I am aware of main people building there light sim around the Digital Combat Simulator A-10 Warthog that they are using the Arduino as a interface with the sim to use 2 line LEDS and (forgive me as I go not know what they are call) Numbers made up of 7 leds in a block and you use multiple blocks to make larger number. in there flight sims for the radio read settings and other readout panels.
No one in the DCS forum seems to want to impart the information which is need for a beginner to make the system work just send you round and round on threads which only someone with great experience in electronics would understand.
Is there anyone here that would be willing to help me with such a problem?
I don't know what you would consider helpful - there are complete worked examples for seven segment LED displays and LCDs over at the Playground, and provided with the IDE.
hornetuk:
Yes, I had also done loads of Internet searches and only found examples of its use but nothing I can not find anything which is truly heapfull
Well, writing text on a small LCD is very common and any LCD shield designed for Arduino would probably come with a working example. Creating a seven-segment display is also quite common and you should find plenty of examples in the playground or in the wider internet. Since this requires an input per segment it can end up using a lot of pins and one common approach to deal with that is to use a shift register to expand the number of outputs on your Arduino. (Please don't say you can't find helpful examples of using an Arduino with a shift register, because I'm not going to believe you.)
Well as I have no real clue as to what I am looking for who am I meant to know what is useful or not? It is like asking a blind man to tell you what a painting looks like. I am looking for someone to instruct me I know what I would like to be able to have but I have no idea of how to do it.
hornetuk:
Well as I have no real clue as to what I am looking for who am I meant to know what is useful or not? It is like asking a blind man to tell you what a painting looks like. I am looking for someone to instruct me I know what I would like to be able to have but I have no idea of how to do it.
So what do you expect to happen next? You have to have an idea of what you want to achieve, and then learn how to achieve it. You've mentioned two display technologies. Pick one. Look at examples showing how to use it - there are plenty of examples for both. Understand them and learn how it works - the examples are not complicated. At the moment I get the impression you're getting nowhere with any of this and hoping for somebody to give you a parts list and working code for exactly what you want to do, but that's not how this works. YOU need to implement the solution. There are plenty of people here willing to help you when you run into trouble, but you have to do the work yourself.
Well as I have no real clue as to what I am looking for who am I meant to know what is useful or not?
Well, all you've told us so far is something about a tank-buster cockpit simulator, but nothing about what these displays might be attached to, so we're in the position of the blind man, listening to a deaf mute trying to describe a sound.
We were (certainly I was) rather hoping you'd tell us what "the problem" is.
As a means of establishing some common-ground, let's start here: I know that an A-10 is an ugly (hence "Warthog"), robust, heavily-armed tank-buster and close air-support aircraft, with a huge Gatling gun mounted under the nose.
That's about all I've understood of your posts so far.
as I have said to use the arduino board to make the 2 line led and the segment display work with dcs a-10. I have already said all this in my past replys.
but that does not say anything. you don't just pug it in and say work. so the led magical connects its self to the board then plugs it's self in and then says to its self I go and talk to dcs a-10. that is what you are saying then?
You need to get a display which is electrically compatible with the Arduino and connect it correctly. If you use a display shield or a display that says it is Arduino compatible then it avoids the problem of working out for yourself whether it's compatible.
You need to write a sketch to display your data on the display.
You should have no trouble finding examples of people doing this on the Arduino playground and on the rest of the internet. Have you looked?
You will also need to have an application on the host (which I assume will be a PC) which sends the data to the Arduino via its serial USB connection, and include some code in your sketch to receive the data. There are tons of examples of receiving data from the serial port.
You will have to work out for yourself what language your PC application will be written in and how it will obtain the data from your simulator, but in most languages writing to a serial port is easy - if you have any problems with that part there is a dedicated section of the forum which covers it.