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Now that I can steal Kat’s camera (she’s asleep, will never know ), I can put together some shots of a ‘little’ project I’ve been working the past month or so…

As I spend quite a bit of time playing flight simulator on the PC, using the mouse to click buttons to change radio frequencies, control the GPS, or even just flick switches to turn on or off navigation lights doesn’t quite cut it compared to sitting in the cockpit of a real airplane. This realisation materialised long before I actually took the intro flight in the Cessna 152 last month There are people who literally spend thousands of dollars and hundreds (if not thousands) of hours rebuilding complete Boeing 737 or Airbus A319 flight decks which look amazing, though a little difficult to accomplish out here. Plus, you’re pretty much pigeon-ed into flying that one particular type of aircraft. The in-between are companies like GoFlight or SimKits which build + sell individual panel components to connect together allowing to utilise them as you see fit and for controlling any aircraft you wish to load up in flight simulator. Again, fantastic units, but still more than a little pricey at $110 plus shipping for a basic 8-button or switch panel.

Since I can’t complain about not having time to build something similar myself and being able to pick + choose the various electrical components myself from various suppliers online, I er, did:

It still needs a couple of sheets of balsa wood for the top parts of each panel which I’ll get in Anchorage next month, but everything is functional and otherwise complete. Some of the labels aren’t perfectly straight and I could do with adjusting some of the push buttons on the autopilot panel so they are all aligned, but it wasn’t built to score any style points! It runs off four USB to 20 button interface modules produced by Desktop Aviator which provide the core controls. These were a great find, even if the articles on flightsim.com which explain how to use toggle switches, push buttons and rocker switches were slightly biased in recommending them given the author of the articles is the founder of the Desktop Aviator But, I liked the way I could buy just one or two and add in functionality over time (which is exactly what I did to make sure I could do what I wanted to do with them in the first place before).

The first completed section was based just off rocker switches and push buttons. The rotary switches for the autopilot panel were added later:

The electronics behind were not all that complicated - the push buttons connect straight to the input pins on the USB interface controller, whereas the toggle or rocker switches require a simple circuit built around an optoisolator to generate a ‘pulse’ as the switch is flicked to allow the computer to recognise the input. The flightsim.com article and instructions on the Desktop Aviator website explain it all in detail and isn’t hard, just time consuming, as this part of the panel required 20 of these small circuits to be soldered. But, figuring on about a $1 for a rocker/toggle switch, $1 for the optoislator, and maybe another $1 total for a capacitor, two resistors and diode, factoring in the USB controller being $29 for 20 inputs, you’re still looking at less than $5 per input. The fantastic plastic panels at 75c each also from Steve at Desktop Aviator were great too as it meant I could drill them however I wanted to group the buttons and switches to my liking.

The radio panel was the main section I wanted to build, as all available solutions are either complicated, expensive, or both. Dual rotary push button switches aren’t easy to find and pricey when you can, and also require either a separate interface controller (usually the more expensive kind used in high-end simulators where you have 80+ inputs per controller) or meant you have to program your own microcontroller to interpret rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise. For the hardcore who won’t accept anything less, they’ll pay quite a price for these kind of inputs, but me, I’ll take a little less!

Taking a basic single-pole 12-position rotary switch (one of the most commonly available at about $2.50) and wiring up pins 1-5-9 and then 3-7-11, it creates the equivalent of a standard toggle switch. To switch between Mhz and Khz when adjusting radio frequencies, after connecting the output of the rotary switch to the standard pulse circuit, the output of this pulse circuit normally going straight to the USB interface controller instead connects to what would be the output of a SPDT toggle switch. The upper terminal can then connect to an input pin on the controller, and the lower terminal to another input pin. Now, when you flip the toggle switch, the rotary controller’s output is sends a different event to the PC. Here’s the circuit to explain a bit better (yes, pretty much just what’s on the Desktop Aviator site):

With the way the rotary switch is wired, you only get a pulse sent on every second ‘click’ as we have a break between our contacts. In practice, this actually works nicely, as with FSUPIC which is used to pass the controls to flight sim, it needs a 1/4 second pause (I believe) between inputs otherwise it won’t recognise it, so if you were rotating very quickly, it wouldn’t register anyways. If you had a rotary switch that had a slightly smoother contact point on the rear (as oppose to mine which has quite a large ball which makes a definitive click and clunk), you probably wouldn’t notice it really. Still, our drawback (for the moment…) is that rotating either clockwise or counter-clockwise, we can’t make a difference in whether we’re increasing or decreasing our radio frequency. This is where the more complicated solutions involving a dedicated microcontroller would read in a binary output from the rotary switch (if we wired up our other contacts in the same manner) to calculate what position the switch is being moved to/from and thus whether it’s going up or down. In contact with Desktop Aviator, they are actually producing a pre-programmed chip to do just this, but no word on pricing. Anyway, my simple solution is to use a modifier key within FSUIPC.

In FSUIPC, I mapped each rotary switch to send a key command rather than an action in flight simulator. For example, rotating the rotary switch for COM 1 will map to Ctrl-C by FSUIPC, and then you can set Ctrl-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE INC. Fairly straightfoward. Then, add another key mapping for Ctrl-Shift-C to represent COM RADIO WHOLE DEC. Hold down shift whilst rotating the rotary switch and now the frequency will decrease. Technically, you can continue rotating the rotary switch clockwise and it will decrease so long as you’re holding down the Shift key but that’s no fun As I use the CH Yoke, the left rear button on the yoke is set as the Shift key, so I simply hold my finger down on the button whilst rotating the rotary switch counter-clockwise to decrease the frequency; release the button and turn clockwise to increase the frequency. Repeat this key-mapping process where Shift acts as the modifier key to decrease the frequency for the other COM and NAV functions, and with the toggle switch on both Mhz and Khz.

Sounds like a clunky process, but in practice it’s all pretty natural. When leaning over to adjust the radios, you’d keep your left hand on the yoke anyway, so it’s no problem to press you finger on the button at the rear of the yoke. Flicking between the Mhz and Khz positions is no harder than moving your fingers between the inner and outer knobs on a dual-rotary switch. I also put in two push buttons for each control - one to enable the COM or NAV channel and another to switch standby frequency. Really, the only thing missing is an LED screen showing the frequency and your adjustments, but that’s getting back into substantially increasing cost + complexity. With this setup, each rotary switch requires 2 inputs on the USB interface controller, plus one each for selecting the channel and standby frequency. To do both COM 1 + 2 and NAV 1 + 2, it works out to about $50 including the cost of the USB interface controller. A 3rd of the price of the GoFlight unit, though admitedly requiring a little more work to get going and not providing exact functionality of those in a real airplane by having. Still, for those on budget and with the time and patience to build the controls themselves, very worthwhile.

Other cool features I included was a GPS panel which happily recreates the Garmin GNS 430’s found in the EagleSoft Cirrus SR-22 and the default Garmin 500 model within FS2004. The rotary controls work in the same way as the radio controls. I also used another rotary switch to represent the ignition switch of a GA aircraft, and then a selection of buttons and a toggle switch for sending the transponder code and going between standby + on. There’s no direct controls available for FSUIPC to do things like IDENT but you won’t get that unless you fly online with something like VATSIM, with clients providing that functionality anyways.

Whilst building these avionics panels, I also came a lightweight, quick, and free voice recognition utility called Shoot which allows you to speak commands and have the computer respond. This is my way of ‘talking’ to ATC without $50 on VoxATC or similar. Again, it’s not going to perfectly replicate talking to ATC with the correct phrases, but in conjunction with Peter Wilding’s control set and adding in a bunch of other commands, I can say “Ready for taxi for north departure” even though all Shoot sends to flight sim is ‘4′ (or whatever) to select from the text-based prompt in the ATC window. Makes things a lot more realistic, and after a few flights of adding in commands on the fly (no pun intended!) as I came across a new ATC command to set, I very fairly have to just say the numbers to move through menus.

All in all, pretty happy with the setup now, as it certainly gives me a lot more to do when flying, and kept me entertained for a good while figuring out how to do it all and then building up the circuits and wiring the controls. An awful lot cheaper than buying pre-built modules, and let me build it exactly how I wanted, such as for the GPS panel. If you have no interest in flight sim, all this has probably made no sense, but will at least give you something to read to help you sleep! And if anyone is trying to do something similar, let me know in the comments to share your ideas + suggestions or if you have any problems.

Kat’s sat in Bethel waiting to fly out - I’ve already been to the airport at 9a.m this morning after being told she was on her way into the village only to find it was a plane full of freight Good ‘ol Yute Air.

But, since I haven’t been able to take any photos recently, thought I’d play with some instead. I don’t have the money for Photoshop (or the desire to get carted off to jail like about 50% of Photoshop users ) so have used GIMPshop, based off the open-source graphics manipulation program GIMP, for a number of years. I know, I know, feel free to poke fun at the name in the comments section! This first one is isolating certain colours or parts of a photo whilst having the rest a black & white image based on this Instructables tutorial. Since I haven’t take any photos with this in mind, this is more a proof-of-concept thing

The idea works well at least. Not sure what I could use it on, but gives me something to look out for when taking photos in the future. This next one is again just playing around with different ideas + effects from this Instructables tutorial. Not the kinda of thing you’d put in a photo gallery, but some useful effects playing with layer masks and such:

Just a couple of cool results. I’ve also been messing around with Picnik, an online photo editing suite, which I’ve used for a while to do some basic editing on photos from Flickr since the start of the year, but there’s some good effects you can add like retro 60’s styling and text effects. Haven’t got round to creating anything worth sharing yet

But, Kat just got home Got the call whilst writing this up, so nice to have her home. Mia hasn’t stopped spazzing out yet either! Kat’s pretty tired, but glad to be home, and thought it was cool how much things have changed in just 3 weeks - when she flew out everything was still brown and dirty from the ice break-up and now there’s green everywhere! Sure she’ll sleep most of the day, but the important thing is she brought Subway…

Kat should be at Reno airport about now waiting for her flight out to Phoenix before heading up to Anchorage. Hopefully will get back into Tunt first thing tomorrow morning, though bad weather the last couple of days has been delaying some of the bush flights (even more than usual…), which will be the last thing she’ll want after 5 hours hanging Anchorage airport in the dead of night!

Mia went swimming on Saturday which was the first time she’s gone all the way into the lakes doggy-paddling - usually she would just slowly creep in whilst still standing up and then scrabble back when the water got to her chest, but I had her chasing sticks up by the new airport and she ended up going right in after them and thought it was great once she realised she could swim

Today I got my rebate check through from XFX for the graphics card I bought a couple of months back - not going to complain, as usually they take forever to be processed, and the $30 rebate is about 1/3 off which is better than sales in most department stores! $65 for a 256Mb DDR3 GEForce 8600GT isn’t too shabby and has worked great.

Anyway, suppose I should go back to cleaning the house now the golf has finished…

Yesterday afternoon Nick, Dana and I went fishing up to the Gallic River where the locals ‘apparently’ go fishing. I say ‘apparently’, as we saw no fishing holes and could barely keep on the trail up there as it’s not widely used! We had the auger so cut a few holes within 5-10 minutes (damn sight easier than using an ice pick to break through existing holes!) and started fishing, but had about as much luck as fishing downriver from Tunt. It was a nice afternoon though, around 5F without much wind, and the ride was pretty cool through the soft snow and across bare tundra without following a trail. I’ll see if Dana had any good photos I can post. Some of Dana’s family are coming up here tomorrow so Nick wanted to check he could get out to the fishing holes and see if there were some holes already cut, but I don’t think I could find my way back there without getting lost as the wind covers the trail pretty quick

I got my PC up and running over the weekend too - genius that I am brought over a bunch of game CD’s and applications for photo + video editing, but not the driver CD for the system board, so that took a while to download them off the internet. My graphics card (256Mb ATI Radeon 9550) seems to have gone belly up though, probably with bouncing around on airplanes when I moved over here. Works fine just on the desktop, but get all sorts of tearing, streaking and artifacts on screen at low-level (such as BIOS or OS splash screen is loaded) and anytime it kicks into a game. Tried different drivers, flashing BIOS, etc. but simply putting in a basic 32Mb don’t-ask-me-to-do-3D card works without problems so it’s not the system board. Annoying as it would still run at 50-60fps, just can’t make out what the hell it’s trying to display on screen! But, Amazon have a $30 mail-in rebate on a GeForce 8600GT with 256Mb DDR3 bringing it down to $65 delivered which is daft considering they were $150 a few months ago, and will kick the pants off the 9550 I paid the same for a couple of years back. That’s PC technology though, especially graphics cards.

Since the photographs I’ve taken over the past few years have been well received and generated a lot of positive comments, I’ve started up a small side-business of sorts at http://www.iainfoulds.com with a collection of the some of the highest quality photos available for purchase.

All prints come presented on 5″x7″ premium photo paper with a gloss finish, mounted in a pure white mat frame and individually wrapped in a clear plastic display bag. If I do say so myself, the prints look very impressive - Kat has one in her classroom which is getting quite a bit of attention

Priced at only $10 per print (check local currency rates), they are attractively priced and available from the comfort of your own home. Shipping is free for all US customers, and international orders are only $10 (up to a maximum of 40 prints…) via Priority Air Mail. Given the exchange rate, most international orders are getting a right steal!

Browse the available galleries, or feel free to request a custom print of something not currently on there, and see if anything is appealing for yourself or as a gift - the “Yup’ik Life” collection of photographs from up here in Alaska are certainly unique!

US orders are ready to ship now, with International orders ready to go in a few days (feel free to order now so your prints can be shipped as soon as possible), and a replacement or money back guarantee is provided on all prints. More information on shipping + ordering is available here.

So, my PayPal account back in the UK is under review in-line with European money laundering regulations. First a hunting licence, then money laundering. Am on a roll this week!

Since I’ve been moving money back + forth between US + UK accounts the past year or so, I’ve hit some monetary limit they have in place before a review is required to prevent naughty going’s on. Is a bit weird, as it isn’t actually limiting me from doing anything as they detailed, since I was able to go ahead and withdraw the money I transfered in anyways There’s two verification steps you have to complete for the review - first, PayPal deposit two small amounts into your bank account and you report back what they were. I’ve already done that years ago, but PayPal want to give me another 7p… Second, they set up an automated phone call where you enter a provided security code, but, they let you change the number they call you on anyways. So if someone was fraudulently accessing my account, they could simply have changed the telephone number, requested the call, then entered the security code shown on screen…

Ah well, it’s the last payment going into my UK account as everything will be cleared up once the withdrawal is complete. As a 7 year PayPal customer, seems like as with most things they inconvenience the genuine users due to the actions of the few.

Even though the post office here in Tunt has seemingly switched to it’s winter service by only opening on an afternoon (maybe after one morning last winter there was a sign on the door saying “Too cold, maybe open after lunch”…), my new hard drive arrived. Well, actually it arrived on Monday but I had to use my physic abilities to know I had to go sign it for myself since there was no card left in the mail box for me. Thankfully I saw the FedEx tracking status and went down anyways It all seems to work fine, and only took half an hour or so to restore my user profile and all the music, videos, etc. Pretty nice seeing 60Gb free space with all the apps re-installed given my old drive was 60Gb total!

But, coming back from the post office I became Dr Dolittle with 5 dogs in tow behind Mia. There’s a bunch of puppies running around the village the last few weeks and no-one is taking responsibility for them. The VPSO’s are waiting on a gun (’cos I guess the entire armory full of weapons or one of the half a dozen guns in the entry way of every house aren’t the ‘right’ guns…) before rounding them up. Kinda sad as some are just very playful and wanting attention, along with food, water and somewhere warm to sleep given it pretty much hit 0F the last couple of days. Anyways, I took my chances walking back across the lake since trying to get 5-6 dogs off the boardwalks every time a 4-wheeler came past was getting boring! I’d forgot how hard it was to walk through deep snow across the lake, especially on the edges, but it was solid enough. Two or three people went through the ice last week on snowmobiles or 4-wheelers as the ice just wasn’t thick enough in places, but it’s all frozen now. Still not convinced about the river though

Clicking sounds from hard drives aren’t usually a good sign, especially when it’s accompanied by your screen freezing (which is very uncommon with OS X anyways) Sure enough, rebooting the MacBook just flashed the question mark icon meaning it couldn’t find a boot device, and the recovery DVD happily shows no internal drive in Disk Utility. Managed to borrow another MacBook and swapped drives and it’s definately the hard drive knackered. At least it’s not the MacBook itself at fault and 120Gb drives can be had for $75 from OWC which is the same place I purchased the 2Gb RAM upgrade from just after I got the MacBook. Apple would probably want double that for a stock 60Gb drive!

Given that the MacBook has been hammered constantly for 18 months with a few thousand photos going through it, all the podcasting and two months of bouncing around in car over the sumer, it hasn’t done too bad. Would still expect drives to last longer than this, but in fairness the only problem I’ve had in close to 5 years of my Medion laptop was a hard drive failure a couple of years back and then the MacBook has been flawless until now. Maybe I’m just cursed with hard drives! Least I’m fairly religious in running SilverKeeper to back-up everything to USB drive every weekend so I’ve not lost any music, photos or documents.

But, given the mail service up here (especially with the amount we’ve been getting weathered in the last week or so!), it could be quicker to wait for Santa Claus to do his rounds in order to get the new drive

The last week or so I’ve been having problems getting anything on the webserver that runs a few of my sites. No big deal as most of them serve static content or are handling podcast media delivery of the Unsigned Rock Podcast, but it’s only from this home connection that it fails. The sites are still working as I’ve got a few hundred hits from various football sites recently about my Sunderland vs Newcastle derby match post from last year given the next derby is coming up next month, and there’s been comments left on the blog, so it just seems to be me.

The ISP is clueless (literally…), and a traceroute happily shows data being routed well outside of the Unicom equipment and down through LA to Phoenix and ping works. Isn’t a browser or OS issue as it’s replicated across OS X, Ubuntu and Win XP, and so across Safari, Firefox and IE. FTP also works without a problem, as does my e-mail.

I’m running through Tor at the moment which is running fine (although obviously a little slow), so it’s not like the ISP is dropping all the traffic. Just seems weird the Unicom routers handle the traffic in + out fine on other protocols, but HTTP fails running direct through them yet pointing the browser to a Tor proxy works. Doubt the ISP would be blocking the server on their proxies, but maybe. As it’s not just one domain having a problem, I don’t think it’s an ISP proxy or firewall issue though. Any suggestions welcome as I don’t want to run through Tor everytime I want to make a blog post!

Still hadn’t had any joy with my camera after it went blurry on Friday, even though I’d let it gradually warm itself up and dry out. Tried leaving it in a zip-lock bag with a packet of silica gel to dry out any moisture, then carefully opened the camera up and used a warm hair-dryer. Gave me something to do I guess. Dad suggested re-cleaning the lens after it’s all dried out, but still ended up with this:

Annoyed at looking at the camera being well and truly knackered, and not particularly wanting to spend $100+ just to get it checked out by the nearest camera shop, I went to turn it off and hit the zoom button by accident:

Now that just ain’t funny! Seems like there is some damage to the lens as it doesn’t focus at all when you first turn it on - tap the zoom button and it clears up through all remaining zoom stages. That first zoom stage barely does anything in reality, just seems to prep the camera for engaging the zoom, so it’s not like I’m loosing half the picture. Guess I can live with that since everything else seems to work fine