Built a Stratux

455 Bravo Uniform

455 Bravo Uniform

Final Approach
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455 Bravo Uniform
I use my old out of cell service iPhone 6sPlus on the yoke with ForeFlight for GPS nav. I have FltPlanGo on my iPhone 8 for GPS backup.

I have my son’s old iPad WiFi only and wanted to use it for nav also (simply used it with ForeFlight for planning, charts, and AFD/Supplement). Plus my eyes are getting bad and need to zoom in with the iPhone 6sPlus sometimes. My wife also wanted a moving plane symbol on the iPad for when she tries to follow along :)

So I could have gotten a new or used iPad cellular. Or done nothing. Or spend $122 on a Stratux (didn’t need the AHRS/fan control). Could have been even cheaper if I used my own micro-SD card and downloaded the software myself.

I built it while eating lunch. Fired it up in the driveway to acquire satellites.

So now I have cheap GPS signal to my cheap iPad. I get weather too, but I consider that a bonus, not the main purpose for me...I’m not good yet at judging how far away buildups are and this will help me with learning distance estimation in the future. (Traffic too, but I don’t even think I’ll use it much; saw a lot of planes in Class A airspace which is really just annoyance.)

Planning to put it in the luggage area under the rear window. Powering it by ship power with a 12v cigarette lighter extension to the rear, then a 12v-to-USB adapter, and a short USB-to-micro-USB cable.

So if you want GPS position on your WiFi only device, $122 is the cheapest I’ve found to get it.

Hope this helps some other GPS deficient dudes.:cool:
 
I bought my Sratux off of eBay for about 225$. I soon was tired of the the battery charge routine before a flight and decided to just plug it directly into the lighter with a charge cord. I do keep the battery as a backup but so far the cigarette lighter and charge cord are doing fine. The only issue I had was that the unit suddenly quit working. It would power up but not receive any adsb information. I did a card flash (video on you tube) and everything working great now. Not sure how to manage a software issue while in flight but so far no more problems. This is a "poor mans" Stratus.
 
Coulda gone cheaper without the ADSB radios and antennas...but thought WX would be nice.
 
I had to re-flash my Stratux once after building for some unknown reason. The good thing is if parts of it stop working, you can just swap those out and not dump the entire product.

I have mine on the black glare shield (clear case, has not melted yet and I am tied down in the sun). Powered by a cord to a USB adapter in the cig lighter (thanks 1960's and smokers for your addition to my 150F). I also have a backup battery strapped under the unit with a short cord that can be plugged in in the event of a cig lighter failure. Thanks for reminding me of this so I charge up that battery next flight.
 
Those of you having to “re-flash” them, are you going to the web page and properly powering them down and waiting until the LEDs indicate shutdown before pulling power?

They’re just little Linux boxes and the file system on the SD card isn’t exactly a robust one when power is pulled. Certain R-Pi versions of hardware will completely trash the card during a power spike event, too.

Haven’t used mine in a while but that problem is fixed property easily by running it on a cheap lithium battery pack.
 
denverpilot said:
Those of you having to “re-flash” them, are you going to the web page and properly powering them down and waiting until the LEDs indicate shutdown before pulling power?
Click to expand...
I seldom do. Takes me all of about 10 minutes to re-image the SD card and make my little custom tweaks. So far, though, no failures. The only time I re-image the SD card is when I decide to just rebuild after it's been sitting for months and not kept up to date. I do run on battery power in flight, just seldom remember to shut it down via the web interface.
 
slacktide said:
I run the Flightbox images, which use a read-only filesystem. No issues pulling power. I’m not gonna stick around waiting for the Pi to do a shutdown -h NOW.

https://www.openflightsolutions.com/flightbox/re-imaging-the-flightbox-data-card/
Click to expand...

Not surprised someone did that. Always seemed kinda silly they didn’t do it in the main images, or maybe they have now, dunno. Haven’t been keeping up.

Can’t think of an embedded project running on Pi hardware that isn’t doing it these days though. Have other stuff here running on Pi that locks the thing down unless it’s in an update cycle.

And all that stuff also auto-updates on its own, too.
 
denverpilot said:
Not surprised someone did that. Always seemed kinda silly they didn’t do it in the main images, or maybe they have now, dunno. Haven’t been keeping up.

Can’t think of an embedded project running on Pi hardware that isn’t doing it these days though. Have other stuff here running on Pi that locks the thing down unless it’s in an update cycle.

And all that stuff also auto-updates on its own, too.
Click to expand...
Nah. They haven't put together a release that does that. One can turn off logging, though, which seems to help a bit. But at least for me, tapping an icon when after I pull the key out of the ignition isn't that big a deal (and at least one EFB, iFly GPS, has it as an option in its shutdown menu).
 
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