Have some updates to provide....
Ebay has been very bad to me lately, and I now have too many disparate parts lying around that will be beautiful someday, if I ever get off my a$$ and start attaching them to the flying part.
Yesterday's obsession was in getting my GoFlight radios (I have 2xGF-166, 1xGF46 and 1 x RP48) to all work properly when the flight was started in cold and dark mode. I figured out how to do this with much cursing and biting of nails by using the Lua GFpower module(which comes completely ready to go with fsuipc) and creating another Lua file named ipcReady.lua that only contained one line which reads:
ipc.runlua("GFpower.lua").
This was an incredibly easy thing to do, but was not a good intro to figuring out what a damn Lua even was. Apparently it is Portuguese for Moon. The More You Know ....
If anyone out there in cyber land reads this thing and wants to do it, please let me know, and I will help you with the files and/or setup.
To compound things, I got a cheap Phidgets 64 led card from Ebay a few weeks ago. It is a card that allows you to have 64 different leds light up! I love shiny stuff! I just got all of the connectors in the mail, and have rigged up a test and can make lights come on! The eventual plan is to have this thing drive leds to light up the Outer/Middle/Inner marker lights, the idiot lights in the warning panel, and possibly instrument lighting when I start to build my steam gauges.
I plan to interface it through a program called fs2phidgets which is supposed to make it play nice with FSX. Well, I am a little overwhelmed in getting the thing setup. I have read about 250,000 pages of fsuipc users manuals today to try and find out which signal kicks out the information to turn on these itty bittty lights. When I asked at the forum where I could find what I needed, the program developer basically told me that I just needed to read the GD manual, but the one I was reading was the wrong one, I was now a developer not a user. Software developer? Me? That is as crazy as the US Navy wanting me to go to Nuclear Engineering school while I was getting a D-- in high school trig.
Anyway, I opened up the FSUIPC SDK (Software Developers Kit for all of you non-developers out there) and found a neat program called FS Interrogate 2 that allowed me to glimpse some of the changes in status within FS as they happened. So now I have a huge pile of offset codes for my 8 little bitty light bulbs that I somehow magically interface with the phidget thingy and they all light up.
Tomorrow I will work on FS2phidgets and hope it all starts to make sense...
Unless someone tells me their Large Hadron Collider needs a new chief engineer and developer, in which case the world will probably collapse in a time singularity as I am trying to RTFM.
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