Here is what I had in mind for the MM "auto landing". Not a real auto landing
but a landing aid consisting of a  stick of LED's mounted vertically
on top of the instrument panel.  The LED's starting at ( 4 meters up) the  top
sequentially  lite as you get closer to the runway. The speed at which they move down
is proportional to one's sink rate. Another LED stick along side that one can give
sink  and climb rate.  It is all about PID

It is all just about adjusting the fore and aft position of the control stick to
have the correct sink rate. When the distance to the ground is about
right one flares with out decreasing the sink rate too much which
would become the climb rate or a flare if over done.

This would be a great training aid to help people to learn to land
faster for less money :-)

http://www.hexamite.com/hxn125tr.htm

Paul Lamar

Hi Paul
I had started to play with just the same ideas re ultrasonic ranging for landing.

I vaguely remember my last work was:
1. Calculating the time it took for the ultrasonic pulse train to traverse say 50feet (100ft round trip)

2. Calculating the horizontal travel of the aircraft/transducer in that same time at say 100knots.

I thought I ran into problems at that height and speed, and ended up with needing a way of increasing the speed of sound in air by a few orders of magnitude!
I last recall looking into using laser ranging, but sensitivity to various surfaces and cost became prohibitive for the moment.

Interested in what you guys found.

Steve Izett

Well young Mark died of skin cancer so I only have a few of his comments.

I would be happy with 4 meters as most new pilots can get it down to there.

BTW Do you ever talk to Geoff Grahm? If you do tell him i love his Maximite.
Please give him a copy of this old IEEE paper.
He should not take this complement lightly as I am one of the
early pioneers in the world of embedded processors with the SuperKim :-)

John Dinkel on here made me famous by publishing an article in
Road & Track magazine about my road test system :-)
Everything on the SuperKim board is now in the Maximite  chip and then
some. :-)

Now the Embedded World conference in Nurnberg Germany each year is
the largest technical conference in the world with half a million attendees.

When I get out to the Oz west coast again I'll buy a couple of the new 4.5 Versions  mounted in boxes.

http://geoffg.net/maximite.html

Paul Lamar


The Rotary Engine free News Letter. Powered by Linux. If you want off
the list PLEASE let me know and I will remove  you.  ACRE NL web
site. http://www.rotaryeng.net You Tube http://tinyurl.com/beqqxas
Copyright 1998-2016 All world wide rights reserved.