Hi Guys,

I'm thinking of a flight assistance information screen and was wondering what kind of information you guys would find useful and would like to see? Stuff for you to quickly analyze your flight.

Daniel

Can you define flight assistance?
Most of that is on screen already, no? Way home.. distance to home.. battery info. Those are the main things that you'd want when you're battling a bit?

What would be nice is some form of more realistic glide slope, as well as a 'co pilot' to guide you in the most optimal path for a return to home. It would be a problem though, in that it needs to know a lot of parameters, such as current wind direction.

But if you went to this 'Get me home' screen, it would draw something indicating that you should descent or climb, as well as auto create a waypointmaybe 250 meters down wind from your position, at a certain optimal altitude. So it guides you to that, and then when you get close to it, way point changes to your position, so it puts you at a good altitude for a nice landing into the wind.

That kind of thing?

Sort of - I was thinking like it tells you how efficiently you are climbing, or your fuel economy and how much projected time and estimated range you have left flying the way you're currently flying, maybe a map, stuff like that.

As for the glide thing - you should check out the glideslope indicator - that's what it's for.

Daniel

Ah, I see.
That would be pretty cool. Loads of parameters needed though. Again, wind direction and speed... aircraft efficiancy (A glider at x AGL and y LOS would have different parameters to maybe a flying wing at the same position)...

I love the map plan! Would be cool (but probably impossible) to preload your flying location at home, saying, 'For today, I will fly between this GPS coord, and this coord... and it caches the maps from Google Earth... and you can overlay a 20% transparent, full screen map, over your video showing google earth location of where you are?

But I understand that memory and processor power isn't going to allow for that - this year.

Vector map - we don't need fancy maps but maybe a vector map can be created and pre-loaded. Or maybe just a table of headings and distances to various waypoints. I'm still toying with the ideas.

Daniel

Radar with incoming aircraft warning. That would be cool.

"Boogy 1 o'clock dive dive"

Does it display azimuth? That is how I navigate and aim my antenna on long flights.

bracky72,

No it doesn't. It could be made to but this is the first I've heard of people using azimuth displays like this. Most of the time I don't really care because when you fly out far enough, you just point your antenna straight out with very slight elevation.

Daniel

a Wh/km might be interesting. Perhaps it could be a %efficiency with 0 is full power not moving and 100 is no power maintaining altitude. Time or distance left at this efficiency would be cool.

It could also be useful for setup to have a bargraph of the various gains affecting the servo outputs to help tune them? Perhaps showing the what IMU and GPS are contributing?

I know there are visual indicators for pan and tilt, i wonder if this could be upgraded to a programmable cross-hairs to show what is "straight ahead"

Mike

how about a buffeting warning that shows when IMU corrections are reaching max servo travel?

how about a buffeting warning that shows when IMU corrections are reaching max servo travel?

how about a buffeting warning that shows when IMU corrections are reaching max servo travel?

Or maybe a buffeting warning that shows when IMU corrections are reaching max servo travel?

MikeTheCrash,

In general I try to keep the center portion of the screen clear of clutter. This is why I am averse to putting stuff like cross-hairs unless absolutely necessary. I suppose an option could be made though but it really needs to be thought through. I'd hate to implement a feature and find out that no one really uses it like that after some time.

Hmm... usually IMU corrections are so small they don't ever reach anywhere near max servo travel. Is there a particular concern you have here?

Daniel

Originally Posted by Daniel Wee

Hi Guys,

I'm thinking of a flight assistance information screen and was wondering what kind of information you guys would find useful and would like to see? Stuff for you to quickly analyze your flight.

Daniel

Daniel,

From what I see, most if not all GPS based OSD's give flawed "fly home" directions because it represents track over ground as heading. This is for sure in accurate, whenever there is any wind. The error becomes more pronounced as the wind speed increases. This error is further aggravated the slower the airplane flies.

What about, instead of a heading to home indicator, a turn indicator. Here's the algorithm:
Define re-fresh time.
Note time.
Draw a line from Current posit to Fly-to-point.
Indicate

• If the plane is on track, indicate something like: <>
• If the plane is drifting left, indicate something like: >
• If the plane is drifting left a lot, indicate something like: >>>
• If the plane is drifting left in between, indicate something like: >>
• If the plane is drifting right, indicate: <

etc...

Note time.
If time < refresh time

Indicate.

If time > refresh time

Re-draw line from current posit to fly-to-point.

And so on...

What do you think?