Objects in Space

Video

The Meters have Landed!

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Well one of them has anyway, 2 days ahead of schedule! I rushed into work with arduino in hand to test it with a coworker. (I get most of my items shipped to my workplace)

Here it is in action at my house

I am pleased to report it works natively with my code without any modification. In this video you can see it represent my total available ship power. The only small issue is that the needle isn’t perfectly smooth in its motion. this can be explained by me using rounded integers as a PWM value. this may be fixed by substituting my custom made math formula in favor using the map() function I mentioned in my previous post… but tbh i’m just nitpicking.

I also started drafting up some console designs this morning. I would love for all the panels to be nice and close and within arms reach, mimicking the feel of a somewhat bulkier fighter jet cockpit…. I foresee a lot of complicated cutting angles in my future! More to report on that later. I cant wait tor my second meter to arrive and have them both runing in tandem. I’ll also have to start looking into taking them apart and making a custom meter faceplate, fun stuff ahead!

Status

Where I’m at now.

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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.

Hello world!

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Decided to resurrect this blog for now…. mainly to serve as a place to post my progress in building an arduino console for the game “Objects in Space“.

An arduino pulling data from the game to display on an LCD

I figured it would be neat to keep my progress all in one place so I can go back and look at it one day. Anyway, that’s all i’ve got for now. Stay posted!