A little update...

I have been busy with other projects lately but now I am back to simulator workshop again.
What other projects, you say? Well... Let's say the house is now almost completely remodeled.
Kitchen, bathrooms, backyard... Long project but now it is done.

I have also been experimenting with Arduino (http://www.arduino.cc/) and I have to admit it is easy to use.

Easy or not, I think I will use my own PCB in simulator gauges. But for other smaller tasks...
Took one night to create this with Arduino:

Some may ask "what the heck is that?" so a little explanation may be required.
Contraption you see in picture controls a heated motorcycle jacket liner. The jacket liner uses kanthal wire as a heating element and power is requlated by using MOSFET and pwm-signal.

Got that working in a snap but then imagination took over and... Now I just need to combine those two red boards. Left one has potentiometer and MOSFETS to control the heat, right one has 18B20 temperature sensor, HIH-4030 humidity sensor and uOLED-128-G1 display.
My goal is to combine those two so that system will adjust the heat setting automatically based on ambient temperature and air humidity. Display will display something too.

But now back to simulator project. More to follow soon, stay tuned.

Ah, about those "other projects"... This is one of them too: http://mitaviela.blogspot.com/ (mixed Finnish and English)

Too quiet...

has it been.

I recently found a neat way to control regular servos.
PCB designed to replace the internal electronics of reqular hobby servo, controllable over i2c bus: "Openservo" from SparkFun.

So now the instrument control "chain" looks like this:

It is a mes... I mean a mix of ethernet, CAN-bus and i2c-bus.

Why? Because of mentioned "Openservo" controller.

I found it quite difficult to control several servos at the same time using timers to create PWM signals while CAN-bus was sending/receiving data.

Now CAN is handled by interrupt routines and servos (gauges) are handled with dedicated MCU located in Openservo PCB listening the i2c bus.

Why I am not using i2c to control all the instruments via USB-i2c-adapter? I don't know, perhaps I do not like i2c that much (and I already have couple of other projects designed around CAN nodes...).

Why ethernet