Aviation-grade Arduino Controller
I've been heads down developing an aviation-hardened Arduino compatible controller.
This project started when I was discussing the procedure for a go-around in my Harmon Rocket with my wingman (Power up, stick forward, flaps up, trim down, call tower). He mentioned that I should just build a gizmo that would do the flaps and trim for me.
Since I was already flying behind an auto-trim controller that I developed several years ago, I took this challenge on and reprogrammed the controller (in PIC assembly language) to implement this function. Everything worked out and now I have a single button push to dial in my flaps and trim. It even measures acceleration and runs the flaps all the way up if it predicts that I may exceed VFE in the go-around.
I realized that many others may want a similar gizmo in their aircraft, but I wanted to move to the Arduino platform for ease of developement. The Arduino stuff is great, but it doesn't do a lot without adding on or designing custom shields, power supplies and packaging. The aircraft electrical and RF environment is pretty harsh. In fact, most of the avionics devices I have designed have most of the cost and circuit board area devoted to protecting the device from the environment (60 volt load dumps, reverse polarity, overvoltages on inputs, strong RF...).
So I developed an aviation-hardened Arduino compatible board called the Falcon-AVR. The prototype has just finished Beta trials (one was replicating the auto-trim controller (1600 lines of C code), the other a marine instrument application). I have just implemented a board revision so that I can easily add-on WiFi or BLE or I2C modules, and support 28 Volt operation.
My intention is to go 100% open source on this design.
See this
link for complete documentation.
My intention is to provide blank circuit boards (plus a Digi-Key parts list) to interested folks. There are are assembly options, so some hardware smarts are required. Send me a p.m. if you are interested. Photo of initial proto below.
Cheers, Vern