, most of the people I hang out with are electronics geeks, so I tend to lapse into "EE-speak" sometimes without thinking about it. "Pot" (in this context) = potentiometer - the device that was used for things like volume controls on radios before everything went digital. This is the exact part I used, though there are many other choices: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/det ... 0L/2564495 (and I misspoke - it's a 1K pot, not 2K - meaning its resistance is 1000 Ohms).

And don't be embarrassed about programming in BASIC - it gets a bad rap, but the compiled version I was using back in the late 1980s/early 1990s was actually a very powerful and efficient programming language. It did have a few deficiencies, and when Microsoft evolved it into Visual Basic and then VB.NET, they didn't fix them and added some more. That's mostly why I jumped ship and now do most of my "real" programming in C#.

[3WE]

That's mostly why I jumped ship and now do most of my "real" programming in C#.

3BS is impressed with your throttle quadrant, even though you MOST DEFINITELY will not know what it’s like to turn final with a HAND-FULL of power levers.

3BS would also love to learn C-236A or whatever version of C.

I learned ITS’s beloved FORTRAN, and then taught myself BASIC, and quit when windows came.

What I have seen hits me as big time Greek, and the self-appointed YouTube teachers just don’t connect with me. I kind of need to learn how to turn it on, a couple of examples and a few tricks…variable rules, if then logic, subroutines, and how to turn it all into an icon on a windows desktop (or should I say Apple app?)

[elaw]

Yeah I have to say the transition from BASIC to C(nothing/#) was not trivial. Though before that I started on javascript as I do (did) a lot of web development, and javascript is a lot closer to C and its variants than to BASIC.

The real key is to keep in mind that the way of doing things doesn't change, you just use different words (or characters) to do it. And that in C(whatever), curly braces are used to begin and end almost everything. Instead of IF (whatever) THEN...END IF, you have IF (whatever) {...}. And so on.

The other thing that drove me crazy at first was variable declaration. Variable declarations in BASIC all start with "DIM" so if you were skimming through code, you could always quickly and easily see where variables were defined by looking for that word at the beginning of a line. Javascript is similar except it uses the word "var" instead of DIM. But C and its variants declare variables by using the datatype as the first word, so variable-declaration lines don't all start with the same keyword. It take some getting used to, but it's survivable.

[ocelot]

Programming is programming -- there are things you can do in C that you can't do in BASIC but most of them are things that you will have bumped into not being able to do if you ever tried to do anything nontrivial in BASIC.

One of the problems at this point (unlike in the 80s) is that to turn it all on in a way that looks like it didn't escape from 1985 is a lot of work, and while there are some things you can use to smooth that path, it involves having tons of crap in your program that you didn't write and don't yet understand what it really does.

My suggestion would be to take up Python first (or maybe Javascript, but there are a bunch of ways in which Javascript is a bad starting point) ... and when you feel it's time to try C, install a Linux virtual machine, get familiar with the shell environment, and sit down with K&R. Most of the stuff you can find on the internets at this point is not oriented toward people who already know how to program (but maybe haven't in a long time), it's either for complete noobs, or for people who learned JS or something by rote instead of understanding and want more of the same.

also, feel free to post about it, I do this for a living and the site has been answering my stupid questions about planes for years

[ocelot]

I was going to post an example, but it seems impossible to do so with proper formatting here

(the approved bbcode way is "pre" and it doesn't work)

[3WE]

Started thread in more appropriate location.