[Flightgear-devel] DIY drones virtual UAV competition
Hi, I could use a little help from one of our aerodynamics experts. First a little background. DIYdrones.com is a group of hobbiests with an interest in building hobby / open-source uav's. Actual projects vary widely, but often they are based on small electric powered foam gliders (like an easy star.) For most people hardware costs are in the couple hundred dollar range. One of the interesting things about DIYdrones.com is that it was started by Chris Anderson who is an editor at Wired magazine. Part of his effort is an experiment into open-source hardware as well as open-source software. (And for hardware, it's the design that's open-source and free to copy and modify, it still costs money to build a physical widget.) A couple of weeks ago I did a podcast interview with Chris Anderson and Tim Trueman on the subject of using FlightGear for hardware in the loop testing. This is an area that many hobby level uav-ers haven't considered. If you are *really* bored you can dig around the diydrones.com site and probably find a link to my interview ... it's about 30-45 minutes and was done very late on a Sunday evening, so there are a couple times where the little electrons in my brain ran up against a sleeping brain cell ... I wasn't on my A game, let me just say it that way. :-) DIYdrones.com sponsors a periodic for fun contest and this time around they are thinking about doing something FlightGear based. The DIY drones contests are setup so that individuals can compete on their own and submit their results to the contest coordinator. It's based on the honor system, and avoids requiring people from around the world to travel to a central contest location. There is a thread here: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/proposed-next-t3-round If you scroll down a bit, you can see that someone found an AC3D model of an easystar glider (this is a relatively cheap and small and light and slow flying RC hobby airplane.) What I am hoping is that someone here could help put together an initial flight dynamics model configuration for the easy star. I don't have any specs, but if we have someone willing to help out, I'm sure we could get answers to questions from the diydrones community. The goal here would be to put together a reference easystar aircraft package (3d and flight dynamics models) that could be used as the basis for the DIY drones contest. Do we have anyone willing to help get an aircraft package together? (I have no idea what the licensing on the easystar ac3d model is, but worst case scenario if it isn't GPL compatible we can distribute the aircraft package separately for the diydrones contest or perhaps one of our 3d modelers would want to create our own GPL compatible easy star.) Thanks! Curt. -- Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] DIY drones virtual UAV competition
Curtis Olson wrote: If you scroll down a bit, you can see that someone found an AC3D model of an easystar glider (this is a relatively cheap and small and light and slow flying RC hobby airplane.) but makes a respectable racer if you're mounting a medium-sized, brushless three-phase motor as propulsion - like my friend did :-) Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
[Flightgear-devel] High priority: fixing the Great Lakes in FlightGear default scenery
When I originally added ground-use support to TerraGear many years ago, the Canada/US Great Lakes worked fine: we simply treated the water as a special ground use, used the DEM to get the elevation, clipped it against the VMAP0 coastlines, and for good measure, Curt had written code to average out the elevation of water areas to remove bumps, etc. The surface of Lake Superior or Lake Ontario might be a few feet high or low, but it was pretty hard to notice. Then, just before I left the project, something got badly broken in TerraGear and/or its input datasets: it changed so that any water connected to the ocean was forced down to sea level, although the real-life surfaces are as high as 600 ft MSL. Now, Chicago sits perched atop cliffs hundreds of feet high overlooking Lake Michigan, and rivers run through (non-existant) fjords. I think someone originally had a grandiose plan to build a water network, and wanted eventually to model locks, rapids, waterfalls, etc. to account for changes in water surface elevation, but that never happened, and to be honest, we should never have let the code into production until it worked. Now, quite a few years later, the Great Lakes are still broken in our default scenery, and as a result, FlightGear looks ridiculous to any new user who comes and tries flying in near cities such as Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee. Is there any reason that we can't restore the old code, and treat inland water like a (specially flattened) land use, at least until someone fixes the newer water-network code? Is there anything else we can do to address this problem? Were we forced into this because of different GIS datasets? Thanks, and all the best, David -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High priority: fixing the Great Lakes in
David Megginson wrote: [...] I think someone originally had a grandiose plan to build a water network, and wanted eventually to model locks, rapids, waterfalls, etc. to account for changes in water surface elevation, but that never happened, and to be honest, we should never have let the code into production until it worked. Haha, I guess that's been me. My plan was to use river locks and waterfalls to logically disconnect the Great Lakes area from the Atlantic Ocean, not via yet another hack in the code but instead at data level. It's still on my TODO list (anyone !?), but the actual issue is a totally different one - see below. [...] Is there anything else we can do to address this problem? Were we forced into this because of different GIS datasets? Exactly. I'm pretty certain that we never had the Great Lakes region at a reasonable elevation from an unmodified VMap0 dataset using the political boundaries as landmass - at least according to the old 'src/Prep/TGVPF/process.sh' script. The reason is simple: VMap0 defines the Great Lakes as not being covered by any political boundary - therefore it's being treated as ocean. In the meantime we've made a polygon set to seamlessly fill The Great Lakes Void - which is likely going to address the issue you've mentioned. But there are still a few other places which are presumably affected by the same cause (Caspian Sea, I guess, and probably the Dead sea as well mmmh, maybe we've already fixed these as well). Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High priority: fixing the Great Lakes in
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Martin Spott martin.sp...@mgras.net wrote: In the meantime we've made a polygon set to seamlessly fill The Great Lakes Void - which is likely going to address the issue you've mentioned. But there are still a few other places which are presumably affected by the same cause (Caspian Sea, I guess, and probably the Dead sea as well  mmmh, maybe we've already fixed these as well). That's great news -- thanks, Martin! I'll look forward to the new scenery. Right now, I can't bring myself to practice approaches at waterfront airports, with the giant cliffs all around them. All the best, David -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High Priority: fixing the Great Lakes...
On Sunday 2010-03-28 David Megginson wrote: Now, quite a few years later, the Great Lakes are still broken in our default scenery, and as a result, FlightGear looks ridiculous to any new user who comes and tries flying in near cities such as Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee. Sometimes pictures really *are* worth a thousand words. I think this is one of those times. I've put up on the Web (temporarily: they won't be there forever) three screen snaps: Please go to http://www.vex.net/~slocombe/fgfs-pics-of-CYTZ/ for pictures illustrating the problems of CYTZ (Toronto/City Centre), which is on an island in Lake Ontario just offshore from Toronto's downtown area. 1. cytz-from-08-apprch.png : CYTZ from the approach viewpoint of Runway 08 (08/26 is the principal runway of this extremely busy airport: Bombardier Dash8-Q400's take off or land about every 20 minutes, and in between that traffic Cessna 150's and 172's practise circuits or transit to/from Toronto's practice area to the East. I'm one of the student pilots these days. The fact that, in fgfs, the water is 240 feet below its real-world level is only a small part of the problem (in fact if that were the only problem one could just pretend one is practising landings on aircraft carriers). The terrain data, intersected by the water at its current level, makes the shoreline wildly wrong... 2. cytz-overhead-at-40Kft.png : This is taken with the UFO tool at 40,000 ft., looking straight down. 3. google-image-cytz.png : a snap of what Google has for a satellite shot, to compare with the previous shot. I'm not convinced that the terrain data that fgfs uses is sufficiently detailed to capture even the approximate shape of the Toronto Islands (what CYTZ is on the Western end of), let alone the Leslie Spit and docklands to the East. So I'm not sure how different this is going to look if the water-level were correct. But surely it would make a difference, and there are 700 miles of shoreline for Lake Ontario, and another 800 miles for Lake Erie: all of this would be affected by a fix. I presume the shoreline in the St. Lawrence River near Montreal must be seriously wrong too. BTW, Just For Kicks, I can fly *under* CYTZ. It doesn't seem to do me damage, and fgfs doesn't even crash! :-) Thanks everyone for the great achievement that fgfs is. It was fgfs that got me sufficiently enthused about flying to decide to get my PPL. David Slocombe Toronto Canada. -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] [Flightgear-cvslogs] CVS: data/Models/Airport B-1200.ac, 1.2,
Erik Erik Hofman wrote: Update of /var/cvs/FlightGear-0.9/data/Models/Airport In directory baron.flightgear.org:/tmp/cvs-serv32368 Modified Files: B-1200.ac BAK-12-0.ac Schopf_F110.ac TowBear_TT.ac default01.rgb eddf_lamp_t2.xml radar.ac tacan.ac Log Message: fix line endings and remove unneeded translucency In order to save your changes from getting lost with the next update, would you mind sending me a packaged version of the affected models (everything including XML and textures in a TAR or ZIP) ? Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High Priority: fixing the Great Lakes...
Quite a few years ago we had a debate, because we had to choose between two sets of shoreline data: 1. GSHSS was very nicely detailed (every little cove and point), but about 1 mile off for the Great Lakes, leaving shoreline airports either far inland or floating in the middle of a lake. 2. Vmap0 was much lower resolution (only big bays and points), but actually had the Great Lakes shorelines in roughly the right place. Since I was doing most of the TerraGear coding that year, I forced through vmap0, but a lot of people objected -- I thought it was OK for the Toronto harbourfront, but I don't remember for certain, and I don't know what FlightGear is using now. All the best, David On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 5:18 PM, David Slocombe sloco...@vex.net wrote: On Sunday 2010-03-28 David Megginson wrote: Now, quite a few years later, the Great Lakes are still broken in our default scenery, and as a result, FlightGear looks ridiculous to any new user who comes and tries flying in near cities such as Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee. Sometimes pictures really *are* worth a thousand words. I think this is one of those times. I've put up on the Web (temporarily: they won't be there forever) three screen snaps: Please go to http://www.vex.net/~slocombe/fgfs-pics-of-CYTZ/ for pictures illustrating the problems of CYTZ (Toronto/City Centre), which is on an island in Lake Ontario just offshore from Toronto's downtown area. 1. cytz-from-08-apprch.png : CYTZ from the approach viewpoint of Runway 08 (08/26 is the principal runway of this extremely busy airport: Bombardier Dash8-Q400's take off or land about every 20 minutes, and in between that traffic Cessna 150's and 172's practise circuits or transit to/from Toronto's practice area to the East. I'm one of the student pilots these days. The fact that, in fgfs, the water is 240 feet below its real-world level is only a small part of the problem (in fact if that were the only problem one could just pretend one is practising landings on aircraft carriers). The terrain data, intersected by the water at its current level, makes the shoreline wildly wrong... 2. cytz-overhead-at-40Kft.png : This is taken with the UFO tool at 40,000 ft., looking straight down. 3. google-image-cytz.png : a snap of what Google has for a satellite shot, to compare with the previous shot. I'm not convinced that the terrain data that fgfs uses is sufficiently detailed to capture even the approximate shape of the Toronto Islands (what CYTZ is on the Western end of), let alone the Leslie Spit and docklands to the East. So I'm not sure how different this is going to look if the water-level were correct. But surely it would make a difference, and there are 700 miles of shoreline for Lake Ontario, and another 800 miles for Lake Erie: all of this would be affected by a fix. I presume the shoreline in the St. Lawrence River near Montreal must be seriously wrong too. BTW, Just For Kicks, I can fly *under* CYTZ. It doesn't seem to do me damage, and fgfs doesn't even crash! :-) Thanks everyone for the great achievement that fgfs is. It was fgfs that got me sufficiently enthused about flying to decide to get my PPL. David Slocombe Toronto Canada. -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High Priority: fixing the Great Lakes...
David Megginson wrote: Quite a few years ago we had a debate, because we had to choose between two sets of shoreline data: Nowadays we're in the fortunate position of being able to merge land cover data from various sources. The foundation is still VMap0 which I've loaded into a PostGIS database, but a noticeable amount of land cover has either been edited in-place, right on the DB - or simply replaced. The names to remember in this context (in chronological order) are: Ralf Gerlich, John Holden, Christian Schmitt, Gijs de Rooy and Rainer Fischer (did I miss anyone ?). Even though there's still a huge lot to improve, these guys have already done a wonderful job so far ! If anyone feels like adding to this effort, either get in contact with Christian or John - or me. As a nice sample, look at this visual comparison. Before: http://mapserver.flightgear.org/map/?lon=-71.47911lat=41.61493zoom=11layers=0B0TTFFF After: http://mapserver.flightgear.org/map/?lon=-71.47911lat=41.61493zoom=11layers=B00TTFFF Here's the legend: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LandcoverDB_CS_Detail Cheers, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] DIY drones virtual UAV competition
On Sun, 2010-03-28 at 09:58 -0500, Curtis Olson wrote: Hi, I could use a little help from one of our aerodynamics experts. First a little background. DIYdrones.com is a group of hobbiests with an interest in building hobby / open-source uav's. Actual projects vary widely, but often they are based on small electric powered foam gliders (like an easy star.) For most people hardware costs are in the couple hundred dollar range. One of the interesting things about DIYdrones.com is that it was started by Chris Anderson who is an editor at Wired magazine. Part of his effort is an experiment into open-source hardware as well as open-source software. (And for hardware, it's the design that's open-source and free to copy and modify, it still costs money to build a physical widget.) A couple of weeks ago I did a podcast interview with Chris Anderson and Tim Trueman on the subject of using FlightGear for hardware in the loop testing. This is an area that many hobby level uav-ers haven't considered. If you are *really* bored you can dig around the diydrones.com site and probably find a link to my interview ... it's about 30-45 minutes and was done very late on a Sunday evening, so there are a couple times where the little electrons in my brain ran up against a sleeping brain cell ... I wasn't on my A game, let me just say it that way. :-) DIYdrones.com sponsors a periodic for fun contest and this time around they are thinking about doing something FlightGear based. The DIY drones contests are setup so that individuals can compete on their own and submit their results to the contest coordinator. It's based on the honor system, and avoids requiring people from around the world to travel to a central contest location. There is a thread here: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/proposed-next-t3-round If you scroll down a bit, you can see that someone found an AC3D model of an easystar glider (this is a relatively cheap and small and light and slow flying RC hobby airplane.) What I am hoping is that someone here could help put together an initial flight dynamics model configuration for the easy star. I don't have any specs, but if we have someone willing to help out, I'm sure we could get answers to questions from the diydrones community. The goal here would be to put together a reference easystar aircraft package (3d and flight dynamics models) that could be used as the basis for the DIY drones contest. Do we have anyone willing to help get an aircraft package together? (I have no idea what the licensing on the easystar ac3d model is, but worst case scenario if it isn't GPL compatible we can distribute the aircraft package separately for the diydrones contest or perhaps one of our 3d modelers would want to create our own GPL compatible easy star.) Thanks! Curt. Readme in the model zip says This Model was created for FMS and now modified by Ken Northup using AC3D and is freely distributed. Please feel free to modify as you wish using AC3D. I've started an aeromatic-ish FDM for this aircraft and tweaked the ac3d model. For some reason I had to scale it down 76.4%. Not sure what the original model units were... The model also contained a lot of cruft from some other flightsim proggy. First design decision I faced: There are no ailerons on the stock version of this model, so I decided to use the aileron control to drive the rudder so it can be flown from the joystick. Thoughts? More to follow, Ron -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] DIY drones virtual UAV competition
Ron Jensen wrote: First design decision I faced: There are no ailerons on the stock version of this model, so I decided to use the aileron control to drive the rudder so it can be flown from the joystick. Thoughts? It's not uncommon to 'pimp' this model plane by adding ailerons. Doing this for the FG model might be a way to curcumvent the dilemma, Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High Priority: fixing the Great Lakes...
Very nice work! I remember when all land cover in FlightGear (other than runways) was desert -- not sure why Curt picked a desert texture (I think it had something to do with Prescott, AZ). Next, we were able to separate land (always forest) from water. It's come a long way since then. All the best, David -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
Re: [Flightgear-devel] High Priority: fixing the Great Lakes...
David Megginson wrote: [...] Next, we were able to separate land (always forest) from water. reminds me of the history of Creation :-) Martin. -- Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are ! -- -- Download Intel#174; Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev ___ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
