F1 - N44FF HP-18

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++) ch...

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.

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...

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 w...

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 Tra...

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_

Vario   Air     Traffic I'm going to update this in the near future.  If I where to DIY a single consolidated XCSoar integrated module, this is what I'd put in it... OpenVario - Base system includes; Primary 32-bit MCU (teensy), OLED display, stepper indicator Ported Static Pressure Sensor (barometric altitude) Ported Pressure Differential Sensor (airspeed) Temperature Module (OAT) Bluetooth Transceiver - Communicate to Phone/Tablet Flight Aware (USB)  - ADS-B (in only) FLARM Transceiver - nRF 905 - FLARM OGN Transceiver -  RFM95 RF - 915mhz US / 868mhz EU    I'm wondering why I need this if nobody is using OGN and I can listen to FLARM.  I may still connect the module and have it there for future. All of this would collect air and traffic data; sending it via bluetooth to XCSoar running on a phone or tablet.  The tablet would provide GPS position for outbound traffic.

The trend in avionics has been consolidation a minimizing foot print.  The ultimate expression of that idea is the "unpanel".  This was first done on a Zenith 750 Superduty  unpanel, but the idea applies to a glider just as much if not more. Remove the panel, remove the pod, it's just a tablet on a flexible boom.  This is already how I fly now, using XCSoar and my phone... Here's a video of a setup similar to what I'm using now on my Silent and the club's Libelle. It's not pretty, but it works, a good flexible mount and a larger format tablet, would really make a huge difference.  But you ask.. Hey you don't have airspeed or barometric pressure altitude or a real vario!  Ooo - contraire mon'amie...  I have setup a BlueFly vario with airspeed.   XCSoar can read the airspeed, barometric pressure and displays it as altitude just as any Primary Flight Display (PFD) would... all out of the box, no coding required. And finally... w...

Last fall I purchased an HP-18 glider from Texas.  Left outside in a trailer that's falling apart, it was in rough shape.  Here's what on the plan. 1 - Clean/Fix and get it airworthy 2 - Install avionics 3 - Convert to center stick 4 - Fly cross country  and competitions 5 - Upgrade to FES