So with all the menu and options done and fully working, and with map working very well, it was time to move forward again. This time I started to add weather radar to my EFI. As you know, X-Plane does not have weather radar datarefs. So? So we will make them!
As you know, X-Plane is
transmitting weather data via UDP (to be used by their iPhone Control Pad). So my friend has built a small windows app which is listening to that UDP port, and receiving the data. The app then takes the tiny part which is relevant for weather radar simulation, and saves the values into my custom datarefs. Each pixel of the original xplane weather data has values 0-9, where 0 = no rain, 9 = the most rain. We are using 60 datarefs, each of them being a 130 values-long array. Air Manager is reading those datarefs, saving the values into a lua matrix, and the draw function is reading them couple times per second, and plotting the results on canvas (and select colour depending on how much rain there is).
The screenshot is a preview only - the colours are not yet calibrated (I took some random RGB values), the range is not correct, and I have to do some masking of the relevant part of the image. Also we will add the simulation of the radar beam sweep into the windows app, which will update the values as we fly (currently the whole image is updated at once every few seconds).
Am I the first one to have functional weather radar in Air Manager instrument?
Also I have to finally finish the TCAS library which is still not working as I would like, and maybe the terrain display comes next after the WXR is finished
Or I will adjust my EGPWS module to include also RAAS callouts, if I motivate myself enough...
Pavel
