
Show HN: Flight Instruments in Snap SVG and JavaScript - duncanmeech
https://fl7b8.csb.app/
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duncanmeech
I wrote these a while ago with some intention of creating flight training
tools. I'm making them available to all the other programmer / pilots out
there who might find them useful. [https://codesandbox.io/s/six-pack-flight-
instruments-fl7b8](https://codesandbox.io/s/six-pack-flight-instruments-fl7b8)

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phkahler
This is one of those things that "someone must have already done, it must be
out there." Thank you for being that person.

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diminish
Those type of awesome contributions are what drives humanity ahead :)

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pageandrew
Hey, they look great & realistic!

Possible issue with the Altimeter. I'm not sure if this was meant as an
accurate simulation, or just a technical demonstration of what is possible
with the component, but I've noticed that the Altimeter pressure setting
(small window) is changing on its own as the altitude hand sweeps around.

That never happens, the altimeter setting is a fixed setting set by the pilot
used to calibrate the altimeter readout to be relative to a known/shared
pressure setting.

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ericpauley
Looks like the site is demoing the altimeter reading changing as the setting
is changed. Note the altitude is changing properly with respect to altimeter
setting.

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duncanmeech
Correct! If you play with the source on codesandbox you can disable the demo
mode and actually rotate the Kollsman window using the BARO button. The
calculations for pressure and resulting altitude are from standard physics
texts.

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sansnomme
Imagine the next jumbo jet using avionics rendered on Electron.

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FridgeSeal
I could have done without that thought thank you.

* your plane crashes because the avionics computer OOM’s because you’re running chrome

* your plane crashes because JS decides that the pitch angle is suddenly NaN and plows the plane into the ground.

* your plane won’t take off, because there’s been yet another NPM dependency breakage because someone got annoyed and removed their single line “right pad” package, which causes the avionics to break because some dependency 400 layers down the tree used it to align an ad that displays on the command line at startup

* the plane crashes because in an emergency the pilots couldn’t find the instrumentation they were looking for, because the UI was updated for the 15th time that month and that disk has been removed “because A/B testing showed nobody clicked on it”.

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Tade0
* the plane crashes because there was an undiscovered bug in an important library whose sole maintainer is currently in a penal colony.

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osobo
Oddly specific

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FridgeSeal
If you are out-of-the-loop, it’s a reference to this:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_j...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/26/corejs_maintainer_jailed_code_release/)

Associated HN thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681860)

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junke
This could be a game where you have to fly a plane, looking only at the
instruments (this kind of training exists for real pilots).

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redis_mlc
Also check out Project Magenta for MS FSX and Pr3par3d pro flight controls
(FMC, etc.):

[https://www.projectmagenta.com/](https://www.projectmagenta.com/)

It's commercial software, but there's free demo versions of the controls, and
a personal license is 600 euros, which is a good deal if it does what you
want.

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imsofuture
Looks great. I have have a mind to make a VOR + map combo sometime, but I
haven't mustered the effort yet.

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5cott0
Very nice work! Unfortunately it appears Snap.svg has been sunsetted and has
not been updated for a few years.

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duncanmeech
Too bad, was only a thin wrapper at best though. Maybe time for a new open
source SVG library.

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5cott0
d3 would be the obvious choice to me. I have only taken a cursory look at your
code but strikes me that it could be fairly straight forward to rewrite it
using d3.

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redis_mlc
d3 is just a low-level combination of HTML, CSS, JS and SVG. It's seldom
obvious how anything is easy to do "using d3," unless manipulating a table of
data.

Essentially, if you're a raw d3 programmer, you're a front-end web engineer.

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5cott0
[https://medium.com/@Elijah_Meeks/d3-is-not-a-data-
visualizat...](https://medium.com/@Elijah_Meeks/d3-is-not-a-data-
visualization-library-67ba549e8520)

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jcutrell
Any plans to use these in tandem with X-Plane?

Looks really fantastic!

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Jahak
Upload the source code to github

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duncanmeech
The original app is on bitbucket git clone
git@bitbucket.org:duncanmeech/flying.git

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skanga
Well done! They look gorgeous ...

