tailwheels

Unintended Adventures

Month: October 2016

A student’s approach to avionics

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On October 22, 2016

In S-20

Pretty excited at the moment. I think I’m actually going to get this engine monitor project off the ground and it will look nice as well.

If you recall my last posting I kind of talked about that I was going to limit myself to simple displays powered by an Arduino because I was having trouble finding a way to create a GUI on the Raspberry Pi. I resigned myself to pixely LCD displays and figured I would start looking for one to buy until a magical moment when I was searching Google for a display and with a combination of search terms I ended up on a search page on SourceForge. SourceForge is a website that can serve as a repository for software projects and sharing those projects.

Wouldn’t you know that I stumbled upon a really cool project that mimicked exactly what I wanted to do and it even used some tools that I had looked at before I gave up. The picture below shows the display that was created. If your into software I encourage you to check it out. You can find it at (https://sourceforge.net/projects/enginemon/). It looks to be a great jumping off point for my project and I think we’ll end up with something very cool.

So after discovering the code I set off getting my Raspberry Pi setup to run it. It wasn’t too hard and there were much fewer headaches then the path I had started down a few weeks ago. I got it running and then decided to try interfacing the Pi and the Arduino. That took a little time, but I used a quick tutorial I found online and I got it working. The video below shows me turning on an LED on the Arduino using a program running on the Raspberry Pi. The method of communicating back and forth is what I’ll use to transmit values received from sensors by the Arduino to the Raspberry Pi.

The current thought is to house the Arduino itself as a standalone sensor box and then the RPi will be housed with or near the display and use some wires to connect to the Arduino. That way I won’t have too massive of a box hanging off the back of the panel.

I also found a 6.5″ screen that is being used by some glider pilots running an open source glider computer. They seem to have good luck with reading it in direct sunlight and they see more sunlight more often than a normal plane. The nice thing too is that the display is relatively inexpensive, so if it doesn’t work as well or I find a brighter one it should be a trivial process to change out the displays.

(3 h)

Riveting

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On October 13, 2016

In S-20

Little late, but wanted to get a short note written to just stay on top of the log.

Last weekend was devoted to getting the fabric on the right wing riveted down. I thought it would be fairly quick, but as usual it was not. Nothing hard for this part, but just a lot of repetition. The plastic strips all laid down nicely and seemed to go better than when I was using the strips on the horizontal stabilizer.

Maria helped out with the riveting and we got it done pretty quick. It was a quick work day, but now we’re all set to start adding exit rings, patches, and tapes.

On an aside, I have started on a side project to attempt some simple avionics. I really like the systems produced by Dynon and Garmin, but I’m haven’t been able to fully commit myself to one for this airplane. The information that I really am interested in is engine data and specifically temperatures. My idea is to use a popular micro controller (Arduino) to interface with the thermocouples and then display this data on a small screen. The end goal would be then to use the power of 3D printing to make a case for the system and be able to mount it in the panel.

I’ve looked into also using a small Linux computer (Raspberry Pi) in order to get access to nicer displays and graphics, but my lack of GUI programming has limited that area. I have a Raspberry Pi, so I may try to figure something out, but the Arduino is a relatively simple platform with a lot of community support for sensor applications.

If anyone reads this and has questions or has done this sort of thing shoot me an email. Should be a fun project and lower my desire for a full-blown glass cockpit. I’m going to add this stuff to the avionics page on the blog and try and track some progress there.

(5 h)

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