F1 - N44FF HP-18

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SoftRF - Pitot Static

January 27, 2019

I've received most of the parts for the SoftRF and compiled the code with the changes to support; MPXV7002DP will measure pitot preasure analog 0-5v signal. WitMotion WT901 is a full ADHRS with barometric preassure. It outputs on a UART in binary at 115kbps. My first attempt at the static pressure cavity failed. My v2 was a cleanup of v1. I then decided to use shark-bite quick disconnects. That became V3... which I'm waiting to get back from the 3D Printer. I'll keep you posted. It looks very simple and promising. Code to Support WT901 (Untested) unsigned char buf[ 11 ]; unsigned char _readDataFrame () { // invalidate the buffer straight away if (buf[ 0 ] = (( unsigned char )Serial. read ()) != 0x55 ) return 0xFF ; // read a 8 byte frame (with headers and checksum) // and calculate the checksum unsigned char checkSum = 0 ; for ( int i = 0 ; i < 9 ; i++) checkSum += (buf[i]

Better center stick

January 27, 2019

This is the new design for the center stick. It's "tube-in-tube". The bottom left goes to the center stick. The top/right goes aft to the mixer. On the bottom/left; the outer tube is elevator, inner push-pull is aileron. After the junction, it swaps. On the top/right tubes, outer torsion tube is aileron, inner is push-pull and elevator. I also made these bracket that fit outside a 1" PVC pipe so I can test the concept. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3385582 And the fuselage bracket which will hold the ball bearings and align the outer tubes. I want to test how it will all work together.

Objectifying thermal convective lift

January 21, 2019

Us glider pilots have gotten pretty good at guessing where lift should be, but it's very subjective and I think we actually rely on luck more than skill more than we want to admit. But what if we could take the guess work out of it... The "money-ball" theory of soaring? How could a ground heat map inform a convective thermal prediction? I am planning to experiment with thermal cameras on a 3-axis gyro stabilized gimbal. I have grand plans, but first I want to run this by a engineer/pilot and set some good basic ground rules for a research project. I can't find good concrete research on thermal-scale meteorology. But.. from what I've learned gliding and from soaring books; here's the key hypotheses I'd like to postulate. The tera-sourced convection trigger theory; Given ; Dry air with lots of sun and disproportionately ground IR absorption When ; regions of heat contrast form Then ; The probability and strength of thermal triggering

What would you put on a glider HUD?

January 15, 2019

I'm headed towards running the HUD device using this approach to start... This is an augmented reality headset. For hardware, I'll use old smart phone of modest power; they can be had very inexpensively. It would already have... 3D accellerometers for head tracking, USB, WiFi, bluetooth, graphics accelerators, lots of RAM and tons of Storage. Very easy to update, etc. I'm looking at using TrackIR ($150) to do referential head-tracking relative to cockpit. From here, I can either dumb down standard Android or root and embed the HUD/PFD software from there. I'm currently playing the javascript 3D library three.j s. I like it because it's simple and it's letting me explore what an augmented reality 3D PFD environment would look like. This is super basic, but I built the horizon & pitch latter in 3D, the horizon is a ring, the pitch latter are ring-arcs. The pitch arcs would stay fixed to your aircraft's nose while you look around. That wa

A bigger plan

January 12, 2019

I've been focused on my ideal glider panel. I think what I want is pretty basic. I could fly just on pressure sensors connected to XCSoar. XCSoar (or LXNav, any glider computer) is not a flight instrument. It's a glide computer. Even if you set it up for well for flying. It's not what it does. Is it legal... sure, but it's not ideal. It's well worth spending the time in XCSoar configuring it for optimal use, but it will look like this... This is optimized for getting a glider around a course. And it has some amazing features to do that. But it's not for actually flying a glider. Glide computers evolved in cockpits that already had flying instruments (altimeter, airspeed, vario and compass). I could have all those, but why? I could also build a device that does better. Primary flight display for gliding Attitude Altitude Airspeed Vertical speed with MacCreedy and Climb Average Synthetic Vision Traffic So... What does this

VAT - Vario All-In-One Take 2

January 11, 2019

My last post talked about building my own traffic alerting and avoidance and air-data from varios components. Since then I stumbled on an amazing open source project that dramatically simplifies this plan. It uses one off-the-shelf consumer Radio/GPS board to do all the traffic and it has pins I can program to accept the barometric, pressure and temperature sensor data. The project is called SoftRF Here are the components bought. Total cost... $64.10 T-Beam ESP32 LoRa WiFi Module -915MHz 868M/900M/915Mhz Antenna Module Aerial MS5611-01BA03 Barometeric Pressure sensor MPXV7002DP Differential Pressure So... I pulled the trigger! With this I should get airspeed, altitude, total energy variometer, FLARM, ADS-B and OGN traffic advisery all on my XCSoar Phone/Tablet. That's _HUGE_

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