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



Hi Paul
I haven’t spoken with Geoff.
If I do I’ll pass on your thoughts.

Steve Izett

Thanks Steve, There must be some sort of Maximite club in Perth.
If you find it let me know. Aden Lindsay teaches electronics at
the local university so he may know. He has been on here from
day one and I met him the first time I was in Perth. He helped
me when I was working on the ignition system.

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.