Maker Pro
Maker Pro

Looking for flight instruments etc. inexpensively

Anon_LG

Jun 24, 2014
453
Joined
Jun 24, 2014
Messages
453
I have been working on a flight simulator as part of a national competition recently, the C++ has been going well and I think that it is time to start on the hardware side of things. I need anything to do with aircraft, most of all flight instruments.

What can I expect to find in the way of electromechanics inside of the flight instruments, eg. altimeter, airspeed indicators (or any rotary dial type display). I have little idea of what type of inputs will be required to drive these instruments, PWM?, serial?, Parallel?, Analogue?.

Does anybody have any second hand suppliers (reachable from the UK) That they may refer me to? We do not a have a large budget for this, we have secured £500 for the first prototype round, and more may be on the way from external funding. I would like to at least get an altimeter and airspeed indicator for < ~£150 total. Upon looking at factory new ones, they appear to be above this price. Can I expect to find any (Working or at least fixable!) instrument within this range?

Ultimately, if the fully working instruments could never reach this kind of price, I would find it plausible to fit the dials with steppers/servos, so supply of internal mechanisms are not required if infeasible. Of course, if this were the case I would expect to pay less for them.

I have a raspberry pi model 2 with which to control the drive circuitry, and a budget that should meet the needs of any amplification/wave modifying circuitry etc.

I am interested as to what somebody will come up with.
 

GPG

Sep 18, 2015
452
Joined
Sep 18, 2015
Messages
452
Have you looked at automotive gauges.RPM and speed in some cars are driven a little like steppers with a full bipolar step taking 270+ deg.the position controlled by magnitude and polarity of 2 coils current
 

hevans1944

Hop - AC8NS
Jun 21, 2012
4,878
Joined
Jun 21, 2012
Messages
4,878
Consider replacing electro-mechanical displays such as artificial horizons, altitude, rate-of-climb indicators, air speed indicators, fuel gauges and the like with individual backlit color LCD displays mounted in "look alike" instrument modules. Almost all (if not all) modern aircraft are "upgrading" to digital image displays anyway. You can get a color LCD display for Arduino and commit one display and one Arduino (or a Microchip PIC micro-controller) to each flight control instrument for probably less than the cost of the "real deal" even if you can find used surplus instruments. I think it would be an interesting project to see just how close to the original instrument you could make a LCD version by retrofitting non-functional instruments. Besides, you are already using one or more high-resolution monitors to display the out-of-cockpit flight environment, are you not? Why not go "all in" with digital displays?

Hop
 

KMoffett

Jan 21, 2009
723
Joined
Jan 21, 2009
Messages
723
You might be able to pick up some cheap or free by contacting avionics repair shops. Ask about "red tagged" instruments. These are unserviceable or scrap.
Google: aviation instrument repair shop
You might find some in your area.

Ken
 

Anon_LG

Jun 24, 2014
453
Joined
Jun 24, 2014
Messages
453
Thanks for the ideas, these really help. Digital displays are a good idea, i will look into this further. Will also ask about red tagged instruments.

Thankyou,
 
Top