Attitude Director Indicator
Same face, on the target board
The panel above is not a mock-up of a product roadmap. It is the same renderer, the same texture and the same geometry that run on the hardware — a 2.761 in round 480 × 480 LCD on an AITI carrier board, with the processor driving the display directly. No GPU and no external graphics part: the sphere, the bank pointers, the flight-director bars, the warning flags, the slip ball and the rate-of-turn pointer are all drawn by the processor, every frame.
The frame figures were measured through the two maneuvers on the panel — a two-turn aileron roll at 60 °/s and a vertical loop — not a static screen. Roll is the worst case rather than the loop, because roll turns the sampling direction against the scanline and pitch does not.
No simulation in this one
That is the panel on its ribbon, driven by the board behind it, running the firmware. Nothing is pre-rendered and nothing is played back — it is running the same two maneuvers as the buttons on the panel, at the same rates.
One caveat, so it does not mislead you. This is a phone camera under room lighting, and the white balance has pulled the sky toward cyan and flattened the brown. Judge the color from the live face above, not from the video — and treat even that as provisional until a colorimeter has been on a real instrument.
Why a real sphere, and what it bought
Most glass ADIs cheat: a flat sky/ground image, rotated by bank and slid by pitch. That holds up until the ball carries markings that only make sense on a sphere. A flat image has no third axis for heading to act on and no poles for the meridians to converge at. So this renders an actual textured sphere — every destination pixel traced back through the attitude matrix to a point on the ball.
Done naively that costs 167 ms a frame. Solving the exact spherical case only every eighth pixel and interpolating between anchors, bounding each row by the circle instead of its bounding box, replacing the transcendentals with tables built at boot, and turning the processor's caches back on took it to 27–30 ms — while growing the ball and its texture. That is the difference between a demo and something that goes in a panel.
A note on the bezel artwork
Not everything on the face has to be drawn, and on a 2.761 in panel not everything can be. The roll-scale ticks, the speed dot column and the index marks are printed on the bezel, not rendered. Turn Bezel artwork off on the panel and you are looking at exactly what the processor draws.
The speed dot column is the clearest case: there is no glass left for it, so the dots are printed and only the white pointer is drawn, moving against them and clear of the ball.
Build it for your platform
Altimeter, VSI and HSI already ship on this same board — a four-instrument panel from one processor. Tell us the instrument, the interface and the artwork, and we build it to your specification. Talk to us →
