It has been a while on posting here. Primarily there have been many other projects that taken time away from the Spaceroom work. However I have always been looking for interesting things both in hardware and software that could contribute to the system.

The latest (and perhaps the greatest) find is the Arduino board. It is an Open-Source hardware and sofware platform. One can construct the board from scratch or buy implementations from a variety of source for less than $40. There is even an virtual Arduino development environment that allows designing and testing projects before you even have an Arduino.

What can you do with an Arduino? Seems to be almost anything. There are many sites with projects that are just a Google search away.

We are going to look at a couple of projects and post the progress here.

Lots of cool info about aurora solar storms, etc... Would be good to integrated into some of the supporting screens.

Noaa Space Weather

One of the challenging things has been to find a way to light up lights and respond to buttons that located around the ship. This looks like a possible way to simplify the output. Certainly a MIDI file could do some cool animated lights and servos. Unfortunately it only supports MIDI output, (and THRU) so it cannot be used to gather input.

MIDI Decoder

I found a set of Open Source components that support MIDI for Delphi which can be found here.

Included with the Open GL package for Delphi GLScene are various extras such as the ODE package as well as the BASS sound library. Recently I took a closer look at the library to see what it can do. I have to say that it is pretty amazing.

The library is a relative small single (100K) DLL with header or unit files for various languages including VB, C, and Delphi. There also extension libraries that allow for specific encoding and special effects. It support playing streaming radio (Shoutcast) in the background as well as many audio files both wave based and music files such as MIDI and MOD music files. Check out the site link above for more details.

There are a number of sample programs, and the one showing how to play a Shoutcast feed was most interesting. My goal was to create an HTTP plugin that would be able to play that stations on the main simulation server box, (so that the music would come out of the main speakers), but allow control from one of the remote machines. Remarkably it worked on the first try, a rare occurance in web server modules, usually due to executing in a separate thread.

This mostly just to create some links to interesting sites worthy of more investigation:

JSB Open Source Flight Dynamics Modeler

JSBSim is an open source flight dynamics model (FDM) that compiles and runs under many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, IRIX, Cygwin (Unix on Windows), etc. The FDM is essentially the physics/math model that defines the movement of an aircraft, rocket, etc., under the forces and moments applied to it using the various control mechanisms and from the forces of nature.

Open Extensible Architecture for the Analysis and Generation of Linked Simulations