Also just wondering if there’s any other FlightGear-ers around LCA this year? (apart from those who I already know). We could have a little chat, or maybe some hacking/debugging/troubleshooting sessions? Or even some multiplay fun?

See you all at LCA!

Share and enjoy…

It was pretty exciting to meet for the first time with a few people who I have known online for quite a while. George (or Gorilla) from the FlightGear gang, Leeds I know from #handhelds.org, and Endy from the ScummVM team showing off the latest version that has AGI support (for some of the old Sierra games like Space Quest I). Looking forward to his lightning talk at the Gaming Miniconf tomorrow.

Apparently Jeff ended up demonstrating the Wii in the Gnome miniconf (which I have missed). I reckon he should have demo using the Wiimote on Linux, which is pretty easy to setup. Or maybe that should be in the Gaming miniconf… :)

On the other hand, I was having weird trouble with the wireless on my laptop. It’s a Intel Centrino PRO/Wireless 2200BG, and I was using the ipw2200 module with the corresponding firmware. For some reasons it wasn’t able to get an IP from DHCP most of the time. I managed to get an IP once, but it dropped out pretty much straight away. I tried setting the same IP I got statically but it was only partially working (DNS working, for example, but nothing else worked, which was expected).

After consulting Jamie and John a bit they reckoned my wireless somehow kept dropping packets. And to be honest I haven’t actually use the wireless much on this laptop. I have no idea whether it’s a hardware/radio/firmware/driver problem or what. I ended up using my CF wifi card and it worked beautifully.

Anyone in the conference is welcomed to fix it for me :)

Took fewer photos than I wanted to today, but anyway they can be found here. I’ll try to put up new photos there for each LCA day.

With thanks to WMD, you could use the Wiimote under Linux fairly easily. For those who don’t know Wiimote talks to the Wii console via bluetooth. So it works with any computer with bluetooth as well.

People have been using the Wiimote on the computers in all sorts of different ways. As a guitar (Wiitar), as a drum machine, for games like Counter Strike, a virtual light sabre, etc. As for me, using the Wiimote with a flightsim, like FlightGear, would naturally be the first thing I wanna try.

The Wiimote has three accelerometers for the three axes. I’ve modified slightly the WMD script to send the X and Z force to the uinput device as the absolute coordinates. jscal then takes care of the calibration of the two axes. Then I changed the commandMap in the script to send BTN_0 to BTN_9 from all the buttons on the Wiimote.

On the FlightGear side all I need is to write a joystick definition XML for the Wiimote. I’ve also made the ‘B’ button to be the modifier. For example I have arrow Up and Down for throttle, Left and Right for the rudder. Then if I hold down ‘B’, Up Down Left Right become panning the viewport. ‘1′ and ‘2′ for changing views, ‘+’ and ‘-’ for zooming in and out, ‘A’ for brakes and gears. All set. Now I can fasten my seatbelt^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwrist strap, sit back and ready for take off.

Updated 5th Jan 2007: Here is a patch against WMD SVN repository. Like I said it’s pretty hacky at the moment. And you definitely have to use jscal to calibrate it before it will behave sanely. Also you probably want to make changes to the commandMap in wmd/Config.py to map more buttons.

And for those FlightGearers out there, here is the Wiimote joystick XML config I’ve made.

Here’s a video of FlightGear + Wiimote in action:

The quickest hack I did was the GE version FGMap, which shows a moving map of all the online pilots on the FG MP servers. It is basically a very simple change with the FGMap CGI that translate MP server info into XML, only this time it outputs KML. Very simple and straight forward, nothing fancy at all. Check it out by opening this file in GE (if no one is on the server, you’ll see nothing! Check FGMap too).

Quickly I found this Collada exportor plugin for Blender. As a test I loaded the C172P aircraft AC3D model from FG into Blender, followed by a few trail-and-error and I figured out what I need to export for GE: 1) Convert all faces to triangles, 2) Export Triangles, Disable Physics, Use UV Image and optionally Use Relative Paths.

According to the KML tutorial I have to pack up the .dae file together with the textures, along with a textures.txt for textures path mapping. However I discovered you could actually alter the path referenced in the .dae file to a local jpeg file, or even an HTTP URL.

So now I’ve got GE to show a 3D model of an aircraft from FG. Next is to get FG to talk to GE. There are many ways (network, serial port, etc) in FG you can export real time flight data. To make things easier for now, I’ve set it up to export simply latitude, longitude, altitude, pitch, roll, heading to a file (or actually a fifo), then I wrote a little program to read and output a KML file for GE to read. Then on the GE side, I have to create a KML with a NetworkLink to refresh the actual FG KML.

Now, problems. It seems even if I set the refresh time to be 0 seconds, and I can see GE refreshing the link continuously, on screen it still only updates the position/orientation about once per second. It could well be a GE internal limitation (or feature). The bottom line is, we need a sane way to feed data into GE.

Another thing is I can never get GE to “follow” the aircraft properly. It’s either not panning faster enough, or it will go kinda crazy and jitter a lot. Guess I’m not a GE/KML yet. I need to test it more and tidy up my codes/scripts/things a bit and I’ll put them up.

Nevertheless, it’s kind of fun to “fly FG inside GE”.

Screenshots of FlightGear running side by side with Google Earth, whereby FG sending data to GE and showing the 3D aircraft. Possibly more screenshots here

KSFO

Hong Kong with Computamaps Hong Kong 3D models

Also I’ve added external links in the airport info box to World Aero Data and AirNav (for U.S. airports).

And so one thing leads to another. I setup Xinerama for the 2 screens. I played with DMX across the 3 screens for a bit. It’s nice but for some reasons it’s not doing direct rendering for GLX, neither the local nor the non-local clients.

And then the most obvious and exciting thing to do is to run multi-head FlightGear. As my setup is 3-screen-on-2-machines, normally you’d simply run one FlightGear on each machine. However my 1-screen-machine is rather old and slow, and not much memory (Pentium 2 w/256MB ram). So I ended up running two instances of FlightGear on the 2-screen-machine (Pentium 4 w/1GB ram) and forwarding the display onto the other (by setting DISPLAY). Its startup time is a lot faster this way.

When I have the time I should play with Chromium as well…

The Golden Gate Bridge across 3 screens

Flying over San Francisco

I want to thank Stanley again for the trouble, and probably any sorts of other things he had to do for this move.

Though, still need to wait for Curt to update the DNS for mpserver02.flightgear.org and mpmap02.flightgear.org, as he’s always very very busy. So if you need to use the FlightGear server on my box, you could just use pigeond.net 5000/5002, and this url for the FGMap.

And for our fellow FlightGear pilots, that would mean mpserver02.flightgear.org and mpmap02.flightgear.org would not work for a little bit when we’re moving.

We got quite a bit of jittering but we managed to get quite a few awesome videos. shavlir also did a pretty cool aerobatics at the end when we realized we’re not able to do a proper refueling with the Harrier due to some “technical reasons” :)

Enjoy!

• Harrier formation flying
• KC135 being chased by others
• OV10 formation flying

So I bought myself a 2GB CF card when I was in HK months ago. And I’ve finally finished setting Linux up on it. Host name “Pikkoro” (yes, yet another machine named after Dragon Ball characters), got Debian Etch (testing) installed, have it booting and running my own Linux system using a USB-CF card reader.

For those who are not familiar with the idea of a “live” system, it is basically an operating system (Linux in this case) installed on any media that can be used to boot on a computer. We all know the common setup of your computer booting the OS installed on your harddisk. So your harddisk is “bootable”. These days most computers can boot not only from a harddisk, but also from a CD/DVD, or a USB storage device (aka USB drive/stick). A live system would mean the OS/system can be run without installation. It won’t touch your harddisk (unless you want to).

So in my case, I have Linux installed and setup on my CF card, which can be plugged to a computer via a USB-CF card reader. The reason why i didn’t use a USB stick/drive is so I can use/read it on my iPAQ too, which has a CF slot.

Getting a Linux live system to work is pretty easy if you’re familiar with how Linux boots and how Debian works. Nevertheless I did some searches and reading on what other people have been doing, and I found this mini guide. What interested me is the localepurge package in Debian, which saved me a some disk spaces.

One of many things during the process was picking a window manager (notice how I said “window manager”, but not “desktop environment” :) I’ve been an AfterStepper (1.8) for a long long time. When I was doing FGLive I played with fluxbox a bit and I liked it. So I’ve decided to give it a go. After fiddling with it for a while, it’s official, fluxbox is now default on my Linux live CF. Its tab feature is probably one of the coolest. My only complaint so far is it not able to switch virtual desktop by mouse, and the fact that it only has concept of linear virtual desktops it seems.

Anyway, I’m now happy that I can carry around my own Linux system anywhere I go…

At the moment you can either search for a navaid (airport, VOR, NDB, FIX) by its code/name, or you can have it showing you all navaids in the current map view.

All navaids data are from FlightGear, which uses X-Plane’s data. I have stored the data in a database, which FGMap talks to via AJAX.

There are a few things that i haven’t done yet. That includes proper ILS/OM/MM/IM/GS drawing, heliport, airway, etc. I might also add real time metar reports to airports later.

Anyway, feel free to play with it, and leave me some feedbacks.

Here are two screenshots of FGMap navaids in action.

Over KOAK - Metropolitan Oakland Intl

Over VHHH - Hong Kong Intl

To find out more about FGLive, see here, and make sure you read the README as well.

See screenshots and videos of FlightGear here.

At the same time I did some “sightseeing” around, and checking out one of my favorite buildings, currently the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101. Then I noticed the difference (pretty obvious) between the satellite images from GMap v1 and v2. The one from v1 is in fact newer than v2. The one in v2 is still being built!

GMap v1

GMap v2

And so I started off doing it. It’s heaps of fun, not to mention finding out all those bugs with IE. M$ is very kind, they always do things that make people laugh. This always gives me a chance to revise a lot with Javascript.

I also ended up writing my own routines for map overlays displaying plane markers and info, instead of using the GMAPI’s GMarker. A bit more flexible, and it does exactly what I want.

There is time when Javascript is useful, and there is time where it’s just overkill. IMHO, Javascript is useful for writing “web app”. Same as using Flash, or Java applet. But btw this does NOT mean every website should be bloody web app!!

And there you go, the FlightGear server online map. A couple of FlightGearers have been using it as a flying map and as a simple ATC radar. If it’s the right time you’ll see us flying!

I’ve got plans to add more features, like airports/navids lookup. And of course, improving the usability and UI is always on the plate. Comments are also welcomed…

Also thanks to everyone who has helped me with testing and giving suggestions to the page. (ampere, AJ, thorben, vivian, gorilla, Surge, johnh51, MasseR, etc)