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Hardware Interface Plugin help

Discussion in 'DIY Motion Simulator Building Q&A / FAQ' started by bigboros, Oct 17, 2012.

  1. bigboros

    bigboros New Member

    Joined:
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    Hi Guys

    First of all may I say that the creations on this site are incredible and inspirational.
    There is some great talent pooled here and I hope that I can tap off a little to kick my project along.

    My intention is to build a 3DOF motion platorm mainly for racing sims.
    I have at my disposial a bunch of indrustrial Servo motors, drives, power supplies and gear boxes sitting around and I intend to utiluse these in my simulator.

    The problem I have is my servo drives have +10V to -10V DC velocity input signal requirement. 0v being no motion (Stopped).
    I have a Galil DMC control board that provides suitable velocity signal to control the drives. All the Galil controller needs is the position commands and it takes care of all the motion.

    The Galil board is designed to have serial and ethernet communication but for some reason the serial comms is not working.
    If it was I would be able to use the USO to allow X-Sim to communicate the calculated position commands to the controller.

    So I am stuck with ethercat communication.

    I have the BBF software (Demo/time limited) and this has the ability to communicate with a Galil controller over ethernet.
    It's all seems to be working fine on Xplane and MSX but as I stated above my interest is racing sims.
    X-Sim seems full capable of doing what I wish, all I think is needed is a plugin to pass the calculated positions from X-sim to the Galil software (GalilTools)

    I've had limited exposure to C++. But from what I can work out it should be a relatively simple plugin.
    There is no PID, PWM or any calculations required, the Galil controller does all this.
    All that needs to be done is to build a string with the position commands of the actuators and then pass this through a connection to GalilTools.

    Here is a link to the GalilTools Communication Library and the command to pass the string.
    http://irtfweb.ifa.hawaii.edu/~tcs3/tcs ... ml#command

    I have looked through the examples of interface plugins provided in X-sim but am unable to work out how to access the individual position commands to allow me to build the string.

    So my question is how do I go about getting the actuator positions from X sim from within the plugin?

    I thank you in advance for you assistance.

    Boros
    bigboros, Oct 17, 2012
    #1