September Update: Manuals, Open Protocols, and In-House Production

Another month has come and gone since our last news post, so what have we been up to?

Manuals are coming to the website, we published an openly available protocol that Draco and future Atmos Avionics products will use, and we are bringing the majority of our production in-house with our own circuit board assembly equipment!

First, manuals.

Right now, if you go to the website and click the Manuals button, there isn't much to see. That's because we are currently finishing what we consider the initial release of our documentation.

We are hard at work looking for spelling errors, sections that don't make sense, and anything in our wiring diagrams or schematics that may be confusing or warrant additional explanation.

I went ahead and published the Manuals page anyway because we now have something available there that normally isn't openly published: our data protocol.

In our efforts to make Draco as ecosystem-independent as possible, I devised a mostly transport-neutral protocol that Draco and future Atmos Avionics products can use to communicate with other avionics equipment.

Draco and future products will continue to use existing industry-standard protocols where necessary, but we hope this is another step toward making our equipment widely compatible throughout the experimental and light-sport aircraft communities.

We call it the Atmos Avionics Data Protocol, or AADP.

This does NOT mean Draco suddenly works with everything.

It places responsibility on us at Atmos Avionics to maintain the protocol, while manufacturers or developers who want Draco or future Atmos products to communicate with their ecosystems would need to implement support for it on their end.

Our hope is that this can contribute, even in a small way, toward greater standardization without all of the smoke and mirrors that can sometimes surround data transport protocols in avionics.

There will inevitably still be implementation-specific pieces. For example, an Atmos message may begin with !ATMOS, while another company adopting AADP could use its own identifier. We hope the open nature of the protocol encourages other companies to publish those details when practical, but there is no requirement in the specification to do so. We would rather encourage adoption than try to force an entire industry to change how it operates.

If you are interested in reading AADP—or potentially adopting it—you can find it on the Manuals page of our website.

As for certification, that is a bridge we will cross if and when we pursue certified applications. Requirements may be different from those of the experimental and light-sport markets, and we will evaluate those requirements when the time comes.

Finally, we are bringing the majority of production in-house.

The PCB fabrication process itself will still be outsourced, but we decided to purchase our own circuit board assembly equipment so we can maintain direct control over assembly and quality control.

Bringing assembly in-house also gives us much more flexibility when making revisions, building smaller production runs, testing changes, and controlling our production schedule.

It also helps us keep our products relatively affordable. Instead of paying another company for the assembly process, our primary costs become the components, equipment, and our own time.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to me by email and I will respond as soon as I am able.

I've gotten quite a few messages from some awesome people out there, and it has been a great time answering everyone's questions and hearing what people want to see from Atmos Avionics.

Thanks!

-Dalton
Co-Founder / Software Engineer