Cirrus IQ equivalent?

[haykinson]

I've been following Cirrus's "Cirrus IQ" product ever since they introduced it. For those that don't know it, Cirrus started installing cellular modems into their airplanes, and created a smartphone app that lets you check your airplane's status remotely. Apparently you can check location, fuel levels, oil temp, etc. These, in particular, make it really awesome to be sure that an FBO fueled your airplane while you're away, or to check if the airplane is cold and will need preheating or whatnot — I think that their app lets you wake the airplane up (i.e. temporarily power on), send the status to the cloud, and then power back off. Their app does more (service center locators, flight records, maintenance tracking — "you've got 22 flight hours until your next 100 hr inspection" type stuff — and some more customer servicy type stuff).

Unfortunately, our preferred contemporary airplane manufacturer does not seem to be as clueful as Cirrus and doesn't think about pilot or customer experience outside the plane very much. So I got curious whether it's possible to do something similar without Diamond's participation. Here are some thoughts.

1. There appears to be a company that sells something kind of similar: https://www.air-sync.com/ — this is basically a USB-powered cellular modem that talks to a wifi SD card that they provide, which can pull log data from the G1000 and upload it to the cloud and to their app. This seems to be a decent fit for what I would want, and it's relatively inexpensive as their device is not meant to be certified avionics. However, it can't replicate the Cirrus IQ experience with remotely turning on your avionics to check fuel levels and temps, etc.

2. At the hobbyist level, some aspects here should be possible to hack together. Flightstream cards can provide data (via Bluetooth) to anything that wants to listen, so in theory you can hack together a portable device that connects, saves the data locally, and then calls up on a cellular modem to push this up to the cloud. All the parts here can be purchased off the shelf and integrating them is likely not very difficult. The advantage here over the Air Sync device could be that — in theory — you could make this very Diamond-specific, and not need a separate card like Air Sync does. I'm not sure, though, whether it would be possible to use the device to turn on the avionics to get the full remote status experience a la Cirrus IQ.

3. For those who don't want / have Flightstream cards or devices, another option is Wi-Fi SD cards. Those used to exist a while ago, and were mainly used to connect normally-offline DSLR cameras — you plug in an SD cards, and (using the power it gets from the camera) the device connects to your local Wi-Fi network and uploads photos from the camera. There were about three or four different makers of such cards (the most popular was Eye-Fi). I tried one of them before (a Toshiba card), and it sort of worked: I was able to see the logs stored on the card after a G1000 powered up. However, these cards seem to have mostly gone out of style and aren't readily available anymore. There's one that I found that's still around, though I haven't tested it.

4. Whether with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi SD cards, in theory the data acquisition could be done from a smartphone. While you're in your plane, your phone can connect to the in-panel card, pull the information, etc, and just make it available to you. The advantage is no new devices (one just needs to write an app that does this); the disadvantage is that if your phone isn't in the plane then your plane is not connected.

There are probably not a lot of Diamond pilots who're willing to apply hobbyist solutions to their airplanes. However, we have relatively new airframes and a lot of us have relatively contemporary avionics that log a ton of data, and I think that the logical expectation these days is for vehicles to be connecting to the cloud. It feels like waiting for Diamond to decide to catch up to this kind of thinking is wishful thinking, since they still haven't figured out how to see their customers as contemporary consumers at all. So I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this — is a connected plane important? Is a remote logging solution like Air Sync enough? Is anyone genuinely interested in trying to push beyond that?

[VickersPilot]

Yes, it's 2022 - our aircraft should be connected devices and should auto update databases, sync status with the cloud. There is a whole new and exciting world opening up in connected aircraft and I suspect we will see the innovation start when GSR56 is replaced with an Iridium Certus 100 device. I am really impressed even by FS510 & FF combination. Until then...

Air Sync works great, except the DA implementation of Garmin NXI v2 doesn't output:
(1) Aux Fuel Level
(2) TKS Level

..so you don't know either fuel or TKS level. O2 level in the DA** aircraft is a mechanical sensor and not integrated to the G1000, so O2 levels can't be captured.

I believe if the DAN-6 could request (add to shortlist) these parameters be written to the SD Card log we could use AirSync as our poor mans Cirrus IQ.

Continuing the discussion of making our airplanes join the IoT, in Europe, a pseudo ADS-B output is now available using a combined cell/iridium data connection. The benefit is it feds FIS-B weather into the GTX345 (and therefore -> G1000 -> iPad over FS510).

http://golze.tech/accessories_13_adls1g.jsp

In summary, Air Sync and Golze are examples of engineering around legacy technology but great thread, let's see what else people have found out there to modernise our aircraft?

[mfdutra]

Diamond has been "certifying" the latest version of NXi (phase 3) for 2+ years now. They can't even roll that out.