That’s a level of stupidity which is beyond belief, but really nothing should surprise anybody in this business 
But, hey, it is not certified so it’s ok 
Surprising nobody has noticed before that the flag disappears well before the time the gyro could possibly have managed to spin up, and asked Falcon what sort of amazing motor they are using…
IO390 wrote:
Apply power and the red flag goes out to show the instrument is functioning, but the gyro doesn’t spin up.This is because the motor is driven by a 7810 linear regulator, which in this case has died. But, the flag is powered by the input, BEFORE the voltage regulator! So in this case you have a dead instrument which says it’s working.
Hm. We have a T/C of apparently the same model which has the exact same symptoms. (Flag goes away but gyro doesn’t spin up.) Maybe it can be fixed easily…
What is the bus voltage?
The 7810 is gonna get a whole lot warmer in a 24V plane than in a 12V one.
It will not do much in a 12V plane because a 7810 has a typical dropout voltage of 2V, but at 14V it will output 10V correctly.
Peter wrote:
What is the bus voltage?
12 (well, 14) V.
If you were here, I’d swap it for ya in 10 mins
Hello,
after many times reading here, ive finally created an account.
Avidyne Flightmax EX5000 MFD PN 700-00004-002
I have often heard that the avidyne ex5000 is based on windows NT. When you are in the setup menu, the checkboxes also look very much like windows.
now my suspicion has confimed.
they even made little symbols for the applications :D
Thank you!
Amazing stuff. I see some 2002-dated parts, and a filesystem with 2005 datestamps.
Old thread on Windows in avionics.
Avidyne would have struggled making this “PC” in 2023, but that is normal for people who develop on a PC (the easy way to build systems with a GUI) and then hope to end up with a product manufacturable for many years. A much better way is to use an “industrial processor” (e.g. something like 32H7xx from STM), some RTOS, and then the only bit which you will have periodic hassle with will be the LCD. In the end, the problem was “solved” by Avidyne’s product range more or less ending, firstly by Cirrus going to the G1000.
It gets even better if the dev used some then-fashionable language, rather than straight C or C++ – I wonder what language that thing was written in? I see some .ocx files which appear to be Microsoft. Could also be Borland Delphi. But no no dev tool current in 2002 is still used today AFAIK.
What’s inside your gyros and accelerometers in modern glass, and how they work:
Peter wrote:
I see some .ocx files which appear to be Microsoft.
ActiveX, so probably Visual BASIC. ActiveX was Microsoft’s attempt to make the world wide web Microsoft-proprietary. It’s amazing and disturbing to see it in avionics. It wasn’t exactly a high reliability technology, it was knocked together as fast as possible to try to displace Javascript.
That is a totally amazing video about the MEMS gyros! I knew a bit about it but learnt a lot from this one. Apart from the ingenious design the thing is that the whole lot is produced by etching and AFAIK it is all done in situ; they don’t make the parts separately and assemble them. And these devices are very cheap nowadays.
The maths involved in translating the 6 signals into a position in space (and orientation i.e. 3D heading) is well known. The same system was developed for ICBMs in the 1950s and was used in Apollo etc. I don’t understand it
Yeah – Active-X was weird stuff. I recall browsers used it because it bypassed all security and e.g. a browser could look around your PC and retrieve stuff like Outlook contacts and send them back to the website you were browsing But we are talking about 25 years ago…
