Bright 4.3" display

Just arrived! 4.3" 800 nit display from FEMA Electronics, with an eval driver board. Hoping to get it running with the RasPi as a proto-prototype for an embedded Airball!

This is Airball running on a Raspberry Pi with a 5" screen. This is the cheesiest of demos possible but I find it exciting because I can look at this and imagine an Airball "avionic" component with an embedded system. And I just found out that, with RaPi 3 in a SODIMM form factor, there is an upwards compatible path to an actual product! Cool, eh?

Airball for Linux Single-Board Computers

This weekend I started porting the Airball UI to generic Java code -- removing the Android dependencies -- so that it can be used on a Linux Single-Board Computer such as a Raspberry Pi or an Up Board. Here is the new Github repo:

https://github.com/ihab/airball-for-lsbc

This will eventually allow us to build the UI as a customized avionics "brick". While displaying the UI on smartphones and tablets is cool -- and likely how we're going to start prototyping Airball -- building a dedicated avionics box is essential for the following two reasons:

1. We can use a high brightness (1000+ nit) LCD panel for daylight visibility; and

2. The controls can be minimized to one or two simple knobs for ease of use.

As an example of the sort of thing we plan to build, check out the Dynon D2 Pocket Panel.

Work proceeds!

Probe mounted on car

This is the prototype of our probe on a car. The electronics will be external for the time being, then we'll work on packaging: