SOFTWARE
FLIGHTGEAR
At the heart of this project is Flightgear↗ flight simulator (FGFS), an excellent open-source, free piece of software.
Flightgear↗ is a free, open-source, community built flight simulator. While it's scenery is lacking the polished feel of proprietary simulator software such as X-Plane↗ and DCS↗, it fits in with this project for the following reasons:
- Open source philosophy, no personal data is being sent to big coroprate organisations.
- It is the 'tinkerers' simulator. As its code is open-source, you can read it, undersrand how it works, customise and fine tune it to suit a project.
- It is designed to be a flight simulator, not a game. ie: weapons and combat scenarios are purposefully not included, this ethos of the developers agrees with my own views on weaponry.
LIGHTNING MODEL
The Lightning model I am using has been developed by FGUK↗. I have supported its development by providing information and advice, and have also taken on developing some of its systems.
It is again open source and free for anyone to download / use.
OPERATING SYSTEM
Linux
In keeping with the open-source theme, I am using Linux↗. The distributions I have used for the sim so far are Manjaro↗ XFCE (an Arch branch), and currently Linux Mint↗.
For a bit of fun, I installed Flightgear on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4gb RAM), and amazingly with the graphics settings tuned down, it was quite a success! Not brilliant as an immersive experience, but for developing the Lightning model (coding and testing), it has been perfectly fine, a nice cheap and low power development tool.
Windows
I have tried using Windows 10, however, it does not work with my hardware as Microsoft have dropped support for serial "COM" ports over USB.
INTERFACING
Arduino boards↗ are being used as the heart of interfacing between the real world hardware and the flight simulator computer, communicating by serial over USB.
In addition to the programmable boards, almost every interface will also require some level of electronics to convert signals in terms of current and voltage.
As each and every component type is indvidual and no interface standardisation exists in aircraft of this vintage, the interface board software and associated electronics has to be developed on a component by component basis.