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Announcing the Socata TBM 900!


Cameron

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7 minutes ago, Tom Stian said:

Looking forward to this powerfull bird and for the release.

There is a lot of good videos on youtube. i.e. steveo1kinevo (TBM850)
And found this interesting video regarding the startup up of the TBM 900 with battery and with GPU.

Thank you for the links. We have Jason on the beta team and he's being extremely helpful in making sure we got the details correct.

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So I thought I might share some screenshots of a new feature that's being developed for the aircraft: terrain synthetic vision. This was always one of our aspirational goals, but we couldn't get it to show underneath the PFD symbology due to a lack of programming interfaces to the stock X-Plane G1000 to accomplish such a thing. So we've done the next best thing: we've added a tablet to the yoke (which you can hide/show separately) and modeled the synthetic vision system (SVS) modeled loosely on the SVS of ForeFlight:

tablet00.png

It is still a work in progress, but among the features are of course dynamic terrain display, with automatic mesh detail rescaling for terrain that's far away from the aircraft in order to keep the performance high, background terrain loading from X-Plane DSF files and also neat little things, like dynamic runway number rescaling on approach, so you can more easily identify close parallel runways:

tablet01.png

Part of the SVS is of course relative terrain height indication by dynamically coloring in any terrain that's close to our height, in this case yellow for terrain that's less than 1000 ft below the aircraft and red for terrain that's less than 100 ft below the aircraft. Terrain more than 1000 ft below the aircraft is colored in using the absolute height scale employed by the Garmin G1000 (basically, the lower to sea level, the greener and the higher the terrain, the browner). In the screenshot below, we're on approach to Aspen, so approximately 7000 ft above sea level. Notice that we have a 200m-scale north-south-east-west grid pattern overlaid on the terrain. This helps terrain shape recognition, make recognizing motion to the terrain easier and also gives the view a sense of scale.

tablet03.png

When high up, it's useful to know your gliding range in case of an engine out. We have range rings placed at 3, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 NM (the dark bands in the screenshots above and below). The range rings dynamically adjust to terrain contouring, helping both in terrain shape recognition as well as knowing how far the aircraft can reliably glide before running out of energy:

tablet04.png

The SVS includes an auto-declutter display mode, where the compass rose and VS indicator momentarily disappear during extreme bank & pitch angles, to help you recover from abnormal flight attitudes:

tablet05.png

As I anticipate a question about integrating a web browser, let me preemptively answer that so far we're not looking into this.

And that's all for now folks.

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On 9.4.2018 at 6:39 PM, skiselkov said:

So I thought I might share some screenshots of a new feature that's being developed for the aircraft: terrain synthetic vision. This was always one of our aspirational goals, but we couldn't get it to show underneath the PFD symbology due to a lack of programming interfaces to the stock X-Plane G1000 to accomplish such a thing. So we've done the next best thing: we've added a tablet to the yoke (which you can hide/show separately) and modeled the synthetic vision system (SVS) modeled loosely on the SVS of ForeFlight:

 

Great! But a bummer that it can't implemented into the stock G1000. Have you been in contact with Laminar with this? Maybe they can implement such a interface in future.

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3 hours ago, StefanH75 said:

Great! But a bummer that it can't implemented into the stock G1000. Have you been in contact with Laminar with this? Maybe they can implement such a interface in future.

I've had a brief exchange with them over e-mail. The response was "no external integration API is planned at this time".

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10 hours ago, skiselkov said:

I've had a brief exchange with them over e-mail. The response was "no external integration API is planned at this time".

Hm...hm... I hope at least that they acknowledge that it would be a great improvement for developers having an API. Or maybe they have other plans regarding SVS.

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Definitely looking forward to it. Concerning the G1000: at least terrain overlays will come with 11.20 for the map display...

But I also like that iPad solution. In that aircraft category, it's not so uncommon to have this kind of retrofit solution...

Edited by daemotron
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2 minutes ago, daemotron said:

Definitely looking forward to it. Concerning the G1000: at least terrain overlays will come with 11.20 for the map display...

But I also like that iPad solution. In that aircraft category, it's not so uncommon to have this kind of retrofit solution...

The relative terrain elevation overlay is actually something I've been considering to implement, but since I saw it was being put into XP11.20, I didn't bother. But we do have a completely custom TAWS-B page which does the same relative terrain contouring coloring plus of course all the aural and visual annunciations of the real Garmin TAWS with all modes modeled (PDA, RTC, ITI, NCR, impact point prediction, etc.).

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Btw: to clear up the alphabet soup of the terrain awareness system in the G1000, you can read up on it in this manual: https://static.garmincdn.com/pumac/190-00709-04_0A_Web.pdf (although that one is for the TBM850, it's close enough to give you a reasonable idea). The TAWS alerts are described from page 427. We've implemented all of the alerts, although the availability of the Obstacle alerts depends on having a reliable obstacle database on hand (currently we only support this in the US, because the FAA provides a regularly updated, high-quality obstacle database free of charge).

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  • 2 weeks later...

Feature update for you good people. We've implemented the G1000 Emergency Descent Mode. That means no more setting up the simulator and walking away to take a nap. A brief demonstration:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/253395611?t=02h40m35s

Now the avionics is watching for pilot alertness. The allowable time interval for pilot interaction is altitude dependent, but varies from 20 minutes at 15,000 ft down to around 8 minutes at FL310 (decreasing exponentially, so only about 10 minutes at FL250). If pilot inactivity is detected for the aforementioned period if time (no buttons pushed or knobs actuated on the G1000 avionics), the avionics will start a graduated process of alertness checks:

  1. First it issues an advisory CAS caution + one aural chime:"ARE YOU ALERT?". The pilot has one minute to respond by pushing any button or clearing the caution via the attention getters.
  2. After 1 minute passes and the pilot hasn't responded, the system issues a non-advisory caution saying "HYPOXIA ALERT". Non-advisory CAS cautions different from advisory ones in that the message stays blinking and the yellow "MASTER CAUTION" button stays illuminated. The pilot again has 1 minute to respond.
  3. Final call, the system issues an "AUTO DESCENT" master warning CAS message, illuminates the red MASTER WARNING button and a continuous aural chime is heard.
  4. If the pilot doesn't respond for one more minute, the red "EDM" AFCS mode is annunciated on the PFD, the autopilot preselects 15,000 ft altitude, switches to the FLC pitch mode to initiate a descent and selects maximum airspeed. On descent the engine will over-torque without the pilot making power adjustments, but the torque limiter can hold the engine at 108% safely for several hours, so it's a small price to pay for regaining consciousness.
  5. During descent, the system ignores pilot input. The only way to disable EDM mode at this point is to disengage the autopilot.
  6. Upon leveling off at 15,000 ft, the system resumes monitoring for pilot input for 4 minutes. If during those 4 minutes the pilot touches the avionics, EDM mode is canceled. If not, a second descent to 12,500 ft is initiated after the 4 minute timeout.
  7. The system now ignores pilot input and descends down to 12,500 ft remains there. At this point, the only way to disable EDM mode is to disengage the autopilot.

That's all for now folks!

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7 hours ago, THaBoHNix said:

Great! Aand what about that synthetic vision on the PFD‘s ?? :)

X-Plane 11.20 added an art control that lets me kill the background on the PFD. This has in turn allowed me to design a shader to pull some pixel removal tricks and finally sneak it under there:

shot.png

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16 hours ago, skiselkov said:

X-Plane 11.20 added an art control that lets me kill the background on the PFD. This has in turn allowed me to design a shader to pull some pixel removal tricks and finally sneak it under there:

shot.png

wow. betterpushback. it is safe to know that you are here

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1 hour ago, Norman said:

The integrated Thing is not as good as the Tablet Solution. Hmm, i would guess keep the Tablet until a good G1000 SVS is available.

 

I'm not sure what you mean. The SVS in the G1000 is exactly the same code as is running on the tablet display. This is not an X-Plane stock feature, this is bespoke to our model.

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