Charlie's blog

I continued working with the ODE library, this time working on the Reaction Control System (RCS). The RCS in a ship is designed to control the orientation in non-atmospheric conditions. It is also used to do fine maneuvering. There are two modes: Linear for position changes in each of the three relative dimensions, and Rotational for performing orientation changes on any of the three axes.

In previous incarnations of the simulation model, I have written the physics code related to movement and rotation. Linear movement is pretty straight forward but rotation is often complicated. There are a number of different ways to represent rotation in terms of the computations, but on the display a pilot would typically want the standard Roll, Pitch, and Yaw (also known as heading, bank, and attitude). These calculations require matrix math and or use of Quaternions to prevent difficulties when using combined rotations on multiple axes.

I was checking out a link to a [http://paia.com/ web site] for an analog synthesizer which also has Theremin Kits. In poking around more, I found that they have a kit for a MIDI drum brain unit which accepts input signals and converts them into midi data. I also checked out this article: http://paia.com/ProdArticles/drumsens.htm

Now that the communications are working it is back to functional aspects.

There are five available stations, Engineering, Helm, Navigation, Science, and Tactical.

Last night I took a trip to the location of the Spaceroom to test out some of the software on the actual machines and to get some photos of the room (as I have been promising).

The photos are available at Spaceroom Photos. Just a few pictures to hopefully give the flavor of the room.

Software testing revealed a few things, primarily in the configuration. One issue was due to a missing XML role config file. I had to recreate it from memory because I did not have it on my laptop either.