I set out to make a crop duster autopilot for Savage.
My project is based on Nguyễn Quý Hy’s flight recorder, everyone using C# Visual Studio 2019+ and SimConnect must study these sources on Github, It has a Roslyn code generator for the SimConnect data you fetch. so you can tailor the poll to your needs
Instead of passing position and angles to the aircraft directly, like Nguyen does for his playback…I inserted a very basic pilot simulation model to keep the aircraft on the correct altitude (elevator & throttle setting), prevent banking (aileron) . To change course, I modify rudder, in very small steps, until the heading is correct. Between changing the rudder setting, I keep using aileron to compensate for the banking.
My program reports all data and currently has only Start and Stop and 8 heading buttons. See below. In this flight I clicked north east, and south west headings a few times, and ended with a north west heading, straight back.
Below flight was about 100 minutes and all I had to do was press my direction buttons,southeast-northwest alternating, every 10 minutes or so. The aircraft kept altitude at 2000 feet, and the turns were done with a maximal banking of 6 degrees. As a result, these turns are very wide ! But when I try to change rudder in larger steps, the aircraft goes shaking and becomes unstable… I have to find a way to do the turns quicker. My crop duster is not ready yet…
Flight looks like this now,
I have a GitHub, I’ll release the source when it is ready for crop dusting action.