Month: April 2013

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Working on clouds over lunch and got the V-pass done for the Gaussian blurring. This shot looks particularly good… but it was done by using the source alpha blended with the original color rather than the inverse of the source alpha… so don’t get your hopes up yet.

Waiting to install this completed interior panel with all attachment locations denoted in red.  This is for the starboard side and it is scheduled for tomorrow night.

Also posted a YouTube video of some tests I conducted with the Linear Proportional SSR featured in an earlier post.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=_s5UqZUFfZo]

Trying to come up with an 80/20 extruded aluminum solution to this problem since my friends at Motion for Simulators apparently have no interest in selling this component.

I had an idea a while back. I rented a van in Florida for our family vacation last year. Not sure if it was a good or bad thing but as the engine power would fluctuate it was noticeable that the blower speed fluctuated (like the battery was dead and the alternator was the only thing powering the blower).  Anyway it reminded me of a similar effect in a jet – since the cabin air is taken off a stage of the engine compression it would change the pressure and noise level in the cabin almost directly. Then I went to the Sigur Ros concert in Kansas City last Thursday and saw they were independently controlling incandescent lights on stage!  My friends at Phidgets led me to this article which lead me to Proportional SSR’s and voila!

Ah, but sadly Crydom recommends against using these for inductive (motor, transformer) loads.  Not sure why or what would happen so I bought one on eBay to experiment with.  In the event that my experiment goes horribly wrong:

Fortunately the blower motor that we are using has a tapped winding and I could switch between these three speeds using a standard AC SSR.

In other news, finished the forward bulkhead insulation and moved onto the starboard interior paneling.  That is ready to paint with the kids tonight!

These are all the lowest class or “scout” class vessels for each of the three factions.

Installed rigid foam insulation (1.5″) in the frontal area of the ship (design would not allow for more but it is a relatively small area).

I also worked on dressing up the swivel bracket (previously it was exposed lumber).

Finally, I fixed the “black” square issue… turns out a lot of my colors were off because I was using “char” instead of “unsigned char” to read them from the file.