EM broken again

The latest problem I'm having definitely seems to be a hardware issue, the voltmeter goes to 0.70V (or effectively 0V), and the fuel counter starts counting 'less'.

I also have my doubts about the tach ever working right. I was getting 3000+ RPM on climbouts and straight and level flights, which should be impossible unless I firewall the throttle and point the plane straight down.

I haven't yet figured out why the voltage going bad also makes the fuel counter go bonkers.

All I know is that it seems to be a hardware issue, like a bad soldering joint. This has happened before, it seemingly shakes itself apart.

Oh yeah, about the plane

I flew from Livermore, CA (KLVK), to Gwinnett county-briscoe field (KLZU) last week. It took about 14 hours or so, I had amazing tail winds the first day, I was seeing ground speeds 190KTS or more, even hitting 200+ at one point.

The EM had a strange problem in that it would basically stop working after one gallon (or when the counter hit 32768). I 'sorta' fixed it that night by putting in a watchdog timer, but that was only a band-aid. The real problem was some more signed/unsigned problems with the internal counters and some of the math.

Once the value hit 32768, it would 'go negative', and a bit shift would shift in a 0xffff causing a cascade of nonsense values. It caused it to hang before I put in the watch dog.

Now that is all fixed. There is still an occasional crash on the app side, and sometimes my windows machine simply hangs, or 'stalls' for long periods of time. If I can move to an embedded linux or other CF card friendly OS, I'm hoping I won't have that problem.

Plane and EFIS update

As mentioned previously, I ported to GTK (via gtkmm), which generally went OK. However, cairo on windows (at least 2.16) is amazingly slow. So slow in fact, it can't render a few lines (airspaces and SUAs) on my moving map in less than 400ms.

400ms?? Seriously? It's drawing lines, not a voxel based renderer. I couldn't figure out how to make it any faster, but I found out how to create a DIB and get a good ol' GDI DC on it.

So, while the rest of the app is in GTK, with a smidge of cairo, the main drawing is handled in GDI. Thats not the best port in the world.

Now I'm thinking that I might want to ditch C++ altogether and just make a Java version of this (with stock AWT), that makes it stupendously portable, so instead of recompiling for linux, I could theoretically just drop some class files and go.

The other idea would be to nab one of the upcoming android tablets, and just make an android app out of it. That way, customers could use their cell phones, or just grab their own tablet of whatever size they want, (like a Dell Mini 5, Archos 7, JooJoo, or whatever)

This starts to make more and more sense the more I think about it.

I'm sure my friend Trimbo will chime in with "I told you to do this in the first place".

EFIS update

While I'm on this business trip to Iceland, I've got some time after work to devote to improving the EFIS software, namely, porting it to gtkmm, so that I can easily hop it over to a linux install, like Xfce. My first attempt was basically a disaster, but then I found Glade.

Glade is a UI designer, it writes out a bit of XML, and then I can load that XML with just a few lines of gtk, display it, and run it. Very similar to the forms builder in C# (or perhaps vice versa)

This jumpstarted the port, and I hope I can chew through this and get the current feature set up and running soon.

Borders suck

I'm in iceland for a business trip. I'm here for two weeks, and I feel 'cut off' from the internet due to streaming rights for media. Apparently, sending packets outside of the US is a freakin crime, so I'm unable to use Hulu, Last.Fm, Pandora, and heck, even isohunt is giving me almost broken UI.

Here's a thought, KNOCK IT OFF.

Either let me use your sites (and serve up ads), or I go 'around' you and download commercial free torrents.

I'm really confused as to why there would be streaming rights confined to a single country or region, same goes for the whole DVD "Region Codes". Don't you want to sell product?

The scale moved!

So, it might just be a crappy scale, but since I've been at this, the scale now reads somewhat consistently lower each morning. A sign of progress, or a red herring? It *looks* like it's somewhere around 205, 206. And if I'm really dropping 2lbs a week, then that could jive.

When I see the scale consistently at 200, then I'll know there's some real progress.

Consistent exercise and a slight diet change could very well be the ticket. My goal is 190. If I can keep up the pace, thats about 2 months.

More memory for the VPS!

Yay! I asked for a smidgen more memory on my VPS, and NetrackServers.com just gave me a little bump for free. (I had offered to pay a few more dollars a month).

Thanks NRS!

The problem was that sometimes mercury mail would spike, and then mail would go down. And the tomcat container was sorta strained for memory (xms, xmx flags in use), I was able to increase these a tad more, and hopefully make things more stable.