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)