I'm currently studying aircraft maintenance and for the purposes of a project, I was assigned to make a model of the ILS feature used in aviation. ILS stands for Instrument Standing System and it's used in order to help pilots land the aircraft smoothly and safely during the day, night and especially in bad weather conditions with low visibility.
As it is my first time using an Arduino board and its components I kindly ask for your help in this.
What part of this project would you like to be electronic? It will be easy to blink some LEDs and make sounds, but setting up an RF outer marker, middle marker etc. along with the receivers, and coding the "perfect path" vs current path may be too involved to meet your ability and deadline.
Depending on scale, there may not be enough seperation between markers for RF, but a light curtain on the left and right of the runway, although it would look funny, would work on a small scale.
Well, that's why I asked for your help because I haven't done any other projects with an Arduino board.
I had an idea of making the correct path somehow using proximity sensors along with 3 LEDs, one for each marker.
Two proximity sensors can be placed to simulate the function of the localizer, one at the beginning of the glide path and one at the beginning of the runway. Although the localizer is located at the end of the runway, I'm not certain if this would work due to the sensor's range to cover the aircraft's movement.
On the other hand, in order to simulate the glide slope, two (2) proximity sensors can be placed on the sides of the runway (one left and one right)
My supervisor teacher will provide me with an exact ILS instrument (the one with the needles shown at the link above) to check that the system is functioning perfectly.
The scale of the project would be determined when a solution is given.
As long as you don't have a real aircraft in your project, you can use pots or analog joysticks for entering the flight condition, and make the ILS needles reflect that condition. In further steps real sensors can replace the pots.
strongvas:
My supervisor teacher will provide me with an exact ILS instrument (the one with the needles shown at the link above) to check that the system is functioning perfectly.
If you are being provided with a real ILS instrument, I do not see how you can "model" an actual ILS signal for the instrument to pick up.
The ILS signal, while not complicated, is too much for the Arduino to simulate or reproduce.
I've been trying to think of a realistic way to help you achieve this. It depends how big of a scale you want to build, and if there can be any "connection" between the "aircraft" and ground. I don't "think" proximity sensors will work. If you want a handheld instrument that reacts with left/right and up/down as you move it around, then maybe using IR leds would work. For example, have an LED pointed along the glidepath flashing a certain pattern (eg, ...), another LED a bit left with a different pattern ( . . .) and another LED a bit right with another pattern ( _ _). Then your reciever can pick up the code, and see determine if it is left or right, then move the needle appropriately. But this may not work, and there would be many challenges (LED focus, sorting out 2 or 3 different signals, 38khz modulation, ect...)
This project sounds complicated, but it all depends how much you are supposed to "model" and what other requirements there are.