I concously set this project aside about 18mo ago to concentrate on an airplane project. That project is winding down. I attended #OSH17 and I was kinda shocked nobody else is trying to do anything like this. Perhaps the fact that it's non-commercial? At any rate, the idea stays the same, open source DIY project to build your own flight instruments for a basic VFR aircraft that you can integrate with either a very basic dedicated display and/or a panel mounted tablet or an economical panel mounted Android Car Stereo. I am a fan of the open-source Avare flight software and that community is very active and receptive to pull requests (changes). I am quite confident if I developed this board and wrote the updates to display engine data, they would add the tab for engine/air data. This would make an excellent poor-man's ($300?) EFIS
This is Avare... I would add flight data to the PFD display above and a new tab for engine data.
Let's get caught up....
It's quite basic, and I haven't tried flight yet. I recall when I set this aside, I had it mostly working on the bench, but it need further refinement and flight testing/debugging.
The core of it is up to 8 channels of analog input with handy through holes for pull-up/down resistors to match the most resistance sensor (OilT, OilP,CHT,EGT,OAT,MP...). For more complicated sensors that require special component, I have two I2C inputs. There are lots of really cheap I2C modules for pressure, inertia/gyros and magnetic compass. Basically you can build your own air/engine data collector.
Let me know what you think. I have a few extra boards I'd send to anyone who's serious and commits to contributing.
Here's the GitHub repo on the very basic LCD display version of this.
https://github.com/bruceme/SportVFR
