My latest creation... thanks to everybody on here!

wjsteele

For the last several years, I've been designing avionics for aircraft as a hobby. I found the Propeller about 3 years ago and haven't looked back since.

Attached is a picture of my latest creation. I call it the Wingman. It's a portable EFIS, or Electronic Flight Information System. This is the first and only unit on the market that is completely portable. The prototype has one of Rayman's 4.3" Touch screen displays in it and runs on a single propeller chip, with 64k eeprom and an internal 2gig SD card. It also has a Li-ion battery pack to allow it run without ships power for over two hours. All of it's sensors are built in, including 3 axis accelerometers, 3 axis gyros and a 3 axis compass. It's also got a 20 channel GPS, but can also connect to an external GPS for additional waypont and route information. It has a bunch of software from the OBEX in it plus about 10 years of my own software development converted to PASM and a little bit of Spin.

I want to thank everybody on this forum and from Parallax for being so helpful and generous with your time, without you, this wouldn't have ever got done.

I've finalized the design and have decided to start manufacturing them... we'll be officially launching the Wingman at this years EAA Oshkosh AirVenture in July. If you happen to go, please stop by and see me at my VirtualHUD booth in Hangar D (#4101.)

Bill

Scope

So cool!

Congratulations and thanks for sharing.

Good luck with it.

zoopydogsit

Congratulations! It's great seeing the Prop move to more commercial products!

BTW. Where did you get the case for Raymonds 4.3" display? Looks like a great fit.

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It's all a function of time.

wjsteele

I designed it myself and had Chuck over at Mountain King Technologies cut them from acrylic. It's layered up from 1/8" sheets with a 1/16" sheet on the front and back as a bezel and cover. The outside is then wrapped in a nice foam cushion. They look great and are very durable.

Bill

sylvie369

Oh my, it's fantastic. Nice job.

That does it, I'm coming to Oshkosh this year.

wjsteele

sylvie369 said...
That does it, I'm coming to Oshkosh this year.

Wait until you see my other suprise at Oshkosh... it'll knock your socks off!!!

Bill

HollyMinkowski

That looks really cool!
Amazing the power of a single propeller chip.

When you get boards made for these we would love to see a
picture of one populated.

electrosys

Cogratulation, fine job and looks great, very pro

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Timothy D. Swieter

Bill - very neat and congratulations on putting together a nice package on the product.

Can you tell us more about the features of the product, like what it does? I did some rudimentary searching on Electronic Flight Information System, but got a lot of general descriptions. What is it about this product that someone will buy it? (Hey - I would buy it already because it integrates the Prop with a bunch of cool sensors and a screen).

Please do give us a report on how your time at Oshkosh goes.

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Timothy D. Swieter, P.E.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" 16:9 LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT, PropNET, PolkaDOT-51
www.tdswieter.com

william chan

Is it for passenger aircraft or hobby aircraft?

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www.fd.com.my
www.mercedes.com.my

Cluso99

Bill: Please don't hide your project here whe$re us propellerheads may miss it. You should put it up on the prop forum.
Congratulations. It looks great. Any idea of $?

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Links to other interesting threads:

· Home of the MultiBladeProps: TriBlade,·RamBlade,·SixBlade, website
· Single Board Computer:·3 Propeller ICs·and a·TriBladeProp board (ZiCog Z80 Emulator)
· Prop Tools under Development or Completed (Index)
· Emulators: CPUs Z80 etc; Micros Altair etc;· Terminals·VT100 etc; (Index) ZiCog (Z80) , MoCog (6809)·
· Prop OS: SphinxOS·, PropDos , PropCmd··· Search the Propeller forums·(uses advanced Google search)
My cruising website is: ·www.bluemagic.biz·· MultiBlade Props: www.cluso.bluemagic.biz

wjsteele

Ok. An EFIS is basically a digital version of the instrument panel in any aircraft. Modern versions actually give the pilot a lot more useful information than the traditional six-pack instruments in older aircraft. The Wingman is designed to give those pilots of "less equipped" aircraft that same information.

Cluso, as for putting it here, I didn't want to cross post it, and since it is a commercial product, I wasn't sure I could post it in the prop forum, since I can't reveal a lot of the details.

As for the price, it will retail for $1,595. Which is actually $500 less than a typical aviation GPS and $1000 less then the closest competitive product, which isn't portable.

Bill

davejames

Very very cool!

Does it have to be "certified" in anyway?


DJ

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wjsteele

No, but it does have to be extensively flight tested.

Bill

Timothy D. Swieter

Cool. Are you a flyer yourself? I can imagine you beta testing the device in a Cessna plane, flying with your knees while trying to download a bug fix update.

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Timothy D. Swieter, P.E.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" 16:9 LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT, PropNET, PolkaDOT-51
www.tdswieter.com

wjsteele

Actually yes, I am a pilot, but I fly a Beechcraft. I make it a point to not use the device except in a normal manner and video record everything, even though I'm very tempted sometimes. It gets to that point when I see something wrong and I know exactly what I did to cause it or know how to fix it, but I left everything back on the ground and have to wait. Thats the nice thing about the cameras... all I have to do is mention it out loud and the camera will record it... so when I get back we'll remember it.

I also have a test pilot who does a real professional job. We build "test cards" with the manoevers we're going to do and set it up and record it with small cameras in the plane watching the instrument panel and the Wingman. That way, we can coorelate that everything is working perfectly.

I had a funny thing happen one time... as I was flying, I was doing spin testing on it. After the flight was over one of my engineers came over and told me I had to go look at the video. Right as I entered the first spin my mechanical attitude indicator in my plane (the "artifical horizon") started to tumble... and it never stopped the entire flight, but I never noticed it because I was using the Wingman the entire time. That was one of those moments when you know you got it right.

Bill

Ravenkallen

Cool!!!! You should post it on the completed projects forum. I bet Parallax would make that project of the week for sure.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

Ravenkallen

Cool!!!! You should post it on the completed projects forum. I bet Parallax would make that project of the week for sure.

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Propeller + Picaxe = Romeo & Juliet

wjsteele

I thought about it, but I can't post the code or schematics because we do have some proprietary stuff in there. If we posted that stuff, our competitors (which we're sure to soon have) will have all our magic goo. (We've also thought about the future and have made provisions in the hardware and software for "future upgrades" that we have planned, which we don't want to reveal at this time.)

I have to say, the further and further I dig into the prop, the more I love it. The Obex is wonderful for getting a collective understanding of how everything works. We took a lot of the ideas (and code) and blended them into our software. Most had to be rewritten to fit our particular needs (and space, because we only have 512 longs in each cog.) The real cool part is that we still have free space available for additional processing and we're only using 7 cogs right now. That's gives us some breathing room from some future enhancements.

I've been working on a "detuned" modification that we'll be able to release for propheads, but getting ready for our official launch is a higher priority right now.

Bill

Tim-M

Looks like a great product Bill, thanks for sharing it with us.

Any chance you'll leak a little information about your other surprise at Oshkosh... for those of us who are not able to be there?


Tim

P.S. I used to fly gyrocopter and powered parachute before an inner ear problem.

wjsteele

Sorry, no. Ok... well... here's a hint... my company is called VirtualHUD for a reason. We already have a Heads Up Display for part of the aviation market out there... what are we missing?

Bill

HollyMinkowski

A short clip of one of the videos you made in the cockpit
would be fun to watch.

Tim-M

Fantastic stuff Bill... A brilliant idea to create the display by projecting the information onto the 'surface' of the rotating propeller! Good for keeping your attention outside the cockpit for safety, good display size, good for all sorts of reasons. Hats off for really thinking outside the box.

wjsteele

Tim-M,

Believe it or not, that's our old HUD... we have a new one coming that will make it obsolete.

Bill

ScribblerKart

wjsteele,

Fantastic! I could see if my dad and me could get a screen from the Parallax shop and build a tv with legos and the screen!

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ScribblerKart


Uh oh, ScribblerKart time!

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Great stuff, Bill! And thanks for going public with a very important message: Propellers aren't just for hobbyists!

-Phil

Kevin Wood

Given the interest in the subject from time to time, can you share what measures you've taken to protect your code/IP? If not, I'll understand.

wjsteele

Actually, Kevin, we haven't done anything to protect the code itself. We're just going to rely on the Copyright and Patents for now. If someone really wants it, they'll have to do the hard work of reverse engineering it.

We did encase some parts in epoxy, but that was more for environmental reasons than to protect IP.

As you might be able to tell, our company was founded on being innovative. We have a 7 year business plan built around that model, so every year we'll introduce something else that is innovative. Last year it was the VirtualHUD, this year the Wingman... we have other cool items either ready for market or getting ready or on the drawing board.

Bill

Timothy D. Swieter

Bill - what epoxy materials did you use to for encasing? You encased ICs or connectors?

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Timothy D. Swieter, P.E.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" 16:9 LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT, PropNET, PolkaDOT-51
www.tdswieter.com

wjsteele

Timothy,

Off the top of my head, I don't remember... I do know it's a product from the same company that owns Loctite. It's a two part epoxy that cures in about 4 hours and has a very high electrical resistance.

We're setting everything in the epoxy, so basically the entire inside of the unit is packaged in it. The prevents things from "shaking" loose in the event of a rough running engine or someone dropping it.

Bill

Dr_Acula

This is just so cool. It would be great to see it over at the propeller forum - sometimes I miss things over here in the sandbox. There is no need to make any code available - it is enough for me to see a photo and a quick description and the knowledge it is "Propeller Inside".

The prop is going commercial!

Do you have a serial output port? I'm just thinking this could be light enough to fit in a model plane/helicopter as well, and if it was continuously dumping all the data out of a serial port as well as putting it on the screen, another micro (or another propeller) could take that information and use it to control the plane. Maybe it might open up another market simply by adding a serial port object and a small socket?

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www.smarthome.viviti.com/propeller