@flightzoomer wrote:
There was a thread some years ago, asking whether a Pixhawk could be used in a real airplane.
I can perfectly understand, why the feedback from the Ardupilot community was negative. But there is a big but. The guy asked to use the pixhawk as autopilot. But how about…
- using Arduplane (+ a GCS) as an Instrument only?
- use it strictly only for one of the unregulated aircraft classes (like UL or CFR Part 103 which actually have less regulatory obligations than drones, they e.g. don’t need to be registered and the pilot does not need any license). These aircrafts typically have little to no avionics requirements, their systems neither need to be certified nor to comply with any standard.
- There is e.g. this page, https://experimentalavionics.com/ where people are building open source avionics by themselves, which could easily build as reliable, cheap and functional with a pixhawk as data source and a nice adopted GCS.
What do you guys think?
A bit of background
I am the developer of the GCS FlightZoomer (the one which looks like the cockpit of a real aircraft). Two times I was asked, to build a version, which would be suitable as EFIS (Electronic Flight Instrument System) for UL aircraft. My concerns, that were the same as yours in the linked thread, were answered by the reasons mentioned above.What would the supposed system architecture look like?
Arduplane and the Pixhawk would play the role of a GPS+AHRS sensor box, e.g. like this AHRS module. Or the SP-X modules which are used in combination with a proprietory (and much more expensive!) EFIS system.As the use case looks pretty compelling from my perspective (and could potentially be a large new opportunity for Ardupilot), I have started to answer one of the requests and am currently building a EFIS, which is fed with data from a Pixhawk.
To give an impression of the EFIS, here are two screenshots:
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