Over the summer an online dealer in Utah for the Recon Instruments family of devices had the Snow2 + Scott googles on sale for over 50% off. Even with the exchange rate, it was a phenomenal deal compared to the price local dealers were charging. The Snow2 is a pseudo HUD in that it does not directly overlay ones view, but instead sits on a small display in the lower right field of view.
An image of what the HUD looks like within the goggles, from Necessary Coolness.
Here is a link to Recons info page.
The HUD software is geared almost exclusively towards snow sports (thus the name Snow2 and likely why I got it so cheap mid summer). But it runs on Android, and strangely enough yours truly has a decent amount of experience with Android fairly close to the metal.
Trivial to repurpose this device towards a more paragliding centric application. Grab the Recon SDK, the sample app, and a hacking we will go.
The result:
Fairly simplistic. It autostarts on boot, precluding the need for the all-too-easy-to-lose remote. The compass rotates in line with heading, the green arrow indicates bearing. If the user has a sufficient change in bearing or a climb rate above 0 m/s, the centre display will show climb rate, otherwise it shows glide ratio. Climb and glide are averaged.
Next up will be determination of wind direction and speed (a blue arrow on the compass?). After that, maybe speed to fly, maybe BLE connectivity (if Recon has finally updated the OS for the device with proper SDK support) to a PGing GPS such as the XC Tracer.
In any case, it and the laptop will follow me to Brazil for further testing/dev.
Continued in Part 2.
...Or skip ahead to the current refactor.
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