Ubuntu Touch Screen on Aux Console

7" Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 on the right Aux Console, fits..... almost perfectly. I had to cut about 2mm into the rim of the aux console on the upper right hand corner. Other than that, it fits right in.

7" is still a tad small for fat fingers, like mine. But, it's workable. Plus, I got a wireless BT/4GHz keyboard touchpad combo thing hooked up to it. Hey, it even comes with a red dot laser pointer. I think a magnetic holder at about where it sits now will do just fine.

Of course, in anticipation of my own control stick to be slotted in where the stick is supposed to go, I did added bottom panel, and some ribs inside to reinforce the "slot", and increase the rigidity of that plastic thing. After all, this thing is 3D printed plastic, not cast aluminum. Whether it's strong enough when missile are chasing up my six remains to be seen.

I am thinking about putting up a long 12.5" wide screen on top of the glare shield as the 2nd screen. You know, one of them long, and narrow screens often used in a transparent computer case builds. Probably too much. Oh, well... we will see, if there is a use of it.

It's a Raspberry Pi 5 with a 512GB NVME drive sitting behind the touch screen (with 8GB RAM, a 16GB model is on order), running Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS (no, I ain't doing the rusty Ubuntu 25... that thing might turn out to be very rusty by using too many new Rust programs. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And Ubuntu 25 is fixing it. Why would I need a 2GHz quad core running this thing? This thing is FAST! The Debian-based Hempstick Linux image is build on one of these, in about 3 minutes. This thing sure is much faster than my Y2K era company issued development laptop (developers got top of the line those days; today we get shit). The deal is that this will be the central mgmt pit computer controlling all the Hempstick panel Linux boxes.

For instance, it will receive network events of the status of each panel. Think you have one Linux box controlling each panel. You will end up with, what?, 20 Linux boxes to manage? One doesn't boot up right and you are in a world of problem. So, what about a map of the cockpit displayed on this touch screen and with each panel having a red/green status light? And what about shutdown? You don't want to turn off all of them one by one manually, now do you? How about this central computer sends a shutdown event to each one of them to turn them all off? The possibilities are endless.

As to what software I will be running to facilitate these "endless possibilities", you will see. My philosophy has always been... if I can use one, I will not write one. I have been following what I want to use for this for about 10 years now. It sure has matured quite a bit in the last 10+ years.




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