Raspberry P1

[icebob]

Hi All,

 

the last few days I have been logging on to this web site with a Rasberry P1 I purchased for $41 and all up this little computer has cost me $100 to assemble. I have found this cheap computer very good for what it is but what blew me away was I went into a computer store today, there was a 7.8 inch mini Ipad knock off for $99, all I could say was "bugger". Well anyway I have had fun making this computer.

 

Bob.

 

 

[Kyle Communications]

Hi Bob

 

Its horses for courses. The Pi is really not a "normal computer" its use is more for specific operations like in a process control environment or specialist projects where you have inputs to monitor and outputs to do things depending on what comes in. I have one as well and for what they are they are brilliant. They are the cheapest PLC core you can get. Its too hard to make a ipad or similar to do these operations. For the money and what is in them they are just fantastic. The worldwide demand for them is out of control RS and Element 14 almost can not keep up supply. It is interesting it started life as a university project for students to learn microcontrollers and has taken on a whole life of its own worldwide

 

Mark

 

 

[damkia]

It would be interesting to turn one into a "black box" for small aircraft by way of recording elevator/aileron/rudder/throttle/pitch/roll/yaw movements every half second or so. You can get 3 dimensional inertia sensors for the latter half of the measurements, and easily rig some sensors for the other inputs. Combined with electronic engine monitoring systems this would give a complete and reasonably reliable indication of what went wrong during an accident. All this for an extra kg or so of weight.

 

 

[icebob]

Hi Mark,

 

I origianlly purchased this unit to run a weather station that I have built including a web cam. The whole thing runs so well, just a few little tweeks and a lot of calibrations but I am getting there. The plan is to have the weather station self sustaining. My next test is connecting it all via 4G and run a number of in field tests, was thinking maybe somewhere like The Oaks for the very distant test as wi-fi reception there is about 40% and have live feed available from the web cam and weather info too. If it all works was going to offer it to Ian for this web site. So far the whole project has cost me just under $400 for everything. The major softwear I got free and the computer is running a cut down version of Linux.

 

Hi damkia,

 

I like the thought of the black box would be easy to do, very easy, there are a lot of off the shelf items that will run on it and the forum has people who have done similar for door movements in a factory.

 

Bob.

 

 

[Kyle Communications]

With the current EFIS units around it maybe possible to just hook a Pi up to the can bus that they use and at least get all engine and airborne parameters and put into a datalogger format but I think there are different protocols used between the different units. I use a MGL Xtreme and their "airtalk" which is just a canbus. It has its own datalogger built in which logs to a SD card and their software to decode it. To monitor elevator and other flight surfaces would require quite a bit of wiring and fitting of encoders which really isnt practical.

 

I know when I was providing and servicing the radios for Larry Perkins V8 supercar team he is a mad keen heli pilot and he developed a monitoring device including a login for the pilot so that if the engine was oversped or almost any other parameter that could damage the heli they knew who they could send the bill to. That was developed of course quite a few years ago with standard micro devices now they are much more powerfull and can do many more tasks easier

 

Mark

 

 

[djpacro]

Perkins' datalogger is fitted to quite a few aeroplanes these days. It works very well.