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I went on a trip to the Mooney Airplane and Pilot's Association conference in October. In addition to attending the conference, meeting lots of new people, and soaking in a lot of great information about generaal aviation and Mooneys, I had offered to put on a seminar about electronic flight bags. I recruited people who were goin to be at the convention to present, and I had a camera showing what was on their tablet sitting on the podium as they talked.
I had expected that most people in the room would be wary of the idea of electronic charts, and so I structured the talks to try to sell the idea of EFBs rather than a specific application. It turned out that far more people wanted to know which one to get--I was astonished.
Here are a couple of the presetations that I got mediocre shots of
with my phone camera:
Thanks to everyone who did a presentation!
I took a road trip this weekend (including Monday) bewteen two weeks of training. I drove 526 miles up and 538 miles back today. It seems like a long way to drive just to sit on a couch.
Getting on I-39 where it begins at Bloomington. Driving dead
north--NOW we're getting somewhere!
There are a couple of big wind farms along I-39 in northern Illinois.
Here's a side shot. The camper is a random occurence; the "bend
backwards" stance amuses me. I presume it's because of the way the
camera raster-scans the image.
For quite a while here, it looks for all the world like the road is
goin to go between those two wind turbines, like the Gates of
Argonath from the Lord of the Rings.
But the road turns eventually.
Some closer shots of turbines:
This is either a Unicycle built by B.S. Johnson of the Discworld
novels, or else a new power line pillar with wheels for running the
new wires.
I love the mural on the back of this truck.
In Wisconsin, I-90, 94, and 39 run together for a while. I-39
continues to the north, but I branch off to the west with I-94 to head
towards Minneapolis/St. Paul.
It's been cold farther north. There's still snow on the ground.
And finally, at the end of the drive up, here's the river as I cross
into Minnesota. Yay!
The primary reason for going on this trip was to surprise my brother
by showing up to his 30th birthday party. Here's photographic
evidence. I'm on the left, my brother Dave is on the right. Would
you trust your computer to these guys?
The other reason I went was I visited Chippewa falls Monday (today).
One of my stops there was the
Chippewa Falls Museum of Science and Technology, which contains an
extensive exhibit of vintage Cray hardware.
I'm sitting on serial number 1 of the
Cray 1 Supercomputer. The
computer parts are in the tall cylindrical section behind and above
me. The wider part, that I'm sitting on, houses the power supplies.
It was awesome seeing this museum. The early Cray systems defined the
very idea of a Supercomputer, and were marvels of engineering and
computing design.
(At the left of the picture is a display with three floppy disks
illustrating how storage has gotten bigger over time.)
The end-of-trip obligatory speedometer shot.
I bought this car just about exactly 2 1/2 years ago, and I've already
put almost 55,000 miles on it. In a bit over 5,000 miles from now, it
will have passed even the extended warranty that I bought for it.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I keep having these grandiose ideas of the really groovy stuff I want to blog about, but then I don't have the time to edit up the nice photo set, so the post gets delayed, and I don't write the post. I have trips in October and November that I have lots of photos that I want to document. Several interesting posts about airplanes and one about cars coming up.
One quick on that the pictures are ready for. I flew to a conference
in Seattle early in November. On the way back, from SEA to ATL, I
photographed this unique-looking river-convergence. Note the airport
marked with green dots:
I didn't have my iPad along on this trip, but I figured that this
formation of rivers, town, and airport had to be fairly unique.
It turns out that I was flying over "little Egypt", which is the very
southern tip of the state of Illinois. Here's that same spot on the
sectional on the screen of my iPad:
The town is Cairo (pronounced "kay-row", by the way). I find it often
tough to figure out where you are when you're looking at stuff from an
airliner, but this time I got lucky and managed to figure it out.
[It's always mystified me that people talk about having lists of blog posts that you have to write. I've always thought that if you have a post to write, you write it. Well, now I'm having to take a dose of my own medicine; this is a blog post I've been trying to put together for six months.]
My philosophy of phone buying up to this year had always been to buy a relatively old phone that was just about to be discontinued. It's cheap, all the bugs have bene worked out. I had a Palm Treo and then a Palm Centro under that philosophy. However, I'd always wanted to have a phone that had an ssh client, so early this year (February, I think) I went shopping. My critea were I wanted a phone that had an ssh client, and one that could plug into usb. My friend Wayne was confused, and said that they were all like that (the usb part).
Well, I ended up getting my first nice new phone ever, a Droid X. As
I was told, the charging power suppy for it looked like this:
It plugs into the wall, and has a USB port, which supplies power to
the phone, or it can charge with a computer USB port. So I got that.
Slightly later in the spring,
I got an iPad. The iPad came with a USB-output charger too:
These two things together rang a bell. Douglas Adams wrote an article about this once. He talked about eliminating "dongly things"; discrete separate power supplies for gadgets (he was rather a gadget freak). He suggested that there should be a more common standard that just everything could plug into. I thought, with these two gadgets, that the power standard that Adams talked about has arrived, and it's USB!
Well...not only did someone already think of that, but they posted that fact to the relevant page that has his article. Among other things, apparenlty the European Union decided having different chargers for everything was silly, and set up an initiative cell phone companies to damn well compromise on USB as a power standard (I'm paraphrasing here) for mobile phones. So much so that new European-style power outlets are to have USB outputs built into them separate from the power plug. Here's Douglas Adam's article about "dongly things", complete with references to USB as a power standard.
So that's the article that I wanted to write in March, but I hadn't taken the time to take the photos and write the text. I got all excited at the time, though, about the whole USB-as-charging standard thing. I mentioned this to my pal Alex, that charging iPad and phone (he has a nice Droid phone too) via USB was great 'cause you dont' have to bring as many chargers and stuff. He said "Yeah, but the iPad charger puts out more current". I told him that was preposterous, USB has a power limit and surely the wall chargers respected that. He shrugged, but assured me that was the case.
As in all things, and I should have known this, it turns out that Alex was right. I'm not going to go into the details, but Wikipedia's article on USB has a good power section. The important bit is that devices are allowed to draw 500 mA under USB 2.0 and 900 mA under USB 3.0 (all at a nominal 5V). There's also a "Battery Charging Specification" under which USB devices can draw 1.5A, and up to 1.8A from a "dedicated charger" (presumably like a wall charger). A later section also lists devices that don't follow any of the specifications, which concludes with "The iPad and MiFi 2200 are two devices that draw even more power (10 watts or 2.1 Amps) than the Battery Charging Specification allows via USB ports."
So apparently, there are fairly normal USB chargers, and "high
power" USB chargers. The specifications on my charging devices bears
this out. Here's the charger that came with my phone:
It can source 850mA. This charges the phone in a few hours. But the
iPad charger widget says:
Ye hah!
Those are dedicated charging devices that come with their parent
device. However, that means that stand-alone USB chargers have several
variations, including normal ones and "high power" ones. It turns out
that's the case. Since then, I bought this charger that I like to
take along on trips. It draws power from the wall OR from a lighter
socket in a car, and its output is a (high-power) USB socket:
The most recent chapter of this story happened recently, although I'm
sure it's not the last one. I flew down to San Antonio, Texas, a few
weeks ago and rented a car and drove to Kerrville. The car that I rented,
through my usual Zen method of car selection, was a Chevy Malibou.
For the very first time in my experience, this car had a USB power
charging jack in the dash board:
It all started when I went to renew my subscription to Flight Guide. It's a set of
publications put out by a company called "Airguide Publications".
They contain non-official information about airports in the US. The
great thing is they contain(ed) information about the airports that
wasn't in any official source. They list hotels and businesses at or
around the airport, and they have airport diagrams for airports too
small to have official diagrams in the official FAA stuff. They are
(were) awesome tools for the VFR pilot. Although I let it lapse a
couple of times, I had an active subscription for most of the time
between when I got my pilot's license in 2007 through last year.
After I got my instrument rating last fall, I realized my subscription had lapsed, and I went to renew it. Well it turns out that they were changing their format and the old format is no longer available. Huh. I started digging into their web site, and I noticed one of their products called Fight Guide iEFB. Hmm...I wonder what that is and would I want it?
There's a set of descriptions for Electronic Flight Bags (hardware and software), and Airguide has apparently decided to spend a lot of their time building one for the Apple iPad. An EFB application has and displays charting and reference informationt for operating at airports and flying between them. It can contain charts, frequencies and departure and approach information which before pilots carried in their flight bags (the big heavy bags that pilots carry onto the airliners).
At first I didn't feel a burning need to swtich to electronic stuff. While I certainly love gadgets, I have enough to think about when I'm flying. However, I thought about it and did some math. Instrument publications change over a lot faster than VFR publications, some of them every 28 or 56 days. The information in those publications is free (as a product of taxpayer money), but getting them on physical paper costs money. I realized that keeping myself in publications for the parts of the US that I would want to fly in would cost me something on the order of $300 per year. The electronic EFB applications generally require a subscription service; Flight Guide's cost like $75/year for everything I want. Given the great cost efficiency increase by going electronic, I went ahead and invested in an iPad.
The flight guide app does have charting, but I don't think it's the
best app. The one that I use when I'm flying is ForeFlight. It's a great
interface, it's very smooth, and it's very very SIMPLE. I find it's
great to use in the air. Here's ForeFlight on my iPad displaying
instrument en-route charts with a highlight flight plan:
And displaying an instrument approach:
This is roughly my setup when I'm flying:
I have the iPad on my left leg mounted on an leg
mount from Ram Mounts. That's a kneeboard on my right leg
(basically a clipboard with a strap). I have a note pad clipped in it
for writing down clearances and frequencies and stuff. This is
obviously not taken in an airplane; I just took this at home for
illustration purposes. When I'm flying, normally there are rudder
pedals and things in front of my feet instead of, in this picture, a
cat. I've flown with this setup for real, lots in VFR, and also in
simulated instrument flying for practice and in on case an actual
instrument approach. It works very well for me.
What's interesting is that air carriers that carry passengers for hire have been working on getting FAA approval for using iPads for charting devices. This February, a company called Executive Jet Management got approval from the FAA to use iPads (with Jeppesen Mobile TC application) as their charting source (article on Wired) (article on Gadget Venue). The second article is interesting because it says that they have approval to use the iPad as a sole source of charting information.
The reason that I bring this up is that yesterday, United Airlines announced that they are going to be issuing iPads to their pilots to replace bound paper charts and publications. So, for once, this is one trend that I'm actually in on the ground floor!
I've been figuring out how to make proper bar graphs in gnuplot, so
that I could make this chart. This type of bar graph doesn't work
with "with impulses" if you make the line width wide; the bars extend
below the horizontal axis and it looks like crap. Instead, you use
the plot command thusly:
plot './hours_flown_quarters_2011aug06a.dat' with boxes fs solid title
'hours flown per quarter'
Here's the graph of my flying hours through the present. I've done
pretty well over the last year. The important thing is to keep a
steady level of hours to stay current.
I finally got Ubuntu installed on my new laptop. I'm writing this entry with it. Here's the dining room table, right before I left. I'm backing up the old laptop and installing and updating the new one (lower right).
I now have the blog front page mostly in shape. There's now month and year archives, and all the pages link to the main page and all the sub-pages.
I abandoned blogger and the original craigsteffen.net in December 2009. I instated a new site then and set up blogging in pivot. I created entires there until May of 2010. I wasn't able to get the pictures from blogger working in pivot nor pivot to do entry categories. So I decided to write my own. It's taken a year and more. But now It's almost usable.
Since getting my instrument rating last September, I've become interested in "electronic flight bag" solutions for charts and instrument procedures. I looked at different applications and platforms, but what I'm using at the moment is the Foreflight application on the apple iPad.
When I went looking for applications, one feature I felt was very important was the ability, when flying IFR, to switch between the IFR en-route chart and an instrument procedure and back with the minimum amount of interaction. You can do that in Foreflight with a single click in either direction.
Here's a video of me demonstrating two things on Foreflight. First, bringing up a new instrument procedure from the en-route chart, and then flipping back and forth between that procedure and the chart.