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PT KLN90B Thread

Okay. so last night I did a little survey to see how close we are to emulating (not simulating) a KLN90B. The good news is, everything is in there you absolutely need to get from A to B, and you can manipulate the flight plans and access all the airports and navaids pretty thoroughly. The bad news is, there are lots of other non-essential page and facilities missing. Here are the details.

Left side:

NAV pages: 1-5 all working.
FPL pages: 0-25 all working.
MOD pages: 1-2 all working.
TRI pages: nothing. 0-7 missing.
CAL pages: 4 is implemented. 1-3 and 5-7 missing.
STA pages: nothing. 1-4 missing.
SET pages: pages 0-3 implemented. 5-7 missing.
OTH pages: page 3 implemented, 1-2 and 4-10 missing.

Right Side:

NAV pages: 1-5 all working.
ACT page: working.
REF page: missing.
CTR page: missing.
APT pages: 1-7 implemented, #8 missing. (This is big. 8 is the approaches page. There aren't any in the DB!)
VOR page: implemented.
NDB page: implemented.
INT page: implemented.
SUP page: implemented.

Altogether I count 32 pages completely missing. And some functionality is also missing, such as the MSG-ENT key combo that switches you into "find nearest airport fast" mode. Or the ability to key in the user's own info on the power-on page. Just to mention two I happen to remember and tried. I haven't even begun to test all the paths.

Just letting all know the magnitude of the project. But first, we get what we have working reliably.

Dutch
 
Tushka, we will leave TU-154 coupling there. I don't know why it's not connecting, I haven't deliberately taken anything out. I don't really even know how that works I haven't looked closely at it. The plan is to develop a better system of driving the AP heading using the default (which I can easily test) then adapt that calculation to the TU-154 AP too once we know it works right.
 
Question. There are two "versions" of this source code, actually the same but there's an option "for usss" that can be turned on. Does anyone know what the intent of that was? The main thing it seems to do is switch on some big blocks of code that try to use Direct Input. It doesn't work, when I try it I get lots of compiler errors. It looks like a work in progress.

Direct Input would be nice! I may port over the DI code from FSCaptain here. Also, some optional sounds would be nice. Button and rotary clicks. Altitude alerter. Sound like a real KLN90B. I can use the FSCaptain sound system for that too. No sweat.

Dutch
 
Yes, I see. Nevertheless, I will use the Soviet navigation system meanwhile and I thank you for working with this KLN90B as a serious project, I only thought a few fixes to be honest. It will be very interesting to see how it works out in the future and once it works right, will probably be one of the more popular GPS not only for the Tupolev, but for all the other aircraft as well.

32 missing pages sounds like a challenge. "For usss" doesn't make any sense to me, could it be related to the airport Koltosovo Yekaterinburg? It's icao is USSS... Maybe developer named it like that for some reason in a hurry despite it won't make any sense. Indeed would be nice if there was sounds included, would increase the immersion. The thread is passed on the Project Tupolev forum, original developers hopefully will catch it.
 
Yes thanks Tushka. I would like to speak to the developers about how this gauge interfaces with the TU-154. It would help me find that section in the code. So far, I have found something that says "for communication with the ABSU." Since I have never heard of that before, I'm guessing that's maybe the AP in the TU-154? Anyway I couldn't see anything in that code that would interface with any other gauge or module.
 
I will try to redirect attention from avsim.su to this thread to hopefully catch attention from the developers. The ABSU is the name of the autopilot of Tu-154. I don't know if it's of interest but during my last flight KLN90B was able to drive the autopilot of the Tu-154 suddenly which means my first trial when it didn't connect was probably a mistake on my side. ABSU is a very outdated autopilot, so it's very unlikely it was a bug with the KLN itself.
 
It should work with the ABSU. I found the relevant code after a search. It exports four variables which can be picked up by another gauge. These have to be the ABSU ones.
Code: 
      register_var_by_name(&ExtGPSLbu,TYPE_FLOAT64,"GPS_N1_LBU");
       register_var_by_name(&ExtGPSLbuDiff,TYPE_FLOAT64,"GPS_N1_LBU_DIF");
       register_var_by_name(&ExtGpsGot,TYPE_BOOL,"GPS_N1_GOT");
       register_var_by_name(&ExtGpsPuDelta,TYPE_FLOAT64,"GPS_N1_PU_DELTA");

Also, I just found what looks like a huge slip-up. On every update cycle of the screen, it creates the font and the pens. It should only do that once. That's a hit on the frame rate as well as a memory gobbler. I changed it to do it only once, with no negative effect. It should now run a little faster and eat less memory.

Dutch
 
In 0.72B Terminus font KLN works very well. The GPS works very well. Flight plan was loaded from FSX perfectly. And, yes Vlad, works perfectly with the ABSU (remember you need turn HBY on).
KLN fails to load the last navdata released on avsimrus (CTD). Maybe with the last change is solved.

Wow! Your plan is very ambitious...Surely a game changer in the community.

jPEZTiP.jpg
 
ce_zeta - yes, I am just now discovering the many bugs in the nav data loading system. It won't load the MSFS default nav data either, although it's supposed to. I plan on having that solved today. Could you give me a link to that data set that it won't load? I will figure that out now that I'm in that section of code for today.
 
Wow, Bill ! thanks, that is much nicer, I'll slip that into the next rev or so!

After a four or so hour fight I have it converting the MSFS nav database again. That was a work in progress that never really got finished. That's also the key to adding the ILS frequences, the data is there I just need to export it and support it in the rest of the code. Not to mention the approaches but that's a much bigger job.

Now I've downloaded the PT 1501 airac and we'll see why it's crashing on that.

Once that's done I'll throw the next beta out. Hopefully today. Tomorrow the "work" week starts. Funny how some things that are really hard seem like play, and some things are really a lot easier feel like work.

"Work is anything a body is obliged to do." -- Mark Twain.

Dutch
 
Okay, I loaded the data from the link you gave ce_zeta, and copied the sidstar folder and isec.txt into my KLN90B folder. I made sure my KLN90B.CNF file had the entry EXTINTDB=1 which directs it to parse isec.txt and not the default PTT_WPT.DAT. It loaded and ran just fine. I dialed in a few of the unique waypoints that aren't in the default and they are there. No crashes.

Try 0.073B and see if it's magically fixed. I say magic because I've done nothing to fix anything with the EXTINTDB. I don't like magic fixes. They usually mean trouble somewhere else down the line. Be sure your isec.txt file and the sidstar folder aren't corrupt of incomplete in some way.

Dutch

These updates are in 0.073B:
// 150117 CEO 0.073B Made airport/navaid names all uppercase to match real KLN
// 150117 CEO 0.073B Fixed the "mangled angle" on NAV4 page.
// 150117 CEO 0.073B Fixed situation where font & pen were created multiple times.
// 150118 CEO 0.073B Now rebuilds database from FSX BGL databases if PTT nav data files are missing. Or from the SET 0 page you can trigger it too.
 
Last edited:
Here is a block of code, along with a test gauge for it, which will retrieve ILS information for the runways of a given airport.

Doug
 

Attachments

Thank you so much Doug. I'll be using that!

Anything I can do for you, let me know.

The support of this community here is awesome.
 
Just one other suggestion, you may want to change those ints ib the heading calculation to floats for a more accurate output.
 
Dutch, will you be opensourcing the initiative? I'd like to take a look and maybe tackle some of the missing pages eventually.
 
I agree about the image, it's nice looking but so small that on most higher res airplanes once you expand it a bit it gets real fuzzy. Bill if you have a higher res version laying around would be nice. I like the look of that one on avsim.su with the gray bezel - but I'll have to extract the resource from it and see how high-res it is. Hard to tell from the small photo on the site. If I knew of a real one in existence anywhere near I'd take a camera over and get some high-res pictures. But I haven't laid eyes on a real KLN90B since the mid-nineties during my last days of real-world flying. Nostalgia is a big reason why I'm doing this.

For a 3D version - I know zero about 3D modelling. But I know that we could easily make a version that was only the screen and allow the controls to be changed via XML variables. That should be usable with any 3D model.

pfabian - yes, open source is a great way to go. I need to set it up on source forge or some sharing site. Many of those missing pages aren't important and some just are irrelevant to our PC simulation - like the status pages that track satellites. And some we'll struggle to do because of lack of info, like the CTR pages. But the CALC and TRIP pages are real nice and should be there, and all the OTH pages, especially the ones with fuel planning. The big one is APT 8. Approaches. The database for that isn't even implemented, so that's a huge project.

Right now I'm looking at fixing some of the crashes. Dealing with the SID/STAR pages gets you an access violation fairly quickly. There's also a strange quirk when you are flying that causes the KLN to send you a message to adjust your OBS any time you point your airplane at a waypoint other than the one you're flying too. That's gotta get fixed.

Priority one is to make what we have already got into a practical reliable machine. Then we can add pages and optional features.

All in all though, after taking another look at the KLN on the Virtavia BN-2, and the Friendly Panels approximation, I think we already have about the most authentic KLN90B simulation available anywhere for MSFS. (I don't have X-plane so I can't compare theirs.) A ton of work has gone into this by the folks that have worked on it, and they deserve much credit for all that's there!

Dutch
 
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