Ultimate Pilot / Aviation Watch Digital Face

[ninthsrw]

So it seems “smart watches” are finally taking off - until recently battery life, slow re-refresh rates (more than one second), and poor daylight visibility prohibited their adoption by pilots. However, it seems like these major issues have finally been overcome by products with 7+ day battery life and proper transflective displays using Sharp's memory LCD (not technically e-ink, but highly transflective).

So the technical triumph begs the question: if what would the ultimate pilot oriented digital watch face look like?

Presently I’m working with the idea of a black and white display that is 144x168, since that’s the size of the Sharp memory LCD which is central to the battery life and good daytime visibility of smart watches which might be suitable for pilots.

Below are a few ideas’ I’ve mocked up.
Please feel free to take them and make them your own and post whatever you make here, or provide me with feedback that I can try to accommodate. Specifically, what sort of information would you like to see on the display, and how would you like to see it organized?

It is worth noting that most smart watches I’ve come across have some sort of alarm. Some are audible, some vibrate, some have both, and because these watches are capable of running apps you can make use of the alarm just about any way you can imagine.

I would also add that I the various times are not necessarily ment to be set via the watch itself - but rather all set up on a phone running an associated app, and then synched up on the smart watch via bleutooth or wi fi, or whatever. Of course the chronometer and flight timer woudl all be operated soley via the watch iself, and no smart phone would be required to use the watch face once the various times (i.e. t1, t2, dept, dest) were set.

So here is my first mock up idea:



The "AL : 15" in the lower left is intended to indicate that an alarm will vibrate each 15 second interval that the chronometer turns over (i.e. vibrate once it has counted of 15 seconds, vibrate again once it has counted off 30 seconds, and so on...) - this would be a user adjustable setting. This would be super awesome for shooting approaches, holds, etc...
The deal in the bottom right corner is a battery charge indicator so users can be sure there is plenty of charge remaining before you hop in the cockpit.
T1 and T2 are intended to be easy to toggle between am/pm and 24 hour modes, as indicated by the am, pm, 24 hour markers.

Here is a cleaner looking of the same:


Here is the same with a less stylized font:


Here is what I imagine the ultimate flight timer might look like - its kind of a cluster, but personally I like it because of its shear utility:


Here is my idea of a full flight timer with a less stylized font look:

[ninthsrw]

So I'm a big fan of digi-ani faces, but the hands of the analog always get in the way - and it occurred to me that an LCD / e-ink display is uniquely suited to solving this problem, since the physical hands need not be physically attached to the center.

Here is a rough mock up - I would add a tick mark for each minute along the analog circumference if I had more time to put into it.
I imagine the top digi would usually be an T2 or Flight Timer, while the bottom would be an Chronometer or Date.

[ninthsrw]

Ok so that earlier digi-ani mockup was kind of not so great.
Maybe these will generate some interest:


and this


The idea here is that the digital displays could be used for a julian date, big-endian date, middle-endian date, 2nd and/or 3rd time zone, chronometer, or countdown timer.

Thoughts?

[ninthsrw]

For those enthusiastic about E6B / slide rule bezels, it ought to be possible to setup a E6B emulator like function within any of the above proposed displays... There will be 3 buttons available to map for the apps - so the top would be scroll up, the middle would be select, and the bottom scroll down. You would have to pre-select the type of E6B function, but could then rapidly scroll through number values (like spinning the wheel) to achieve teh desired mathmatical function. The screen is a Sharp Memorly LCD that refreshes at 30 times per second (as opposed to e-ink which refreshes like once every 2 seconds), so rapid scrolling through numbers ought to be doable.

[Milos]

you're not getting much attention with this are you, Mac?

Just to get it straight - you are proposing a pilot's watch based on new display technology. right?...'cause you are planning to produce something of the sort, or are you just playing with the thought?

The idea per se, of a display that could be pretty much configured to any mode, without any restrictions sounds good, but the models are a bit crude for me - no bad blood :) ...it just doesn't come of as something high-tech to me...

[ninthsrw]

Thanks for your insight – no offense taken – I think you’ve hit on the key issue to which I was perhaps oblivious – these displays are highly functional from a utilitarian perspective, but somewhat lacking when it comes to pure aesthetics – unless you subscribe to a functionalist aesthetic paradigm wherein utility defines beauty…

To be fair, the display I am primarily designing for is pretty limited – a Sharp Memory LCD that is 144x168 and 1-bit (i.e. no gray scale). This display is not e-ink (thus the 30 fps), but it is something of a break through with respect to the segment of devices that the e-ink displays have historically been used in because its battery life is roughly equivalent to that of any e-ink device (easily greater than 7 days), as opposed to those that use color displays (usually OLED).

The most recent application (and arguably most impressive) of the Sharp Memory LCD is in the Pebble smart watch (Pebble) (battery life is 7 days of continuous display with 7 days of Bluetooth running). In the interest of full disclosure, I am in no way affiliated with Sharp or Pebble other, than having been a paltry consumer who participated in in their Kickstarter funding. The awesome thing about Pebble is its open SDK and APIs that will make watch face and app creation a relative breeze.

Other products like MetaWatch (MetaWatch - Home), Sony SmartWatch (SmartWatch | Android Watch - Sony Smartphones (US)) Allerta’s earlier product the inPulse (for blackberry only) (inPulse smartwatch | Get apps and alerts on your wrist), the iPod Nano, and whatever other smart watches come along may equally benefit from the faces I have proposed here… I hope they do. Why the iPod nano doesn’t have an sweet E6B app is beyond me – though I suppose its dinky screen would make using it tricky.

Thus, the central thesis that I am testing here is simply that in the era of smart watches with battery lives and form factors that enable relatively carefree and normal use, many things can be done to achieve new levels of utility heretofore unattainable by the likes of a Breitling B-1 or Citizen Skyhawk (previously the high water marks of pilot watch oriented utility). Granted, a Breitling B-1 is a marvelous thing that ought not be replaced by something which works better but looks worse, but maybe it is worth considering how the utility of the uglier smart watch might be maximized? Especially where the substantial, nuanced, and rigorous requirements of pilots are concerned?

So to that end, here is a mock up of the Pebble with a face that I personally like the most. I figured a little context might help.



Any other suggestions, feedback, or thoughts on the merits of my thesis would be tremendously appreciated.

[Andrew McGregor]

I think a pilot app for Pebble would be a great plan.

[ninthsrw]

I think a pilot app for Pebble would be a great plan.

What would you want it to do? How would you want it to look? Would a pilot oriented watch face matter at all? If so, what would you want it too look like?

Again - in the interest of disclosure - I am not a developer, and have no plans to pursue pecuniary gain based on the discussion I've started here (my C skills are pretty limited anyway) - but I am a pilot, and have a strong suspicion that other aviators who also have a thing for watches might have some strong preexisting opinions on what a good pilot watch ought to do, along with some very useful input that might benefit us all ("us all" being folks who use their wrist watches when they fly- to do things like time instrument approaches and holds).

[Andrew McGregor]

Well, I am a developer (as in, I could actually write such an app, easily) and also a pilot, although only a PPL. My main aviation involvement is actually ground control and incident management for the coastguard air patrol. So while I can think of plenty of things that are feasible, I'm not the best judge of what is necessary.

However, I notice a lot of airplanes used for IFR work have triple countdown timers on the panel, so that's one thing right there. I use elapsed time rather than countdowns frequently in my air patrol work.

I think all the world time functionality of the Skyhawk is a necessity for frequent international travellers, and so that would be right up the list (I'm actually wearing my skyhawk as I type...). But the Skyhawk's main failing is that they're hard to read, so much so that for actual cockpit work I've taken to wearing a dive watch for the readability.

E6B-type functionality would be cool, but I'm not sure how practical. Crosswind calculation, on the other hand, could be very useful (Hamilton figured this out with the X-Wind).

[ninthsrw]

Any interest in developing something? It sounds like you have a solid grasp of what would make for a good av app.

Really like the crosswind calculation idea.

In the US FAR 91.205(d) only requires a "(6) A clock displaying hours, minutes, and seconds with a sweep-second pointer or digital presentation" for IFR flight. In my personal experience the result is many privately owned aircraft in the US have panel mounted digital clocks, but not the elapsed timers that are ideal for shooting an approach or timing a hold. It is also common to find equipment with "count up timers" buried in their interfaces - like with the Garmin GTX330 Transponder, but I bet that a lot of folks who use a GTX330 every weekend don't know it has a count up timer; and figuring out what equipment has "count up timers," and where they are located in various menues is a pita to figure out if you are a student hopping between aircraft equiped with a variety of instruments.

Given that elapsed time timers (essentially stop watches) are really useful in aviation (as you've pointed out), and given that these smart-watch things have highly configurable alarms like vibrators and loud piezoelectric buzzers (the Pebble only has a vibrator), it occurred to me that an elapsed time timer could be setup so that it vibrated say once every 15 seconds, and then double vibrated every minute (or in some other sort of pattern that demarcates the passing of time), making it very easy to keep track of elapsed time without having to look down at the watch face - sort of how the breitling aerospace's "audible time indication," but for elapsed time and with a vibrator (so you don't have to worry about hearing it in the cockpit). Almost no panel mounted elapsed time timers provide such an alert.