iEFIS Discovery Lite temporarily unavailable

[rainier]

We are having some delays in getting the MX2 (ex Discovery Lite) assembled due to our production facility running at capacity.
In the meantime however it is giving me a chance to work on the actual EFIS software. While initially the intention was to port the G3 pretty much as is and make it work on the G4 under Linux - this was done and is working well, the additional time available has been spent on a quite a big overhaul. While the user customizable screens are still available as before the visual appeal of the various items has been greatly improved , moving away from the traditional flat colors.
The biggest change however is the addition of a built in screen designer. For those familiar with our screen designer on a PC - it is somewhat similar but there is now a new screen file which gets generated on the EFIS if desired. This is loaded after all other screen files for a particular page (so there is one new file for each page). Here you can place your own screen items and each has a property editor with all the relevant settings you also find on the PC based designer. Placing the items (which also now includes a built in selection of premade groups of items) is simple. Editing and moving them just as easy. Several nice aids exist such as making backups of the user screens or even taking the current built in or screen design files in the screens folder and creating a fully editable single screen file from that. You can use the user screen file in addition to the existing or as only file on a page. It's really quite powerful.

As this is easy to use it now allows the built in screen files to be very simple with just the very basics. This is nice as it means the screens are far less cluttered with items you may never need. Say for example you want the familiar radio control on your screen - it's no longer available on a built in screen - you use the built in screen designer and simply place it where you would like it and then tell the designer what size you want it (this item has only one property to set).
Several engine displays are built in as groups (for example an oil group would have oil temperature and pressure with graphical and text readouts) so you can use these to create your own engine displays - or you could use the individual items as before in a screen design or any mixture - the traditional built in selectable engine and fuel displays are also still available (as you can extract these to a user screen you can even use these as base for your own modifications or additions).

Up to now drawing items on the screen was done in a background/foreground fashion - the background would contain items that are CPU intensive to draw or are drawn at a rate lower than the screen refresh (maps for example). In the past with a screen design this had to be taken into account (so for example it required additional effort to make a small map show on a horizon display). All this is now past history - the drawing engine has been redone as well so for new screen designs the background no longer exists. If a item requires a background or off-screen image it will handle that itself transparently now.

As Linux is used it is possible to use OpenGL and use the graphics processor which is a Vivante. The G3 also has a graphics processor but this can only be used under Linux as the holder of the intellectual property refuses to divulge how to use it and only provides a binary driver that runs under Linux. Even though linux is used the Vivante graphics processor interface has been reverse engineered and the project is called Etnaviv (Vivante backwards). This means open source OpenGL drivers are now used on our G4. When I started one this two years ago Etnaviv was still a bit buggy and would easily crash but after a few revisions (at least one bug I was able to isolate and report to the developers) - it now seems stable and have not seen any issues for many months.

The intention is to release the G4 as open source at some point - hence the effort spent on Linux and the graphics engine as well as a very nice and easy to use development environment that requires zero cost on the developers side (i.e. nothing fancy to buy, no compiler or tool licenses - just a usb cable and RS232 cable is needed apart from a PC or laptop running Windows 11 - if you don't need to change the provided Linux then all you need is any old PC running at least Windows 7). The Linux development side (for the uboot bootloader and LInux kernel and drivers) is done in a virtual machine running under Windows 11 (that has native support for Ubuntu Linux).

In all the G4 is the largest upgrade of the EFIS firmware since probably the change from the monochrome Ultra EFIS to the Engima EFIS.

[bvolcko]

Rainier,
You are a wizard. Most of your last post went straight over my head, I'm not a computer guy. Ke4ep up the good work. I have a Discovery Lite in my Xenos motor glider...love it.