How does the communication between instruments and gauges (in cars/planes/ships etc.) work?

970 views

How does the communication between instruments and gauges (in cars/planes/ships etc.) work?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is a broad one, as there’s many different configurations; you can use electricity, liquids or gases to transmit information to analog (dials) or digital (lights, LCDs, etc. ) displays.

Think of one of these systems like inflating your tire with a manual pump; you add pressure to the system by pumping, the pressure is transmitted through a hose, and the pressure inflates the tire.

There’s something that measures something (a sensor), it translates this into a signal (pressure, voltage, or current), the signal is transmitted through a conductor (pipe or cable), and the signal is translated into a display that we can read.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I used to work on helicopters

There are some gauges/lights that are directly connected to a sensor (temperature, fuel flow, fuel level, metal chip detectors in gearboxes) usually the signal that was sent out by a sensor went directly to the gauge/light for it to display

Some gauges had air lines going into the back of them (barometric pressure, airspeed) gauges like this usually only had wires going into it to power the backlighting

Some screens/panels got data sent to them from a computer or a processor dedicated to that certain system (automatic flight control system, all countermeasure systems, FLIR, radar). Usually these systems had several mechanical/analog inputs or sensors that the processor collected data from to display