I've flown ~500 hours on mine, never been happy with it's performance as a variometer, inferior to my mechanical Winter, but the instant wind has saved me from two outlandings. It only needs to be a bit less noisy and there'd be real value in an alarm when the wind suddenly changes 30 degrees or 10kts within a few minutes.

On Wednesday, January 29, 2020 at 6:26:01 PM UTC+13, krasw wrote:
On Tuesday, 28 January 2020 12:25:09 UTC+2, Jim Hogue wrote:
Does anyone know exactly what the 14 sensors are in the Air Glide ISU? I will guess:

3 axis accelerations
3 axis rates
3 axis magnetometers
Static pressure
Total pressure
Total energy probe pressure (differential, actually redundant to Static and Total if you know or are willing to compensate for the aircraft’s position errors)
Outside air temperature
GPS

Please correct me if I have guessed wrong.

You are most probably right.


OpenVario with sensor board has most of these but lacks the GPS (but is routinely connected to FLARM etc.), OAT (input hardware for a probe exists but I am unaware of if it has ever been used), and the magnetometers (I am sure a magnetometer module could be designed or an existing one adapted to plug into one of the OV’s available input ports). With a bit more work, I think the OpenVario could host all the necessary sensors.

But of course, a huge task is to create a display which will pleasingly and effectively communicate the airmass information to the pilot so he can use it effectively. This by itself is a huge challenge. There are good ideas already in use out there, but I suspect improvements could be made.

Lots of challenging and interesting work to be done. Any takers?

Cheers,
Jim J6

Well I disagree of the problem, world is full of excellent displays and coding nice graphics is not an issue. The real problem is to get the inertial platform so good that you can actually do something useful with it.