We were in a bit of a rush to make a test run before the weekend. Unfortunatelly, the 3D printer wasn't fast enough.
So we had to improvise a little bit and built a classical fly-by-wire airwire ratsnest with a cardboard box as protection against shorts.
The hardest part was to install VSC on my laptop. There is no user friendly software to setup the paramaters, yet. Instead, everything is hardcoded into the source so I had to re-compile to adjust the resolution, velocity and direction of rotation. But we finally got it to work and... WOW! The difference is like day and night. When we connected the controller to the simulator software for the first time I pushed the throttle with the brakes still engaged to make the plane slightly tilt forward. First, I thought it didn't work. I had to look at the motor shaft couplings to see that the servos were actually spinning. Everything was totally silent.
With the other controller the "average" movements were the same and we used the exact same settings for servo tuning and motion cueing. But it didn't feel like an airplane, more like a horse-drawn carriage driving down a gravel road. This time every tuft of grass on the runway could be felt while rolling on the ground and it was a perfectly floating glide while in the air. We had big grins in our faces.
I don't say that this success can be completely attributed to the P2. Theoretically, all this would also be possible using an ARM controller. But you'd have to spend much more time doing the PCB layout because you can't assign all functions to arbitrary pins. Then you'd spend even more time figuring out special tricks to get the timing right (interrupts, task scheduling...). With the smart pins and multiple cogs this is all easy and you can spend more time on the real task, the actual calculations of the motion.
And I thought the real task would be to "fly" the damned thing. I'm shocked and disappointed .
Funny you used the same tried and true protection from shorts. My favorite. i use it as a body shell as well. Also kind of works...for some time at least.
I wish we did not live half a world apart, I would love to fly it, I am afraid my license has a lot of brown around the edges as my medical cannot be renewed.
enjoy, it sounds like a super experence.
Jim
Comments
We were in a bit of a rush to make a test run before the weekend. Unfortunatelly, the 3D printer wasn't fast enough.
The difference is like day and night. When we connected the controller to the simulator software for the first time I pushed the throttle with the brakes still engaged to make the plane slightly tilt forward. First, I thought it didn't work. I had to look at the motor shaft couplings to see that the servos were actually spinning. Everything was totally silent.
So we had to improvise a little bit and built a classical fly-by-wire airwire ratsnest with a cardboard box as protection against shorts.
The hardest part was to install VSC on my laptop. There is no user friendly software to setup the paramaters, yet. Instead, everything is hardcoded into the source so I had to re-compile to adjust the resolution, velocity and direction of rotation. But we finally got it to work and... WOW!
With the other controller the "average" movements were the same and we used the exact same settings for servo tuning and motion cueing. But it didn't feel like an airplane, more like a horse-drawn carriage driving down a gravel road. This time every tuft of grass on the runway could be felt while rolling on the ground and it was a perfectly floating glide while in the air. We had big grins in our faces.
I don't say that this success can be completely attributed to the P2. Theoretically, all this would also be possible using an ARM controller. But you'd have to spend much more time doing the PCB layout because you can't assign all functions to arbitrary pins. Then you'd spend even more time figuring out special tricks to get the timing right (interrupts, task scheduling...). With the smart pins and multiple cogs this is all easy and you can spend more time on the real task, the actual calculations of the motion.
And I thought the real task would be to "fly" the damned thing. I'm shocked and disappointed .
Funny you used the same tried and true protection from shorts. My favorite. i use it as a body shell as well. Also kind of works...for some time at least.
I wish we did not live half a world apart, I would love to fly it, I am afraid my license has a lot of brown around the edges as my medical cannot be renewed.
enjoy, it sounds like a super experence.
Jim
Man, you get to have all the fun, congrats