RE: Which First Sim, Phoenix or AFPD?
I haven't been able to see AFPD in action (no one around here sells it and there isn't a demo available), but I picked up a copy of Phoenix the other day and it's fantastic! Taught myself to fly a 2 channel (rudder and elevator) glider about twenty years ago, but that's the extent of my RC experience. So when I started training on the ClearView sim I was awful. Couldn't fly those planes to save my life. But I kept working at it and I got better. After several weeks of practice I took my *real* RC plane out to an abandoned road and had a nice little flight. My next real flight was even better, including a perfect landing where the plane rolled to a stop at my feet. That would not have been possible without my sim time. My 4th flight was great, but I overshot the runway and hit a pole. That convinced me to a get a more full-featured simulator and as I said I'm REALLY happy with Phoenix so far. I turned up the simulation speed and set up a light wind and some turbulence, and the planes fly just like my real plane. AFPD is supposed to be a great plane simulator, too, but I've heard some of the models are a bit "floaty". There is a rumor that the Phoenix folks are working on an update to the fixed wing flight physics -- so even though I'm satisfied now, I'm looking forward to that.
Posted on: 3/7/2008 1:36 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=7188388

RE: G4 or AeroFly Proffesional Deluxe?
[quote]I guess what I am asking is after being out of the hobby for a few years, as well as never having flown a real aerobat, would I be able to do it after mastering it on a sim like my G4?[/quote] I used to fly RC gliders about 20 years ago. Slope soaring, just 2 channels, rudder and elevator. This past Christmas my wife bought me a ParkZone Trojan, which is a 4 channel aircraft and that's how I found out about RC Flight Simulators. (I knew I was going to need some serious help.) My first sim flights were awful. Couldn't keep the plane in the air and we won't even talk about my landings. But I kept working at it and I got better. After a couple of weeks of practice I took my new plane to a construction site with a lot of empty space and a nice road. The takeoff was a little scary as I scraped a wingtip on the ground, but I managed to land the plane in the field about 50 yards away! Hardly a scratch on it! The next flight, a few weeks later, was almost perfect. The plane landed on the street and rolled to a stop right at my feet. The following weekend I made another nice flight, but had a scary moment on the landing. Still no scratches. The weekend after that I had a perfect flight going, was really feeling comfortable, but I overshot the runway, tried to takeoff again and hit a light pole. Totalled the engine, though the plane is fine. Make what you will of that story. But one thing is for certain. If I had tried to fly that plane with NO sim experience I would have needed a bag to gather up all the pieces.
Posted on: 2/29/2008 1:57 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=7148932

RE: I'm Freezing My Propellors Off!
Thanks for the help! I actually purchased one of those devices to help you jump start your car (as a couple of you recommended) and it works like a charm! Found one for only $46.00. Of course, today at a drug store I saw a little device for charging cell phones. It was a tiny black box (not much bigger than a matchbox) with an electrical plug on one side and a cigarette lighter receptacle on the other side. $12.00 Not sure if that would have worked or not...
Posted on: 2/11/2008 2:44 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "Electric General Discussion"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=7056967

I'm Freezing My Propellors Off!
My wife bought me a ParkZone T-28 Trojan for Christmas (my first RC plane in 20 years) and I'm having a blast with it but I'm REALLY tired of sitting in my freezing cold car while the battery charges. This whole LiPo battery thing is a bit intimidating. I'm very careful NOT to leave it unattended, but as it did not come with an AC adaptor that means I get to sit out in my car. And it's been cold! I figured I could find something that plugged into the wall on one end, and had a cigarette lighter on the other end -- but so far I've been to a hobby shop, three hardware stores and Radio Shack. No luck. Actually, Radio Shack has an AC to DC converter (with a cigarette lighter plug) but it's only 1 amp and the ParkZone charger is looking for 3 amps. Would that still work? It would be slower, but we could keep an eye on it while watching TV in the evening...
Posted on: 2/5/2008 6:50 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "Electric General Discussion"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=7029740

Second Flight Story! (And some questions!)
My wife bought me a Parkzone Trojan T-28 for Christmas and I took it up for the second time today. I haven't flown RC for almost 20 years (and that was 2 channel slope soaring), so I've been practicing (a LOT) with a couple of the simulators, and it seems to have paid off because I had a great flight and I made a PERFECT landing, right in the middle of the road. The aircraft rolled to a stop right at my feet! It ended well, but things got off to a VERY rocky start. 1. As I was putting the plane in the car, I plugged the battery into the charger. I'm pretty sure I hit the Start button, but two hours later (at the flying site) the charger started blinking "error" at me. So now I wonder if I hit the Start button too early or something. I unplugged everything and then hit start again. This time I verified that it was flashing red and I waited another hour. It was still balancing when I finally unplugged it. QUESTION 1: Is it okay to drive while the battery is charging? QUESTION 2: Is it okay to unplug the battery before it is finished charging? (I had been sitting outside for almost three hours at this point and my wife needed me home.) 2. When the plane took off it rocketed into the sky. I tried to turn and give it some up elevator, but the plane started doing loops. I adjusted the elevator trim as far as I could and it stopped looping, but for the rest of the flight I had to keep the right stick pushed forward to keep the plane flying level. In fact, when I landed I turned the engine completely off and as the plane was rolling along on the ground the front kept bucking up in the air. I gave it a little down elevator and it stopped. QUESTION 3: The Trojan is supposed to be RTF, so I'm not sure why the elevator is off. I did a pre-flight visual check and the elevator appeared to be okay... Anyway, how do I adjust it to fix this? Thanks!
Posted on: 2/2/2008 9:47 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "Park Flyers & Backyard Flyers"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=7015035

RE: RC Flight Simulator Comparison Chart...
Frostybeard and flyX: I didn't have room for those other sims in the chart, but I did add links to them in the space below the chart. Driftair: Well, I purchased ClearView before I even started the chart. I haven't ordered one of the expensive sims yet, I'm still gathering data. Last weekend I went down to the local hobby shop and I spent about ten minutes playing around with G4 and FS One. Maybe it was just the monitors/setup, but I was a lot more impressed with RealFlight's G4. It felt better, and it looked a lot better.
Posted on: 1/23/2008 12:37 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6954306

RE: My autonomous home robot...
I just added a new video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf7239VZjGk Whenever Cybert moved he constantly reported back with the distance reading from his forward facing sensor. If he detected an obstacle he performed the following actions: 1. Stop 2. Announce, "Oops. There is something in the way. Please move." 3. Wait for a few seconds. 4. If the obstruction is still there, scan left and right, taking distance readings 5. Pick the best direction based on the sensor data 6. Navigate past the item (hopefully) 7. Recalculate a path to the destination (using a simple path finding algorithm I wrote) We kept the house pretty clean, so I think I only saw this behavior kick in once when one of the dogs got in his way. When the robot asked Brisby to move, the loud sound made him scamper away. So Cybert didn't even have to navigate around, he just kept going forward.
Posted on: 1/13/2008 1:08 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Robotics and Autonomous Robots"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6900218

RE: My autonomous home robot...
Okay, a quick story that some of you may find entertaining... When I wrote Cybert's speech routines I decided to give him "moods", as well. I won't go into the details but Cybert would start each day in a "normal" mood, then his sensor data would cause his mood to change. If he was in a dark room for too long, for example, he would start to get a little afraid. And he would get a little angry whenever he bumped into something. He had 9 different moods and every time I came up with something for him to say I'd write 9 different versions of it... one for each mood. I even changed his voice to match his mood. (If he was depressed his voice would get sort of low and monotone, for example.) Several weeks after writing the mood stuff (and never really testing it), I decided to create his alarm clock behavior that you can see in the video. I did most of my work at night so I always had his voice turned off so as not to wake my wife or daughter. When I finally got the behavior working I set everything up and went to bed. Cybert wasn't scheduled to wake us up until 7:30 or so, but I was awake at 6:45 because I was so excited. The clock on the bedside table hit 7:30 and less than a minute later I heard Cybert navigating down the hallway. He rolled into our bedroom and turned to face the bed. Then he told us to wake up, asked about the news and weather, asked about our stock portfolio (our stocks were up that morning, which was an added bonus!), and finally he asked about waking up our daughter. I said, "Yes" and off he went down the hallway again, stopping in front of Autumn's door. Everything was working perfectly! I was thrilled! Cybert asked Autumn to get out of bed, then he "knocked" on her door 3 times and waited for the door to open. Our daughter HATED to get up in the morning so she didn't budge. Five minutes passed and since he didn't detect the door opening, my program looped back to try again. Only this time, Cybert's voice was deep and loud. And instead of his previous friendly prompting he said, "Okay! That's IT! GET OUT OF THAT BED RIGHT NOW!!!" He sounded pissed off!!! At first I thought I had some kind of strange bug, but then I remembered his mood programming and I realized that "knocking" on the door had caused his mood to change from "normal" to "angry", which made my alternate dialogue kick in. Hmm... I guess that could help explain why Autumn never liked my robot. ;-) Anyway, it was sort of a cool "emergent behavior" and I chuckled about it for days.
Posted on: 1/13/2008 1:02 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Robotics and Autonomous Robots"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6898711

RE: My autonomous home robot...
Just wanted to answer a few questions: The "checking in at the wall" stuff was all created by Probotics (the makers of the "Cye" robot I bought). I'm not sure if you can still buy these robots, but the website is here: http://www.personalrobots.com/ Cye came with his own software and fortunately they made all of his programming functions accessible via .OCX. I wrote a Visual Basic program that monitored his sensors, handled his navigation (using the map of our upstairs), and took care of his voice, personality, and other features. Once I had his navigation working (which turned out to be much easier than I thought), it took me about 2 minutes to add a couple of small buttons to my program. The first made him automatically undock and come into the office near my computer, and the second made him return to his charger. This was really handy! One other note... In the video it looks like Cybert is responding to my commands. Actually, he's simply responding to *any* sound. When he would ask us if we would like to hear the news and weather, Cybert would "listen" for a few seconds. If his sound sensor didn't pick up a significant change in the room's volume he would take that as a "no" and his program would continue. If he DID pick up a sound he would interpret that as "yes". So we would always say -- in a loud voice -- "YES". But we could have clapped, barked, or done anything else to make a loud noise and it would have worked just as well.
Posted on: 1/13/2008 2:40 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Robotics and Autonomous Robots"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6898678

RE: My autonomous home robot...
Cybert navigates using ded-reckoning. The wheels are "spiked" to avoid slippage and they have highly accurate sensors that can track precisely how far each one turns. Thus, if the charger is 0,0 and the robot receives a command to back up for half a second, the movement of each wheel allows me to keep track of how far the robot backed up. And if one wheel moves a few centimeters farther than the other wheel I know that the robot's orientation has changed a bit (a slight "turn"). I made a map of our upper floor and using this ded-reckoning data I can track Cybert's movements. Errors can occur over time, of course, which is why he "checks in" at the wall. (Since the wall is on the map, this allows me to reset his position, at least along one axis.) The charger is always put in a corner so the robot can "check in" on both adjacent walls. This works perfectly! As Cybert moves through the environment, I programmed him to use his forward facing distance sensor to look for objects. If he detects something in front of him -- which obviously wasn't on my map -- he scans it left and right and then blocks that area as unpassable before re-calculating a new path. It worked pretty well! The disadvantage of all of this, of course, is that you need to make a map first. And if someone ever picked him up he'd quickly get hopelessly lost. Incidentally, the Cye robot came with all the ded-reckoning software and a powerful radio modem. Most of the processing -- and all of my additional programming -- took place on my PC. In fact, Cybert has a voice because I hooked up a 2 way radio to my PC's speaker for the text-to-speech processing I needed.
Posted on: 1/10/2008 8:47 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Robotics and Autonomous Robots"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6887715

My autonomous home robot...
I have been interested in robotics since I was very young, so six or seven years ago I set out to make a fun "pet" robot with some useful behaviors. I named the result of my experiments "Cybert". You can see him in action below: [link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYh-AtoLI8Q]Cybert (YouTube video)[/link] I made a number of improvements to his "alarm clock" behavior but before I could get another video my hard drive crashed and I lost some of his programming. I was swamped at work at the time and just didn't have the time or inclination to rebuild everything from backups. (Improvements not shown in the video: he moved about 50% faster and had a more playful and friendly voice... among other changes.) [b]MORE ABOUT CYBERT:[/b] I started with a commercial robot I found online. ("Cye" from Probotics.) I added a head, an IR sensor, a light sensor and gave him a computer synthesized voice. Then I wrote my own navigation and "personality" routines. One of Cybert's behaviors was called "Alarm Clock". Every morning he would do the following: (some of this is in the video) 1. "Wake up" at whatever time we specified. 2. Download the latest news and weather, and look up our stock portfolio. 3. Convert the downloaded data into text files (to be read using text-to-speech technology). 4. Undock from his charger and roll down the hallway, avoiding any obstacles or obstructions. 5. Stop at the foot of our bed and issue a random greeting: "Good morning! It's Tuesday, December 3. Time to get up!" 6. Ask if we would like to hear the current news, weather, and be updated on our stock portfolio. 7. Ask if he should wake up our daughter. 8. If we replied "Yes" to #6 Cybert would read the information out loud. 9. If we replied "Yes" to #7 Cybert would navigate back down the hallway and stop in front of our daughter's door. 10. After stopping he would issue a random greeting, back up and "knock" on the door 3 times by bumping it. 11. Following #10, Cybert would back up, stop, and wait for the door to open. (Using his range finding sensor on the door.) 12. If the door did not open after 5 minutes, Cybert would loop back and knock again. 13. When the door eventually opened, Cybert would back up and issue a random welcome: "There you are! What a great day!" 14. The greeting finished, Cybert would would navigate back to the spare bedroom and plug into his charger. This ran flawlessly for about a month. He never missed a day and never missed his charger! Hmm. I think I may be a GEEK! ;-)
Posted on: 1/10/2008 7:39 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Robotics and Autonomous Robots"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6887300

RE: RC Flight Simulator Comparison Chart...
Flyx: The FMS page didn't mention anything about Vista support, so I assumed that it wouldn't work with Vista. I'll do some more research on this and update the page accordingly. Regarding the other sims, I wanted to keep the width of my page around 1000 pixels so that anyone with a 1024x768 display would be able to see everything without having to scroll. Plus, I found very few forum posts about those other simulators. If I get more feedback about this I'll try to figure out some way to include them. Thanks for bringing them to my attention. The horizontal sorting was sort of happenstance. G4 was just released so when I started to gather all my information it went in first. I initially intended to focus on the high end simulators only, but then I decided to include ClearView and FMS... so they wound up at the end. Other than that, it's just random. ;-)
Posted on: 1/6/2008 5:24 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6861894

RC Flight Simulator Comparison Chart...
My wife surprised me with a ParkZone T-28 Trojan for Christmas! (I'm VERY excited.) Unfortunately, I haven't flown RC for almost 20 years, so before heading out to the field I figured I should hone my rusty skills using one of the new RC Flight Simulators. But which one to choose? There are lots of excellent programs available! [b]I've been researching these sims almost every night since Christmas, and I finally decided to compile all my notes and web links into a comprehensive chart to make my analysis a little easier. I thought others might find this information useful, too, so I put the chart online: [link=http://www.emptynestgames.com/rc_sim_chart.html]Sim Comparison Chart[/link][/b] If you visit this page, please let me know if you discover any mistakes or problems -- I want to make sure that I am presenting the most accurate information possible. (You can contact me with a reply here, or you can send an e-mail to the address listed on the page.) Thanks!
Posted on: 1/5/2008 7:40 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6856683

Reflex XTR - How many aircraft?
I'm trying to figure out how many aircraft come with Reflex XTR. I saw a review that said there are 18 fixed wing planes and 17 helicopters. Is that right? How many gliders are available in the box? (I know that additional models can be downloaded/purchased.) Thanks!
Posted on: 1/3/2008 5:31 PM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "RC Flight Simulator Software"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6848779

How many aircraft come with AFPD?
I'm evaluating the top RC Flight Simulators out there and I'm trying to figure out how many aircraft come with AFPD. (I know that more can be downloaded.) How many planes? How many helicopters? How many gliders? Thanks!
Posted on: 1/3/2008 1:37 AM by Author "Cybert99" in the forum "Ikarus AeroFly Pro and Aerofly Pro Deluxe"
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/fb.asp?m=6845771