Monday, May 08, 2006
Servo control from flightsim
I created a small C program which connects to Microsoft FS 2002 via FSUIPC 2.96 (free), reads indicated airspeed, calculates delay constant and sends it to servo control circuit using RS232 if it needs to be changed. It worked remarkably well. The FSUIPC SDK is really well documented, it was quite easy to create this small interface program. You can imagine my joy when the servo horn moved as the airspeed indicator moved on the screen! Well, the physical movement is constrained to 120 degrees since no gearset or anything like that was used in the simple setup. Still, it is clearly visible that I have to work on more precise timing since the servo horn moved in relatevily big jumps. This would be much more emphasized if it would be geared to 1:3 to allow an almost full turn of the airspeed indicator needle.