Is it a habit we prefer mechnical instruments?

Morgans wrote:
Is anyone (besides me) beginning to think that we are on the receiving end
of a real practical joker?

I'm serious.
Too many things don't add up. Statements about things in China that are not
realistic, or possible. (homebuilt airplanes in China? I don't think so.)

I never made any statements about China. Another poster implied that
China would be more receptive to the idea of flying airplanes made by
people who subscribe to "less-than-rigorous" standards.

Use of English that is on a level that someone might expect for a poster
from China, then this last bit of this post. No mistakes, use of phrases
and English vocabulary (psychedelic twirly things?) that would not be
typical of a foreigner, unless they had very good control of English, then
there would not have been all of the earlier mistakes.

You might be confusing me with the OP, whose ideas I espouse.

Totally far out ideas, that nobody would want to even consider, and for
someone making instruments, they would have a better idea of what is desired
and possible.

What is desired?...I can only speak for myself, and again, I'm not a
pilot, but I don't think I need to be a pilot to know that I would want
some of the things I mentioned, just as I didn't need to learn to drive
before knowing that I would have preferred a car radio with 150+
channels and heated leather retractable seats instead of what I got.
As for as knowing what is possible, if you mean technically, I think
I'm qualified.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

"Le Chaud Lapin" wrote in message
oups.com...

Morgans wrote:
Is anyone (besides me) beginning to think that we are on the receiving
end
of a real practical joker?

I'm serious.
Too many things don't add up. Statements about things in China that are
not
realistic, or possible. (homebuilt airplanes in China? I don't think
so.)

I never made any statements about China. Another poster implied that
China would be more receptive to the idea of flying airplanes made by
people who subscribe to "less-than-rigorous" standards.

Use of English that is on a level that someone might expect for a poster
from China, then this last bit of this post. No mistakes, use of
phrases
and English vocabulary (psychedelic twirly things?) that would not be
typical of a foreigner, unless they had very good control of English,
then
there would not have been all of the earlier mistakes.

You might be confusing me with the OP, whose ideas I espouse.

Totally far out ideas, that nobody would want to even consider, and for
someone making instruments, they would have a better idea of what is
desired
and possible.

What is desired?...I can only speak for myself, and again, I'm not a
pilot, but I don't think I need to be a pilot to know that I would want
some of the things I mentioned, just as I didn't need to learn to drive
before knowing that I would have preferred a car radio with 150+
channels and heated leather retractable seats instead of what I got.
As for as knowing what is possible, if you mean technically, I think
I'm qualified.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Well, it's like this: I went back and read the original post, and doubt
that the OP has ever enjoyed any opportunity to fly.

You OTOH need to spend a pleasant morning, or afternoon, in a real little
airplane with a real flight instructor! And, it may not hurt to tell him
why.

After that, you will see that certain parts of the information that a pilot
uses are best displayed in an analog format. You may get a little air sick;
and that can be a good thing, because it will come right back whenever
anyone suggests that a numeric readout is just as good for an obviously
analog task.

There is no good reason not to get a quick introductory education. There
are one armed pilots, one eyed pilots, paraplegic pilots, etc. So there are
no excuses: Just do it!

Until then, I plan to regard further references to most numeric flight and
navigation instrument displays simply as trolls.

Peter

Roger wrote:
Careful, that's age discrimination :-)) There are a few of us old
guys out there that do that kind of programming too.

I have found historically that younger people are more likely to create
disruptive technologies than older people, those like Burt Rutan
notwithstanding. Imagine if Napster had been a project undertaken by
IBM instead of a 19-year-old. It might have never launched - the
project leaders at IBM would have been carried away on stretchers after
nearly choking each other to death in a fight over who would get the
credit for creating a piece of software that would be used by
100,000,000+ people.

Not when they are certified for use in aircraft. They may be light
weight and accurate, but adding them to an aircraft took away the
"cheap"

I disagree here. I've worked on digital communications systems for the
U.S. Department of Defense that were hardly cheap to get certified.
But no matter how expensive the certification, if you're making N of
them, the certification cost is amortized so that it is little more
than a temporary nuissance.

accurate. If it fails, the computer will know immediately. With

Only if the system is programmed to know and how are you going to
program it to know. An open or shorted sensor is just another input
unless there are valid limits programmed into the system. But that is
not enough either. The system has to have a way of notifying the
pilot that the oil pressure, or CHT, or EGT reading has gone bad AND
it's the sensor, not the actual oil pressure that had gone. Zero oil
pressure and an open or shorted sensor may and probably will appear
the same to the input of the A/D converter.

This is where electrical engineers come in. I could rattle off the
names of 20 people I know personally who could assuage any of these
concerns after 4-hour meeting in boardroom, and know how to design the
circuit, with USB interface, cheaply, in real-time, as the concerns are
being enumerated.

The problem is that what looks good when it is used here on the desk
may not be good for us out there in the real world. What appears
simple at first glance, isn't, or what appears simple with the system
on my desk isn't out in the real world. It's best to think of it this
way. If it looks simple it probably isn't, you don't have enough data,
or you forgot something.

See comment on EE's in boardroom.

Right now I'm setting in front of a 20.1" (gotta remember that point
one) LCD which is driven from a video card that will also serve as an
output to my TV, take signals from the TV, has a tuner for off the air
signals, has S-video inputs and outputs as well as composite and
digital. That video card is in a 64 bit computer with more on board
cache than my first computer had memory. The computer has over 1.6
terabytes of hard drive storage. My computers back up to each other
across a gigabit, hard wired CAT5e network. I use external hard drives
connected via USB for OS backup. I use USB2 for camera and memory
card input. With all that sophistication, absolutely none of this
would be worth beans in an airplane.

Being a member of ARRL, you already know that there are people who
could describe in detail the operation of the things you just
enumerated, beginning with quantum mechanics and the conduction band,
doping concentrations in silicon. diffusion of electrons across a PN
junction or channel enhancement/depletion in MOSFET, how liquid crytals
work, how convulution, filtering, and amplification allows the tuner to
select channels, how signals are combined and seperated in the
composite cable, the Level 1 and Level 2 caches in the CPU, why
translation lookaside buffers help performance so much, the function of
the oxide coating on the disk and the how Maxwell's third equation of
electrodynamics involding curl-of-E = -d/dt (surface integral mu-H)
makes bits jump off the hard disk platter into the read head, why the
hardisk needs to be "opened" using CreateFile() as a special device
when doing backup so as to get it right without data corruption, why
gigabit ethernet needs more than the 4 wires normally used in 10mb/s
ethernet, and why the wires must be twisted. There is a useful place
in an aircraft for every device you mentioned. The display could
be..well...the display. The computer could be the computer. The RAM,
the RAM. The hard disk, the hard disk. The web cam, mount it and take
pictures. Matter of fact, have two, one for inside, one for outside.
Ethernet cable could go to redundant computers. Again, one gets all of
this (but not 64-bit) for under $500.

This sophistication is taken for granted by experts in field, just as
you would take for granting knowing how to pull out of stall, so most
non-pilot expert electrical/software engineers would start crying if
you stalled their plane and told them to fix it.

I guess this is the thesis of what I am saying. There is something
powerful about letting domain experts be experts in their domain. We
have all come across an amateurish web page that is put up by someone
whose products are otherwise highly regarded in their respective
industry. We thinking, "Man...this web site does not do just to the
products." It's difficult to tell the person..."Hey..ummm......you
might want to think about getting a web designer to redo your web
site." The product maker will often not see the big deal - after all,
the difference between what was there before (absolutely nothing),
versus what is there now (a very handsome HTML page based on skills
acquired laboriously over past 6 months) justifies that the site should
remain unchanged. And besides, the site doesn't look bat at all. It
looks quite pretty in fact.

Another indication that we are not tapping the power of specialization:

In college, there was this huge push for "interdisciplinary
interaction." The deans of the engineering (and other) schools kept
trying to get professors out of their departments and "cross-breed"
with the other professors in other departments. It was almost as if
someone had spiked the deans' punch with Viagra. The wanted a giant,
university-wide techno love fest. They even went as far has to hype
the benefits of projects that had attempted to follow this model.

Today, I see why the deans were pushing so hard for this. They
recognized that, as systems builders and as humans, we have a tendency
to overstep our boundaries. We not only do what we are good at, but
we dibble in fields where it might be better to let an expert take
over. We neglect the opportunity to let specialization do its work.
Sometimes we do this because we are just plain greedy. But sometimes
it is out of sheer ignorance. The best example I had of this was when
I was playing Tetris in a computer lab in the early 90's and saw a
biologist sitting next to me doing genome work that looked very
repetitive. It turned out that it wold have taken him 4 months to
complete it by hand. Two programmers and I got together and crunched
his data in 12 minutes. He was so excited, he bought us pizza and Coke
and could hardly talk straight as he explained more and more of what he
wanted. We were amused by his enthusiam, but to us, we didn't see the
big deal. He probably would have married one of us if we had been
female. If this person had not been open-minded, he would have done all
that work by hand, as his peers continued to do, some of whom were
leaders in their field. What's remarkable and important is that we did
not understand the genetics, *BUT* we did recognize that he was doing
something that we knew we could do much better with a computer, and he
had the humility to allow us to prove it.

And I believe this is the case for gadgetizing aircraft (and cars for
that matter). For all the speculation on complexity of programs,
sizes, cost, stranger danger, .....for a person skilled in *this*
field, meaning a software or electrical engineer (but not mechanical
engineer or pilot), the concerns are simply unfounded.

What's happening right now is that companies like Garmin are doing this
so slowly that it is hard to see that it's happening.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
jls wrote:

You want to give up the stick and rudder to the CPU too? I think I'd like
to hang on to that. Everything else might be ok except I'd like some analog
redundancy.


Hmm...I've thought about the stick and rudder problem quite a bit, and
the irrational part of me says keep the mechanics, but the rational
part of me says that electronics will do the job. If the system is
designed correctly, it will operate correctly, even when it's broken.

I'd probably design system with so much redundancy that, if you crashed
as result of fault, God probably wanted you to crash anyway.

-Le Chaud Lapin-


As someone who has spent the last several years working in quality
control for electronic devices, let me just say..."No FRIGGIN' way, dude"

No matter how much you think you've thought of everything, you haven't.
It doesn't matter if it is mechanical or electronically controlled.
It just that with the mechanical control, you have a chance to see the
rust running off the torque tube and feel the extra play in it during
preflight. When you're a leaking electron, no one can hear you scream.

--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:

Semiconductors fatigue. Their parts don't vibrate.

In a plane they will. And they will crack if not supported properly.

They are not as
susceptible to variations in moisture and other environmental factors.

Drop the temps to -40F and they won't work at all. Dowse them in water
and couple of times and the leads will corrode.

If I were to go dig out an old 1984 IBM PC from my schools computer lab
closet and flip the switch, it might not start, but that would be due
to rust on the mechanics. I could take the board out, put it in a
non-rusty case, power it, and it will boot. And it will compute up to
4.77 million instructions per second thereafter, and continue to do so
for 1000 years provided I did not drop or fry it.

Or it may just beep at you.

Problem is, most light craft don't have a professionally trained team of
engineers to care for them. Hell, a lot of them are stored outside. At
least with the heavy metal you can see the environmental damage
progressing and take appropriate measures.

This is why I believe that heavy metal will eventually give way to a
lightweight composites and plastics. The value proposition is just to
great to ignore.

Just don't ignore the drawbacks.


--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."

Roger wrote:

Glass panels are more reliable,

If and only if the electrical system is more reliable. At this point
(still waiting for further developments) I'm going with a Dynon (BMA
takes to long to boot up), with some backup steam gauges. The plane
will still fly without the engine running and the batteries drained, and
I won't enough information to make it as comfortable as possible.


--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."

"Ernest Christley" wrote

I'm going with a Dynon (BMA takes to long to boot up), with some backup
steam gauges. The plane will still fly without the engine running and the
batteries drained, and I won't enough information to make it as
comfortable as possible.

I'm sure there was a typo in that last sentence, but I was not able to
figure out what you were trying to say.

Wanna' try again? g
--
Jim in NC

Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
Roger wrote:

Careful, that's age discrimination :-)) There are a few of us old
guys out there that do that kind of programming too.


I have found historically that younger people are more likely to create
disruptive technologies than older people, those like Burt Rutan
notwithstanding. Imagine if Napster had been a project undertaken by
IBM instead of a 19-year-old. It might have never launched -

No it wouldn't have. Because the IBM execs would have had the good
sense to ask their lawyers if it were legal.



Not when they are certified for use in aircraft. They may be light

weight and accurate, but adding them to an aircraft took away the
"cheap"


I disagree here. I've worked on digital communications systems for the
U.S. Department of Defense that were hardly cheap to get certified.
But no matter how expensive the certification, if you're making N of
them, the certification cost is amortized so that it is little more
than a temporary nuissance.


Ahh! There's the rub. When your talking GA aircraft, you don't have N
of them to amortize across. You have (N - MOST)

accurate. If it fails, the computer will know immediately. With

Only if the system is programmed to know and how are you going to
program it to know. An open or shorted sensor is just another input
unless there are valid limits programmed into the system. But that is
not enough either. The system has to have a way of notifying the
pilot that the oil pressure, or CHT, or EGT reading has gone bad AND
it's the sensor, not the actual oil pressure that had gone. Zero oil
pressure and an open or shorted sensor may and probably will appear
the same to the input of the A/D converter.


This is where electrical engineers come in. I could rattle off the
names of 20 people I know personally who could assuage any of these
concerns after 4-hour meeting in boardroom, and know how to design the
circuit, with USB interface, cheaply, in real-time, as the concerns are
being enumerated.


I work with these sort of engineers. I have to test thier systems. I
still hear the classic, "The customer would never do that."


This sophistication is taken for granted by experts in field, just as
you would take for granting knowing how to pull out of stall,

And the constant lockups, resets, restarts, and workarounds are also
taken for granted.



I guess this is the thesis of what I am saying. There is something
powerful about letting domain experts be experts in their domain. We

And I believe this is the case for gadgetizing aircraft (and cars for
that matter). For all the speculation on complexity of programs,
sizes, cost, stranger danger, .....for a person skilled in *this*
field, meaning a software or electrical engineer (but not mechanical
engineer or pilot), the concerns are simply unfounded.

I'm a software engineer and a pilot. The concerns are most certainly
and profoundly founded. You can sit in front of your PC and pontificate
all day long, but when your hanging your butt in the clouds you won't
care for your "PC" system to tell you that it's going offline so the
embedded OS can do an automatic update via its USB interface.


What's happening right now is that companies like Garmin are doing this
so slowly that it is hard to see that it's happening.

-Le Chaud Lapin-


Cheap, fast, right. Pick two.
Companies like Dynon and BMA have product flying out the door with more
capability each year. Problem is, they get only one chance to do it
right. If just one person dies because of their systems, it's all over
for them. They're doing just fine, IMHO.

--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."

"Ernest Christley" wrote

Drop the temps to -40F and they won't work at all. Dowse them in water
and couple of times and the leads will corrode.

Just don't ignore the drawbacks.

And you didn't mention static charges (coming in from all of those sensors)
wiping memory clean, or damaging components, nor did you mention radio
frequency interference, or engine noise, or the computer causing
interference problems with the communications.

The issue of displays washing out is in the most part solved with
commercially available displays being marketed for aviation use, but the 500
buck computer that has been mentioned here is not going to have a display
capable of working in the cockpit.

I hope by the time I finish an airplane, there are glass cockpit units that
will fit my budget. I would love to have one.
--
Jim in NC

P.S. How is your project going? Is it about time for you to post a
write-up on your progress? :-)

Morgans wrote:

I hope by the time I finish an airplane, there are glass cockpit units
that will fit my budget. I would love to have one.

Dynon was advertising the D10A for $1700 at Sun'n'Fun.

I've got the fuselage flipped upside down as I finish the belly fabric.
I was hoping to get the Polybrush and Polyspray on this weekend, but
got sidetracked putting the last pieces of fabric on control surfaces.
Once I'm done with all the PolyStuff spraying, I flip it back over an
start on the fiberglass upper skins.

--
This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make
mistakes. We want to help them, which means control them and their
decisions, but in doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)."