A bigger plan
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
So... What does this mean for my project? I'm going to start with the hardware for the SoftRF. That has a processor robust radios which can work together to find and avoid traffic. It can also feed a bluetooth signal to an Android device running XCSoar and send it traffic.
Next, pitot and static pressure sensors will tell me how high and how fast
Next, AHRS board will tell me where I'm going. This board has algorithms and filters built-in and outputs attitude and heading directly.
Finally, I'll add a display. The Nextion display has it's own built in graphics STM32 processor which you layout and program entirely separately (in the Nextion) from your sensor logic. It takes very high level input like (heading="10.3", pitch="32.2"..., etc) instead of drawing commands.
Tying this all together is the ESP32 processor inside the SoftRF which will aggregate all these signals. So the SoftRF will form the foundation of a true primary flight display (PFD). This PFD device will communicate via bluetooth the XCSoar and give it more data (vario, traffic, speed to fly) so it's even better.
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 mean for my project? I'm going to start with the hardware for the SoftRF. That has a processor robust radios which can work together to find and avoid traffic. It can also feed a bluetooth signal to an Android device running XCSoar and send it traffic.Next, pitot and static pressure sensors will tell me how high and how fast
Next, AHRS board will tell me where I'm going. This board has algorithms and filters built-in and outputs attitude and heading directly.
Finally, I'll add a display. The Nextion display has it's own built in graphics STM32 processor which you layout and program entirely separately (in the Nextion) from your sensor logic. It takes very high level input like (heading="10.3", pitch="32.2"..., etc) instead of drawing commands.
Tying this all together is the ESP32 processor inside the SoftRF which will aggregate all these signals. So the SoftRF will form the foundation of a true primary flight display (PFD). This PFD device will communicate via bluetooth the XCSoar and give it more data (vario, traffic, speed to fly) so it's even better.
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