In flight, especially flight in IMC (you can't see outside), it is desirable to know which way is up and which way is down. To this end, cockpits are requited to have attitude indicators, which provide a visual indication of (suprise) attitude to the pilot in almost all flight conditions.
Two things:
- Everyone uses ForeFlight now, which can display information acquired on sensors and properly formatted over HTTP.
- MEMS sensors can be pretty good, with the right integrations and data meshing.
- attitude indicators
- MEMS sensors
- Foreflight Communication Protocol
- ESP32
- Extended Kalman Filters, recommend you looking into this
Messages other than the 1090mHz ADS-B work (don't worry about these for now). The main problem is in doing the math/intreprations required to get accurate attitude data. It should be relatively simple I2c sensor integration, and maybe an EKF or something similar.
I have a couple of IMUs available, tried the following:
- MPU6050, which I've integrated and seems to be okay other than drift (which could be solved with integrating GPS and an EKF)
- BNO085 (was good in a stationary enviroment, but terrible in an airplane. If I had to guess, it may have to do with the sensor fusion/parameter tuning already done to make this work better in a stationary enviroment)
- Suggested by prof (This is incoming, could work well?)
- Not an IMU, but have this GPS module to play with.
- Good idea could be to run test with velcro'd mounting (although the tape from initial test was probably pretty good)
Meant to be compiled and used with Arduino IDE, with the Adafruit ESP32 Feather packages. ESP32 + IMU to integrate backup AHRS with ForeFlight. Pretty simple Arduino setup. On ForeFlight functionality, this could use some tests and I can hook you up.