To everyone who has helped, thanks. My goal is to model the behaviors and capabilities of the Digitrak with as much accuracy is possible given my ability and the limitations of Flight Gear. I doubt it would be possible or desirable to model the electrical characteristics of the sensors or reverse engineer the actual code. The short term goal is to model the basic behavior of the autopilot, to get the basic modes working, then see what is possible. My long term goal is to model the building blocks, the gyros, the magnetic compass and let those feed into the autopilot's calculations. This will help model the autopilot without depending on any of the other instruments. The ultimate goal would be to model it well enough to use as a training tool.
I will continue to use the orientation properties from the flight model as a way of modeling the digital gyro input until I can look into coding my own gyro. Flight Gear has made it possible to do more than put a face on a standard autopilot, for which I am grateful. Although the controller derived from the standard autopilot may not model the actual Digitrak in detail, I think that with the exception of turbulence handling the behavior should be very similar to other autopilots for most normal capabilities. Holding a heading is holding a heading, making standard turn is making a standard turn. The main difference is the GPS intensive nature of the navigation. The latest version is http://www.city-gallery.com/vpilot/flightgear/digitrak-debug-0.0.7.zip which supports the GPS Track and Heading Hold modes (to get the latter you must fail the gps by setting gps-valid to 'off' in properties. The next capability to tackle is following a flight plan. Feel free to comment or make corrections, Steve _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
