News and stories about how FPAssistant is developed and the technologies used to create it
Maximum Descent Gradient & Minimum Deceleration Distance Two new calculation required for FAA TERPS have been added to both the FPAssistant API and also to the Windows 10 app, work will begin soon for the Apple iOS and Google Android apps which will include these calculations as well. Here is a screen shot of the [...]
Work has progressed to add the functionality for ICAO Basic ILS surfaces and this development included lots of new classes for the SDK. Here is a screen shot of a completed basic ILS surface drawn using Microsoft Bing maps, only a few parameters are needed to calculate the points that define the polygons you see [...]
As the initial app for FPAssistant is for Microsoft Windows 10 then the obvious choice for map support was Bing Maps (Microsoft) which offers an API for Universal Windows Platform (UWP). So far we have found the mapping API to be stable and reasonable fast, work is progressing on a wrapper that will draw many [...]
One the main functional requirements for the FPAssistant Suite was to offer a product that would happily execute on different hardware devices from phones through to tablets and desktops plus be available on different operating systems (OS)....so how do we achieve this you ask? Well... Initially this was achieved using Portable Class Libraries (PCL) and [...]
I first tried a working concept of Virtual Reality (VR) in the early 1990's with a prototype by Autodesk, this was (if I remember correctly) powered by an Intel 286 based PC with two graphics cards in ISA slots each connected to their own small CRT (~2in) one for each eye; the helmet was quite [...]