Re: "glass cockpit" EFIS system?

["Curtis L. Olson" <curt@me.umn.edu>]

tdale4 writes:
> I would like to implement an EFIS system, one that has a moving map
> display, auto pilot, electronic instruments, etc all running on a
> linux powered laptop. Is anyone else working on such a system? What
> are your ideas on this, I know it'll be difficult, but not
> impossible. Suggestions?? Dave Morris has an exellent example on his
> webpage http://www.davemorris.com/dave/dfly-fms.html of the kind of
> system I would like to make. 

Tdale4,

Here's a couple thoughts for you.

First of all, you should take a look at the "Atlas" moving map program
at http://altas.sourceforge.net -- This is a moving map program that
can draw background terrain bitmaps (or any arbitrary bitmaps I
suppose.)  It can overlay airport and navaid data, and it can show
your flight track.  It's a rather nifty little program.  It comes with
a utility that can generate background bitmaps based off of scenery
from the flightgear project (http://www.flightgear.org)  The results
can be quite impressive.

As the coordinator of the flightgear project, I suppose I must put in
my obligatory plug for our project. :-)

As an open source sim, you have unprecidented access to the internals
of the software.  It may be that you eventually want to develop your
system for real flight (?) but flightgear might provide you a great
platform for testing out your code.  FlightGear can output NMEA and
Garmin gps strings, it can output several other formats as well (via
network or serial port.)  Note that flightgear and atlas can currently
work together via a network or serial port connection.

Currently we are working on developing a "generic" approach that will
allow remote access and control over all the important internal
flightgear variables via a simple network connection such as telnet.
You'll be able to "cd" through the variable hierarchy, and view/set
all the variables.

Good luck on your project,

Curt.
-- 
Curtis Olson   Human Factors Research Lab       Flight Gear Project
Twin Cities    curt@hfrl.umn.edu                curt@flightgear.org
Minnesota      http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt   http://www.flightgear.org
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