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SafetyThird
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I'll add my interest here. I recently started looking to see if a low--cost wing-leveller/heading autopilot was available to add to my skyranger. I found several units on the market now by firms such as Levil, Aircraft Automation, Stratus, X-flight etc. All designed to use things like trim tabs separate from the primary flight controls. From what I can see, they all use a simple AHRS box and EFIS software running on a tablet. There are several navigation apps that work with them such as iflyGPS as they output NMEA strings through lightning to serial cables.
This seems to be a growing market in the world of uncertified aircraft and I'd love to be able to utilise Skydemon to drive a system like this.
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Eagle2
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Skydemon are prepared to look at this but don’t want to speculatively commit to doing a lot of development work on it until they see there’s a good-sized community of people who will benefit and are that keen to invest in in such a device.
Please declare your interest on this forum, direct to Skydemon or at the next trade show they are attending. If they get a more people asking about it it will happen.
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BJS
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+xAs stated by BJS It seems crazy that we have certified autopilots coupled to devices such as the lowly Garmin196, but we are not able to utilize the amazing capabilities of an IPad or smart phone running Sky Demon just because we cant export a route to the autopilot !!! Surely there is a consumer blue tooth device capable of providing this interface out there? If you know of one please help in most cases and the rest is software only.
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Eagle2
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This device has been suggested as a possible contender / solution
https://uconnect.com.tw/S2B5232E.html
Has anyone investigated or tried this device?
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Eagle2
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Group: Forum Members
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As stated by BJS It seems crazy that we have certified autopilots coupled to devices such as the lowly Garmin196, but we are not able to utilize the amazing capabilities of an IPad or smart phone running Sky Demon just because we cant export a route to the autopilot !!! Surely there is a consumer blue tooth device capable of providing this interface out there? If you know of one please help
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BJS
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Group: Forum Members
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+xAt present it is practical, but very fiddly, to transfer routes from an android device to a robust, aviation dedicated GPS such as an Aera 660. But, using a micro sd card as the transfer medium makes it difficult to do in a cockpit environment and really has to be done in the cafe or at home. It is very unlikely that bodies like the LAA are ever going to give approval to driving autopilots from flaky notebooks and phones. It just won't happen. The best we can hope for is that, in my case, Garmin provide bluetooth transfer via their Connect (or whatever it is called) to Skydemon. I expect Garmin see Skydemon as a competing product and it is not in their commercial interest to make easy route transfers. I would be interested to see if any groups in the states have got anywhere with Garmin and bluetooth file transfers. I just cannot see what leverage we have from the UK.
Cheers Martin Board GPLAR There are wireless paired sd cards, in principle small webservers on a card with a (not very reliable) sync mechanism. Yes Android is a troublesome solution for doing such things, but the more closed iOS doesn't do better.
Regarding autopilots driven from consumer devices - not long ago they said the same as you for handheld devices and now we have certified autopilots officially coupled to devices as low as Garmin196. A modern smartphone is science fiction tech compared to those.
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rvmartin
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+xHi. There have been many posts and suggestions on this forum and elsewhere requesting a facility for exporting Sky Demon routes to autopilots and other devices over the last few years. Since the introduction of Sky Demon we have all benefitted greatly from its planning, navigation and briefing capabilites and has become the preferred choice of most GA pilots. However, one option that has been missing from its capabilities was the ability to integrate Sky Demon with general aviation autopilots. Due to the increased interest in this requirement I believe that Sky Demon may now be prepared to explore such an integration. It would help the case for developing this capabilty if those interested could express their support and interest on this forum. Also, if anyone is aware of an existing solution using readily available off the shelf and budget friendly hardware please share this information here as this will reduce reasearch and development time and make an approved solution more likely. Thanks in advance for your support.
Alan Maynard At present it is practical, but very fiddly, to transfer routes from an android device to a robust, aviation dedicated GPS such as an Aera 660. But, using a micro sd card as the transfer medium makes it difficult to do in a cockpit environment and really has to be done in the cafe or at home. It is very unlikely that bodies like the LAA are ever going to give approval to driving autopilots from flaky notebooks and phones. It just won't happen. The best we can hope for is that, in my case, Garmin provide bluetooth transfer via their Connect (or whatever it is called) to Skydemon. I expect Garmin see Skydemon as a competing product and it is not in their commercial interest to make easy route transfers. I would be interested to see if any groups in the states have got anywhere with Garmin and bluetooth file transfers. I just cannot see what leverage we have from the UK.
Cheers Martin Board GPLAR
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David N.
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To my knowledge, Sky Demon has the possibility to transfer flight plan to Dynons Skyview autopilot, however I would agree on that this is probably not to be considered as 'cost-friendly'.
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BJS
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Group: Forum Members
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+xThanks for your thoughts on this subject. Unfortunately not being an IT expert I'm looking for a simple solution to exporting Sky Demon routes to an autopilot on an experimental VFR aircraft. To quote, you say. "Yes, it is doable and spitting out the required additional NMEA sequences over IP is a piece of cake". Please can you share how this can be achieved? 'Talking' to a modern digital autopilot requires you to speak its language, which in most of these cases will be NMEA sequences. For the vocabulary see i.e. https://gpsd.gitlab.io/gpsd/NMEA.html . The specifics of your autopilot will be found in the programming manual of it.
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Eagle2
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+xDo we really want to embrace that? Yes, it is doable and spitting out the required additional NMEA sequences over IP is a piece of cake. The tinkerer and efiddler can experiment so with the now 2 year old Stratux2AP implementation and it works quite well - if you know exactly what you do. BUT, there is a reason the digital autopilot in experimental sector deleted things like BT input and consumer electronics interfaces for operational purposes - simply because the airmenship even in Experimental showed no benefit to harm by such capability.
I think we are by far better of keeping consumer electronics for planning purpose and restrict ourselves to transfer the result in real avionics. Hi BJS Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. Unfortunately not being an IT expert I'm looking for a simple solution to exporting Sky Demon routes to an autopilot on an experimental VFR aircraft. To quote, you say. "Yes, it is doable and spitting out the required additional NMEA sequences over IP is a piece of cake". Please can you share how this can be achieved?
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