Sunday, October 21, 2018

Altimeter UX prototype

I just pushed a change to the Airball code that adds a prototype of an altimeter to the bottom of the display. Here is what it looks like, playing on my computer with a bit of auto-generated test data:

The idea is to try to fit an altimeter and a sensitive VSI in a small space. Note how the VSI needle "flattens" against the top or the bottom of the display, so you can still see that you have a "large" climb or descent rate, but it need not take up lots of screen space. The range of the needle on the right side is +/- 100 fpm.

The reason for having an altimeter is that altitude station keeping is often an important component of the set of things a VFR pilot is supposed to be doing. And if we can integrate this into the One True VFR Instrument [tm] then we can make things much easier on a pilot.

Also, a nefarious ;) goal is to try to indeed make Airball the One True VFR Instrument [tm] that a simple day-VFR LSA or other aircraft can install.

Finally, the cool thing is that all this information is derived from airdata!