2006 Oshkosh Announcements

[dynonsupport]

Here at Dynon, we don't make you travel thousands to miles to find out about our new products. Via the miracle of the internet, we'll make you feel like you're right there in the booth with us. We do apologize for not giving you an excuse to fly though.

We're still open here at the offices all week so feel free to ask questions in this thread or give us a call to place your order!

Dynon's Oshkosh 2006 Announcements:

Hardware:

• Super-Bright Screen Option - 100% Brighter!

Dynon is proud to announce a display option for our D100 series of products that is twice as bright as our current 7" screens. This $200 option increases brightness from 400 to 800 nits, while retaining the high resolution (854 x 480 pixels) that you are used to on the D100 series displays. We expect this option to be shipping by September.

Current owners of D100 products aren't left out from this deal. You can upgrade your unit for exactly the same price - $200. We'll be accepting upgrade orders starting on October 1st, so please don't call before then. The only caveat here is that your current display will need to be in like new condition. If you have any scratches or other damage, the upgrade price will be $300.

• All Products Shipping with Short Lead Times

Most of our products are on the shelf and ready to ship. Only the D100 has any real backorder and should still be less than two weeks. As always, please let us know when ordering if you are in a real time crunch so we can make sure to update you with our best estimate of ship date as of that moment.

Firmware Updates (FREE, downloadable around September 1st):

• HSI with Glide Slope from SL30 Radio

Our next firmware release will include an HSI overlay on the DG screen that we just released. If you have an SL30 radio, you can hook the serial output of that to your Dynon EFIS product and display the CDI, Glide Slope, VOR frequency and VOR id as an EHSI display.

• HSI with CDI from GPS

Another way to get an HSI display is by hooking up a GPS to your EFIS. This will allow the EFIS to display a CDI needle on the DG display for a virtual HSI. The screen will also show various info from the GPS such as ground track and distance to waypoint.

• Winds Aloft with Cross Wind Info

With a GPS connection, the HSI screen will also show you real-time winds, including a relative wind arrow and an absolute display of wind direction and velocity. We also display the crosswind component of the wind vector so you can glance at the EFIS on final and see if you're comfortable with the crosswind.

• Fuel at Waypoint, MPG, Range Data

On the EMS side of things, the GPS connection also gives us some exciting data. The EMS fuel computer page will now show you fuel economy (MPG in english units), how much fuel you will have onboard when you reach your waypoint, and will constantly tell you what the ground range of your aircraft is in the current configuration. These tools should make efficient cross country flying much easier. If you need to get as far as possible, just pull back the power and lean out until the economy number peaks out.

• Aircraft Trim & Flap Indication

You can now configure info items on the EMS to display trim and/or flap indicators by hooking up to the GP inputs. The trim indicators even include a user set takeoff position indicator, and the flaps can be configured with 2-5 "stops" with a numerical indicator of the angle the flap is at even when not on a stop.

• Shock Cooling & Span Alarms

Alarms on the EMS can be configured to warn you if your CHT's are cooling too fast or your CHT's or EGT's have too much span between cylinders. Also added is a seperate span setting for leaning mode so you can be alerted to smaller span changes when running LOP.

• EMS RPM & MAP

The RPM gauge on the EMS now has the ability to have a yellow "restricted" band in the middle of the RPM range for engine/prop combos that have a restricted constant operation range.

The Tachometer and Manifold pressure can be swapped so the MP is on the left and the RPM is on the right, just like your throttle is on the left and the prop control is on the right. You can leave it the way it currently is as well.


Already released firmware:

We are of course also talking about the firmware that we started shipping a few weeks ago that adds a Directional Gyro display to the EFIS and allows the EMS to be displayed on the EFIS. Dynon is committed to supporting our current customers with free firmware updates, and as you can see, we're putting a lot of calories into our firmware to make your purchase even more valuable.

 

[Thomas_Schaad]

Re: 2006 Oshkosh annoucements

Guys, you surprise me!!! Positively! What you announced now I was just dreaming about but not reallly expecting it within that short times period. Just remembering this board one week ago and reading the answers didn't make me hoping to see coming all this that soon. Now it's here and I still don't really know if I am really awake or if I am asleep and having a wonderfull dream  

Thanks very much to the whole Dynon Team, making all this true. I probably hardly can imagine the work behind, I am sure, it was a lot. Now I promiss you, I will make up the most wonderful panel and send you all the pictures of. I just need to save some bucks but for x-mas it will come. Enjoy the show at OSH, all the best from sunny Switzerland,

Kind regards

Thomas

 

[N112B]

Any chance we'll be offered a brighter screen upgrade for the D-10 series?

 

[dynonsupport]

We don't have any plans for a brighter D10 series screen right now. The D10 is already brighter than the D100 screen so we have had fewer customer requests for this enhancement.

It's not an impossibility, so we'd like to know how many people are interested. The cost is almost all in labor, so the price would most likely be the same- $200.

 

[N112B]

I live in Florida and the only time the D10 screens are not quite bright enough is during the brightest part of the day. I can see the displayed info, but not as clearly as I'd like. $400 for both of mine (D10A and EMS)? I'd have to give it more thought. At this point, count me in. The deciding factor would probably be turn around time. Thanks!

 

[svanarts]

I have gone from being a possible customer to a solid will-be customer. This is great stuff.

As far as screen brightness, especially for us bubble canopy guys, you can't make any display too bright. When the sun hits most displays under 800 nits they wash out. Brighter is better.

 

[Canadian_JOY]

Why is it that I always seem to be the King of Bad Timing?!?!?!? :-?

I ordered my EFIS D100 a couple of weeks ago through our local distributor and he provided me last week with an estimated delivery date of mid-August. I've been bitten before, so was a little shy to place my order. So shy in fact that I called the Dynon folks and asked if I would regret placing my order before Oshkosh. Their answer was a very frank "no, you won't regret it".

Well, in all honesty, I now regret having placed my order. I know I'll need the brighter display as a result of having flown my brother's EFIS D10. If I take delivery of the D100 I'll then have to ship it back to the factory for the upgrade. While this may not seem like a big deal, the cost of shipping and customs clearance will likely come very close to doubling the total cost of the upgrade. This makes it a big deal. I hope the fine folks at Dynon have a plan to deal with such situations. They seem to think of everything, so I'm sure they've thought of this angle...

Now, to the technical questions... What other specs will change with the upgraded display brightness? Obviously power consumption - guess it will go up to 3 or so Amps @ 12Vdc? What about recommended wiring - will the existing pinout for power and ground be maintained? And how does this display behave across the temperature band (keep in mind I operate in a climate where it will encounter -20C to +35C conditions)? Will there be any operational limitations ie warmup periods before the 800nit brightness will be achieved? What about tradeoff between life of the flourescent tubes and brightness - is this just more brightness at the cost of a much shorter lifespan? Having spent a chunk of my career working on cockpit displays I'm aware of some of the tradeoffs and am interested in learning which tradeoffs the Dynon design team has chosen.

One last point... The 'enhanced DG" annoucement makes me very happy to have chosen the Dynon product. Now all I need to know is whether or not my Lowrance 2000c GPS will output the necessary information to drive it. Help! ;-)

Thanks.

Mark.
Davis DA-2A C-GJOY

 

[dynonsupport]

Mark,

If you can wait to get your D100 until after September, call your dealer right now and have them hold the order. We'll happily keep you in your spot in the order queue and ship your unit after we get the brighter screens shipping. Anyone that has a D100 order in with us right now can add the brighter screen to their order if they wish to wait for them to start shipping. We don't charge you or anything until we ship, so you can always change an order with us up until the day it ships. You do need to work with your dealer on this though, since offically we're selling the unit to your dealer, not you, so they need to change the order with us.

As for the screen, no other specs change. Power consuption is identical. The pinout is the same. Temp specs are the same. Lifetime is the same. Warmup is the same (about 10 seconds to full brightness). There are zero tradeoffs. You'll just have to believe us that this is possible

As far as we know, any Garmin or Lowarance unit puts out the stream needed for the GPS HSI and other GPS functions. We're using the Garmin 430/530 format, or the standard NMEA-183 format which is put out by the vast majority of GPS units in aircraft.

 

[peastham]

Great new features, guys.

Can you provide any details of how to connect the GPS to the EFIS, in anticipation of the firmware update? (pin numbers, protocols, etc?) It'll be much easier if I can do the wiring now.

Thanks,
Paul

 

[dynonsupport]

Paul,
Hook your GPS serial transmit line to pin 22 on an EFIS-D10A or EFIS-D100. On a D180, it's pin 22 on the vertical D-25. In the install guide, this is "Serial 1 - RX." If you have other devices in the plane that also use GPS, you can usually spilt this line and run it to multiple devices.

The protocol is NMEA-183, sometimes called NMEA version X.Y. You can usually change protocols from the front of the unit so getting this right today isn't a big deal. You may end up just scrolling through protocols on your GPS until the EFIS likes what it sees.

EDITED: Wrong serial port called out in original post. Please see this post for updated connection information: http://dynonavionics.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1153762479/30#33

 

[peastham]

Perfect, thanks!

 

[longezo320]

How about compatibility with Garmin 296/396/496 and other hand-held GPS units?

Sam Chambers

 

[dynonsupport]

Any Garmin or Lowrance unit will work, handheld, portable, or panel mount.

 

[RudiGreyling]

Very nice, thanks guys.

PS: Any screenshots of the new features to wet our appetite?

Regards
Rudi

 

[13brv3]

This is certainly excellent news. I'm about to wire up my panel, and was just telling someone that I would go ahead and hook the GPS up to the D180, because eventually there would be a need for it. This is just about perfect timing.

I'm really happy to hear about the screen too, and will be near the head of the line to get mine updated. The original screen is just a bit marginal under an RV canopy, and it was really my only gripe about the unit. I particularly like the fact that Dynon does it's best to allow upgrades. If Garmin came out with a new screen, you can bet the "upgrade path" would be to sell your old unit, and buy a new one.

Now about that internal data logging

Cheers,
Rusty

 

[dynonsupport]

Sorry, no screensots yet. We have the software running at OSH and we're showing off all of the features since they are basically done, but getting screenshots out of our units is time consuming. Since we don't run an operating system, getting high-quality images out of our units takes some custom software, and we tend to do that only after the firmware is released.

I'll try and post some photographs of the screens sometime today so you can at least get a feel for what the screens will look like.

If you want to see how the bright screen looks, just crank the brightness on your computer screen

 

[Canadian_JOY]

Thanks, Dynon Support, for your clear and concise answers to my questions. I like the answers very much, even if I don't fully understand the physics behind them. More brightness without more power...Hmmm!

I've already asked my dealer to hold my order 'til September to get the new display. 800nits will be enough for me to get a suntan on a cloudy day... lol But I'd really like to have a better idea of how you get twice the brightness without a power penalty. Has the type of backlight changed? Cold cathode flourescent has for years been the best power/temperature/weight/lifespan/brightness tradeoff, but it's always had to have more power input in order to produce more light output.

As the famous Captain Kirk would say, "Please give me some hints how you do this, Scotty, without defyin' the laws of physics!" I'm beginning to wonder if the original design knew this new backlight would eventually become available and actually dumped power in the form of heat, but now the new backlight is available that power is used to turn watts into nits?

 

[Canadian_JOY]

I should add that with less than 100 watts of generating capacity on my aircraft, making double the brightness without increasing current draw is VERY good news indeed!


Mark
Davis DA-2A C-GJOY

 

[dynonsupport]

Hey- We're not going to give away all of our secrets!

The basic way we do this is by getting the light out of the backlight more efficently. Commerical LCD screens are not very good at using the light that comes out of the backlight tube and getting it to your eyes. Most of it ends up absorbed by the LCD assembly and turned into heat. We modify the screen to get this light to your eyes in a more efficent way. Because of this, none of the electrical properties of the unit change, but the screen is absolutley brighter.

 

[vlittle]

The roadmap from the virtual DG page to the HSI page is welcomed.
Those of us with single D10A installations, however, have a bit of an issue...

It would be very beneficial to have the DG page also display selected air data (or the primary display show the DG). I realize that there is a lot of stuff to pack into a small display, but right now the DG page only displays a heading and TAS.

My preference would be to have the DG rose on the primary page, replacing the heading tape.
I don't find the altitude tape very useful, but it would be nice to have a small VSI tape in it's place. I think there is enough room to have all of the useful information including the DG rose all on one page, with a little bit of juggling.

These enhancements will make single D10A installations more attractive. Not all aircraft have the panel space for D100s.

Vern Little, RV-9A