Dimming for night flight

[Russ_Owens]

I flew at night with my Skyview for the first time. I manually dim the display with the +/- buttons. The Skyview is the only light in my otherwise dark cockpit, so I keep the Skyview brightness very low. Occasionally I use my LED headlamp to look at other items in the cockpit. When I do that the Skyview sees the bright light of the headlamp and gets very bright for 30 seconds or so, then dims back to my desired level. Is there any way for me to manually set the brightness and ignore the "ambient light level" so I can keep the display dim?

 

[Dynon]

With verison 11, there isn't a way to have it be totally manually controlled. Interesting scenario, though - we'll need to think though it.

 

[Russ_Owens]

Is there a way that I could "defeat" the ambient light sensor with something as simple as putting a piece of tape over it? Where is the sensor? I strongly request that in the next version, that there be a way for the pilot to have total control of the screen brightness.
Thanks for your quick and direct response.

 

[dynonsupport]

Russ,
It's actually an FAA requirement that you not have complete control. If you have full control, you can go full dim during the day accidentally, not be able to see the screen, and not have a way to un-dim it. All certified stuff works this way. We used to give the user full control, and we actually got complaints about this, and it really wasn't the right solution.

The light sensor is the little dot between the #4 and #5 buttons. If you were to tape over this, you will have full control. However, the system will boot at the previous brightness every time, which will make it hard if you fly at night one time and day the next and forget to go full bright before shutdown.

You can also go into the setup menu and adjust the curve for the brightness sensor to make it act like it's dark all the time.

 

[Russ_Owens]

Fantastic! Thanks. I have all the information I need, to make the system operate just the way I want. I understand the potential problem and will deal with it. One more use I never would have imagined for DUCT TAPE!
Russ

 

[dynonsupport]

Russ, if you really do want it permanently in this mode, you can just go into the setup menu and under BRIGHTNESS SETUP, set all the x% BRIGHTNESS SENSOR VALUES to 999,998,997,996 and the minimum to 995. The screen will go full bright in real daylight, but will go to full dim in anything less, and then you can use the manual DIM+/- to do what you want. No tape needed.

 

[hickej]

I recently ran into this problem as well and contacted tech support. I tried adjusting the settings but could not come up with settings that would allow me enough control. I would love to have direct manual control from the joystick menu no matter what the FAA says.

If I could enter the brightness value to use for a particular sensor input, I'm sure I could make a curve that would work for my aircraft, eyes, and flashlight. As it is, I could not come up with a curve that didn't go too dim at night and that didn't respond to the flashlight and get too bright. I was able to see the sensor values for night time, flashlight, shady sun, and direct sun. If I could enter brightness values for those sensor levels, I'd be set! As it is currently programmed I have fixed brightness values for which I have to enter sensor values (backwards HMI IMHO). Does anyone have a setup that works well at night without blinding you when you use a flashlight?

 

[hickej]

I ended up adding a physical dimmer control knob and switched to external control. I'm very happy with the manual control for night flying. I couldn't find an internal sensor based setup that would work for night flights.

 

[Russ_Owens]

I would like to reopen my request for a better pilot control for dimming for night flight. I've been operating for several months now using the Dynon "recomended workaround" of setting BRIGHTNESS SENSOR VALUES of 999,998,997,996 and the minimum to 995, with the Dynon warnings of the limitation. This setup gives me somewhat better control, but whenever I first turn on the Skyview now, it comes on FULL DIM, day or night. From memory, I push a sequence of buttons to bring the brightness up to a level where I can see the display.This is better than the original setup, but very unsatisfactory!
The Dynon comment that the FAA won't allow full manual control of brightness can't be the final answer. I am not so familiar with the regulations, but as a retired FedEx pilot that did most of my flying at NIGHT in Boeing aircraft, we never had this problem of instrument brightness going to blinding full bright at night when the light sensor was hit momentarily by a flashlight beam! Or having to fumble with a dark screen to get the brightness up to visible levels in the daytime. We ALWAYS had satisfactory control of our cockpit instrument lighting. This kind of control must be possible with the Skyview!
I see that the previous poster has added a manual dimmer control. Shouldn't this be available using the Skyview panel controls?
Thanks in advance, and thanks for an otherwise wonderful product!

 

[dynonsupport]

The FAA allows an external dimmer knob that is ALWAYS the dimmer, is labeled, and works no matter what the software in the unit is doing. SkyView supports this if you want to hook one up.

What is not allowed is a "soft" knob or button. The issue is that you could twist the knob to minimum brightness, then re-configure it to something else, and have no way to increase your brightness. The FAA considers this a safety of flight issue and from what we have been told would never allow a PFD that can be manually dimmed via soft knobs or buttons to zero in a certified cockpit.

I am assuming the Boeing cockpits used a manual dimmer as well, not a fully automated one. If they did use automation, I bet they use more than one light sensor so a flashlight on one doesn't cause an issue. It's hard for us to do that with one screen.

We'll look into seeing if we can do some better filtering of a sudden very bright light.

 

[Russ_Owens]

Dynon -
Well, please bear with me while I try another approach. Is there any way to set up my Skyview that it always defaults to full bright but I could manually adjust it to dimmer without the automatic brightness stepping in and adjusting it to brighter or dimmer?
Then if the Skyview lost power or was turned off, it would go back to full bright and I could just dim it again to an acceptable level.
Using the settings suggested above, I now we have the WORST situation, where it defaults to full dim on powerup - day OR night, and I must make it bright enough to read it without benefit of ANY visible display?

Anyone else - HELP!

Has anyone figured out how to use the Skyview for night flying without running into this night blinding bright display problem when hit by a flashlight beam or momentary cockpit bright light?

 

[hickej]

Since you're looking into the filtering algorithm maybe you could change the setup too. A very simple change would be to allow us experimental aircraft owners to set pairs of values for the brightness curve. I tried working with the built in brightness values of 100, 75, 50, 25 but couldn't get it to work. I'm sure I could have gotten the internal sensor to work if I could have entered pairs of (sensor, brightness) values. e.g.

struct BrightnessCurveSample
{
    int lightSensor;  // measured value from light sensor scaled 0..999
    float brightness; // percent of maximum screen brightness 0.0 .. 100.0
};
BrightnessCurveSample brightnessCurve[] =
{
    {999, 100.0}, // Direct sunlight
    {980, 80.0},  // Indirect sunlight
    {600, 4.0},   // Worst case flashlight value
    {0, 2.0}    // This is the lowest brightness for my eyes in my cockpit
};
float GetTargetBrightness(int curSensor);
// if curSensor less than smallest sample, return smallest sample's brightness
// else if curSensor greater than largest sample, return largest sample's brightness
// else find the two samples that bracket curSensor and return linear interpolation of their brightness values


Keep up the good work. I know you'll figure this one out for the benefit of all.

I Love my SkyView! -can't wait for the touchscreen... 
-Jim

 

[Donald_Eccker]

Yep. Night flying with auto dim on my SV1000 and using any other lighting just doesnt work. Its even a pain just to get to dimming :'(, Sure would be nice to have something manual for dimming , that way we all would be able to adjust our brightness needs as each sees the need..

 

[Dynon]

Just so you all know - we are taking a look at ways we can improve the response rate and flexibility of the auto-dimming. No promises on the outcome, but it's getting some thought on our end.

 

[swatson999]

It sounds like you (Dynon) just need to debounce the signal from the light sensor...a single (or even several) high sensor values should be smoothed out, with some sort of persistence value before it takes effect.

 

[swatson999]

Has anyone figured out how to use the Skyview for night flying without running into this night blinding bright display problem when hit by a flashlight beam or momentary cockpit bright light?

Better overall cockpit lighting?  I know that sounds snarky, but if you are able to set up a nice, even illumination of the areas of importance (panel, lapboard, etc.), you may not *need* a flashlight.  Charts are all on the SkyView to start with, anyway...although yes, it's nice to have a paper approach plate which you can quickly read without having to scroll, etc.).

If the flashlight beam is illuminating the panel, it's not doing any good at illuminating what you want to see, probably.

Consider under-dash LED lights (dimmable), maybe some side-post small map lights, etc.

 

[Jim_Lee]

I want to thank the posters on this thread to alerting me to this problem. After tests in the dark hangar prior to night flight I found that even my red cockpit light brings the Skyview to full bright, not something I want to deal with on final approach. It looks like I will have to resort to the duct tape over the sensor method while Dynon figures this one out. Thank you Dynon for being responsive to our needs.

 

[dynonsupport]

Jim,
If you are running a light in your cockpit that is on full time, no change we are going to make is going to be able to help. The other complaints came from a short time exposure to a flashlight, which we can likely filter out. However, if the lights in your cockpit give us a full time exposure to thinking it's daylight, there's nothing we can do.

Now, it is very likely that your red lights are far from sending the screen full bright. Night flight tends to be a screen brightness of less than 1%. Even an increase to 10% feels like "full bright" because it's 10X as bright, but that's not full bright. If you look in your brightness setup, you will likely find that your red lights are still pretty dim against a full daylight input, and you can probably create a curve to the brightness that doesn't react much to the red light at night but still works in the day.

 

[dynonsupport]

We just wanted everyone to know that we have made significant changes to the light sensor algorithm and we believe it does a great job of ignoring flashlights while still dimming as needed. I think you will all be pleased with the performance in our next release. It also returns to dim much quicker even if a flashlight does persist for so long that we have no choice but to start brightening.

Thanks for your feedback and pushing us to make this work better. Please try it out in v12 when it's release and let us know how it works for you.

 

[Russ_Owens]

Dynon -
Thank You VERY much! After night-flying with the new Skyview Version 12 I am extremely pleased with the new dimming algorithm. It is awesome. Great Job! Thanks for listening and responding.
Russ