Status

Where I’m at now.

So in my adventures with this arduino project I’ve mainly been doing system testing by building small circuits. I am going to use some panel meters to display my ships batteries and power flow. I bought two 5v meters from aliexpress for this purpose. They have yet to arrive but I THINK I have come up with some code that will work. The game outputs the data in two ranges. 0 to 100 and -100 to 100. Initially I figured I would need to mathematically convert those ranges to 0 to 255 so I can use PWM to drive the meters. I spent some time putting a system in place to convert the data…….. then the next day I discovered arduino already has a method of doing this built it. Behold the map() function. Oh well, I’ll switch it over later.

I also was able to drive a MAX7219 seven segment display to display my ships current heading.

Initially I thought this would be the hardest thing to code because of the way the LedControl.h library works. However I discovered the DigitLedDisplay.h it provides a super simple way do display multi digit numbers and even custom characters via binary. I want to have a bunch of these displays display things like, ship heading, motion heading, player money etc.

I do have some other hardware on the way as well such as torpedo buttons with safety covers, more displays, meters, and some minor tools. Oh! And a pair of magnetic Reed switches for a cool idea I have but more on that later down the road. :3

Today I also bought myself a decent jigsaw…. it was a long time coming hehe. I suppose I’ll have to get some of the structural MDF soon. Having the materials really helps me to plan… weirdly enough.