My Master's project, the development of a Flight Deck Motion Monitoring System (FDMD) completed all of its objectives in late 2008. The system was designed to be used with a specific inertial sensor and a specific rugged display with tactile buttons in the display's bezel. It was designed for use with this type of display because touch screens can be difficult to use with heavy gloves.

Shown here is an image of the selected display. It was manufactured by General Dynamics Canada (GDC) who was involved in the project under a research collaboration. In spring 2010 GDC had a new display and new inertial sensor that they wanted the FDMD to be compatible with so I was employed under a short-term contract to upgrade the system.

This is an image of the new display. While the original display had its programmable buttons on the sides, this display's programmable buttons are located along the bottom of the screen. The user interface had to be modified to accommodate this difference. Modifications were also required due to differences in the communication protocol used to communicate with the display itself.

Significant changes were also required in the components of the program that were responsible for communicating with the inertial sensor. The original sensor, a Crossbow AHRS400 transmitted its data in a continuous stream of repeating data packets. The new sensor, a Crossbow AHRS440 instead used a more modern approach of having several different packet formats that could be transmitted, allowing the receiver to pick and choose only the data packets they were interested in.

These two images show the primary operations screen before and after the user interface redesign. A new operations screen without the time history data was also added: