Need help with Phidgets for Racing Sim

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Hello, I'm Owen Atkin, Manager of the Zwarte Wind Racing Team for the Live For Speed Online Racing Simulator (LFS for short) . Now that the formal introductions are out of the way...

I was wondering if it would be possible to make something like FS2Phidgets for LFS, hmm LFS2Phidgets even sounds like it could be as simple as a plugin for FS2Phidgets.

What this would entail is, getting data from teh OUTGUAGE protocol, and passing it along to various phidgets devices, such as LED's being turned on and off with certain values (handbrake warning light, pit lane speed limiter light, or Rev light (rpm based)) or my Text 8/8/8 as configurable display, like having the speed fuel and other levels on the screen for quick reference, and finally servos for working guages.

Outguage is a protocol built into the simulator to be able to do what you Flight Simmers have done for years, Access the instrumentation of a vehicle and build real instrumentation.

Examples of things to be done with variables:
Simply turning on an LED when the pit lane speed limiter is on
Varying an LED's brightness according to RPM, Much like the shiftlight on an Peugeot 306 Maxi Rally Car
Display numerical speed fuel level and gear on a text 8/8/8
Formula1 style rev lights (green for revs too low, a deffinable number of yellow LED's for the powerband, and red for revving too high)
Servo driven Guages for a road car style dash board

And those are but a few of the possibilites!

We are all Cockpit Builders, but my cockpit stays on the ground. Thanks for reading

[Semicton]

I'm sure it's possible. I work with C# and .net exclusivly, so I'm not so sure I could work with the OutGuage protocol, but certainly some language can.

I like your idea of using phidgets with video games. I made this little display below with a phidget 8/8/8/8 with a built in LED with a game called World War 2 Online to show the last two player names and units that killed me in the field. Sort of a cheat in the game as it's supposed to be sort of a realistic war simulation and you should not be able to tell your buddies that you were killed by a machine gunner, sniper, or rifleman with out leaving the game and waiting to view your stats. I wrote code that logged in and sent a htmlrequest to the stat server and then used a regular expression to get the data I wanted, and displayed it on my phidget.



http://www.husko.net/Portals/0/photos/sandbox/wwii1.jpg

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Actually, the idea with my project is to make a realistic cockpit. Make the game more realistic. I HAD a working version that used my 8 8 8 as a shift light, but the programmer vaporized on me after accepting payment.

[Adrenalynn]

Sure! Any of that is very doable using most any microcontroller, Phidgets or otherwise.

Do you have a good link to documentation on the outgauge protocol?

P.S. My summer vehicle is a three rotor 3rd gen, Comp Yellow Mica R1... :)

[Semicton]

I'd like to see a link to that too. If it's easy enough for me to get my heard around it and I can work with C#, I could probably find some time to get some stuff started in my spare time.