Will there ever be a day when steam gauge avionics have to be ripped out?

mh wrote:

Nope, we don’t, but that is the engineering I mentioned. To blame it on the EASA fees ist not correct. The necessary engineering to fit an Aspen or a similar standardised box into an R1180 should not take much more than one day for one engineer, if the design organisation has its papers straight.

For this major changes, one needs to hold a DOA certificiation. Combined with the loads of paperwork this adds up for the final customer.
In some installation, for example, the Slingby where one engine / airframe combo is not on American TCDS, so not on any AML STC. I just doesn’t make sense that you would have to spend a lot on getting equipment certified on an EASA Slingsby, which is from an airframe / avionics point identical to the ones which are allowed with another engine.

Well of couse you need a DOA for that. But I thought the manufacturer either has a DOA or uses an independent design organisation for the certification. And those guys could then. That is why I wrote that the design organisation needs to have their pepers in order to reduce work. You probably can’t do it that fast as an individual, plus you would have to negotiate an altervative procedure to the design organisation approval. That would in most cases be too expensive, I guess.

wigglyamp wrote:

Is it really wrong for a dealer to invest in the hope of making some return for their effort, just as many aircraft owners do in their own businesses?

You can call it what you want, but in the end this has only one single result; the end user is given no choices of who is to fix his equipment. There are lots of this around in the industries, there are all kinds of “certifications” you can get after a 3 day course. The knowledge a person gets is of course usable and valuable, but it is no no sort of proportionality to the false sense of “expertise” these “certifications” have on a common ignorant customer. A good mechanic can rip apart, fix, and put together any aircraft or system he puts his hands on, a poor mechanic cannot even torque a nut without screwing up even after dozens of “certification” courses.

This is the main reason I use Android instead of iOS (which I wouldn’t even touch). I put together my engine myself (I put together my aircraft myself also). I chose MGL due to the open architecture instead of Garmin or Dynon. It is about maintainability. The trend has always been toward use and throw away systems. Instead of fixing a broken part or system, we throw it away when broken and buy a new. There is some logic to this, price mainly, but with the prices of aircraft glass, we are very far from reaching the turnover point for that logic to be effective. For experimental aircraft we are getting close, and it is better just to rip out 10+ year old glass and install new than to fix old stuff, but this is mainly due to the rapid development being done in this area. I think all this glasses are still very far from being matured, the display technology for instance, has a long way to go. I also think at some point we will start to see single, smart stand alone elements that can reconfigured at will, and hook themselves up automatically in a network. In my opinion that is the way all things eventually will go (smart watch for instance), google glasses, VR glasses (the helmet of the F-35). In the mean time it is better to stay away from everything “closed” as much as practically possible.

Peter wrote:

Fortunately I found a Polish software guy (they don’t make them like that anymore, west of the Iron Curtain) who quickly (the software was graphical but ran under DOS 6.22) found the dongle code and patched it

You’d be surprised. I know a number of very British people who have the requisite skills. Many of us (particularly my generation) grew up writing code in asm. Some of us still do it :-)

Personally I don’t do electronics as my day job, but I find most EDA software licensing conditions so unacceptable I’ll only use gEDA despite its many warts and the lack of a decent PCB autorouter. Even when making things to sell to hobbyists, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t terribly important, I never want to be locked out of my own designs in the way the proprietary EDA tools often do.

alioth wrote:

decent PCB autorouter.

Does that even exist? I haven’t come across one…

mh wrote:

Economically viable for who?

Garmin, for example.

mh wrote:

The EASA fees aren’t the big chunk.

I’m not sure why you’re so hung on the EASA fees. They’re only a small part of the certification cost. The problem IMO is the unreasonable level of detail that requires the creation of tons of unnecessary documentation.

For example, when I got a GTN installed, which was only a minor change thanks to the AML STC, I still got dozens of pages of schematics that are basically just a copy out of the GTN IM. What for?

Or why is it apparently such a hassle for Garmin to get new firmware releases approved by EASA so that EASA reg owners get new firmware at best a year after FAA reg owners? Apparently the process was so stuck some time ago that Garmin needed to send several high level people to Cologne to try to unblock it. It’s not that it is raining planes from the sky in FAA land…

My company is an electronics manufacturer in a different industry and we would never give out schematics or software information. It’s naive to expect anyone in the real commercial world to do so.

Tomjnx wrote:

For example, when I got a GTN installed, which was only a minor change thanks to the AML STC, I still got dozens of pages of schematics that are basically just a copy out of the GTN IM. What for?

One problem with any AML STC such as the GTN is that it is totally generic and doesn’t reflect reality in many aircraft. You couldn’t for example use it as-is in a King Air, even though the aircraft is listed in the STC, as there ae bulkhead plugs, junction boxes etc to connect to. For on-going maintenance, the instructions for continued airworthiness are meant to reflect the actual condition of the aircraft and you couldn’t fault-find using the generic data alone. This is where traditionally EASA and it’s predecessors have been different to the FAA and required aircraft-specific design data in each STC, that allowed installers minimal interpretation. They have now moved considerably towards the FAA approach which is way beyond what we could do even under CAA regs in the past.