rafaelmartins / xpacars

X-Plane 11 plugin to feed data to myACARS (a smartCARS-alike plugin for Linux)

xpacars

WIP

X-Plane 11 plugin to feed data to myACARS (a smartCARS-alike plugin for Linux).

This plugin only works on Linux!

How to build and use?

After installing the dependencies (libcurl), run:

$ wget http://developer.x-plane.com/wp-content/plugins/code-sample-generation/sample_templates/XPSDK301.zip
$ unzip XPSDK301.zip
$ ./autogen.sh  # (if running from Git, depends on GNU autotools)
$ ./configure
$ make plugin

To install the plugin, run:

$ export XPLANE_DIR=...   # use the directory where you installed X-Plane 11
$ unzip xpacars-plugin-0.1.zip -d "${XPLANE_DIR}/Resources/plugins/"

Edit the ${XPLANE_DIR}/Resources/plugins/xpacars.txt file, to point to the URL of the endpoint you want to POST your position data to. This endpoint should be served through HTTPS for production environment, and include basic auth support. The user and password should be provided in the URL.

Protocol

/**
 * xpacars protocol, version 0
 *
 * This is the definition of our protocol. All the fields are separated with
 * a newline '\n' character.
 *
 * We have 2 types of requests, that are defined by the Content-Type header.
 */

/**
 * Content-Type: application/vnd.xpacars.flight
 *
 * This request registers a new flight in the server. It just contains the
 * aircraft data for now, but information about origin airport and destination
 * aiport should be added in a new version of the protocol.
 *
 * The server should return 201 to notify that the new flight was registered,
 * and the ID of the flight, that will be used by the upcoming requests.
 */
const char *flight_format =
    "1\n"   // protocol version
    "%s\n"  // aircraft icao
    "%s\n"  // aircraft tailnum
    "%s\n"  // aircraft description
    "";

/**
 * Content-Type: application/vnd.xpacars.position
 *
 * This request send information about the current status of the aircraft to
 * the server.
 *
 * The server should return 202 to notify that accepted the data. When a
 * request is not accepted, the client may take some action to recover, like
 * stop sending for a while, or increase the send intervals.
 *
 * There's no guarantee that the data was processed by the server right after
 * the request. The server can do the processing asyncronously.
 */
const char *position_format =
    "1\n"     // protocol version
    "%lld\n"  // flight id
    "%f\n"    // latitude in degrees
    "%f\n"    // longitude in degrees
    "%f\n"    // altitude in meters (not feets!)
    "%f\n"    // track in degrees
    "%f\n"    // ground speed in meters per second (not knots!)
    "%f\n"    // air speed in meters per second (not knots!)
    "%f\n"    // vertical speed meters per second (not feets per minute!)
    "";