Hello,
I’m now working at home, due to Covid, and that spares me a lot of commuting. I have improved many aspects of the project, and in particular, while expanding the capabilities of the hardware control, I have come close to the limits of the arduino DUE. The reason is that I’m now reaching the memory and speed limits of the device. Although I could go on with the existing design, I have started to investigate a replacement of the DUE by a Raspberry, which is way more powerful. The drawback is that the Raspberry has a limited input/output port capacity, compared to the Arduino DUE. In a first step, I am experimenting with a Raspberry/DUE combination, where the DUE does a minimal work of handling the hardware input/output, digital and analogs, and the Raspberry does the “smart” job : communicating over the network with the simulator, mapping hardware values to real values (for example for servomotors and analogs, often in a non linear way…), handling a configuration file which hides the hardware structure and exposes increased functionalities …
It’s also possible to use a raspberry alone, without Arduino, but this implies a redesign of the expansion card which is used to connect to the opencockpit mastercards. This is my prefered approach but needs more work. My problem is that I have more ideas than free time to realize it, but this project is improving constantly.