737 FMC CDU and Raspberry Pi
Got a Raspberry Pi hooked up to the LCD display for my 737 Flight Management Computer CDU. Had to solder a 5.5mm DC Jack for the 12VDC power, and also buy a (MYR 49 rip-off!) HDMI-to-VGA converter.
The 5″ 4:3 TFT LCD display (https://goo.gl/sFTShF) is nice and has good viewing angles. It is slightly defective … it only works when the ribbon is bent 180 degrees back behind the display. If it’s flat downwards, the display is erratic. Since I would need to pay to ship it back to claim warranty, I figured I’ll live with it — after all I *will* be mounting it with the ribbon bent 180 degrees back anyway. Hopefully that’s all there is to it.
It turns out I also need a VGA cable. So for now I have this 1.5 meter thing to connect two connectors that are going to be inches apart in the end. I’ve found a USD1.39 DSUB VGA Male gender changer on eBay which I think will allow me to eliminate the cable.
I googled enough graphics programming to figure out how to fit the FMC’s layout into the screen. The 737 FMC display is interesting in that despite being a late 1970s thing it combines two different font sizes on the same screen. There are alternating rows of full-height and half-height characters. The buttons at the side of the display are supposed to align with the full-height rows (like an ATM has buttons next to the screen). I think whoever designed the 3D model should have made the buttons a bit lower. But I don’t know enough to mess around with the 3D object to fix it, so it’s another thing I will live with.
Originally created with EverNote at 20170307T032051Z
