Designing Your Panel

Designing Your Panel

You design a panel on the configurator, pyefis.aerocommons.org, and the device pulls it. This page covers what you do there and what reaches the device. How the configurator works inside is in the makerplane-data wiki: The Configurator.

To edit screens by hand instead, see Customizing Beyond the Configurator. The configurator writes the same screen YAML.

Aircraft and devices

Sign in with Google or an emailed link. Everything you create is private to your account.

• A project is one aircraft. Create one under Your aircraft / designs and Open it.
• A device is one display in that aircraft, for example PFD or MFD. Add each with Add device. Each device has its own panel and its own pairing.
• Each device row has Pair (or Re-pair) and Edit panel. The row shows whether the device is paired, when it last pulled, and update pending when you have saved a design it has not pulled yet.
• Aircraft parameters holds the aircraft's numbers, shared by all its devices. See below.

Pairing and pulling are on Setting Up a Device.

The Panel Editor

Edit panel opens the Panel Editor for one device.

Area	What it does
Toolbar	Screen sets the device's resolution and Size its diagonal; the readout shows the aspect ratio and DPI. Grid, Snap and Guides (center, thirds, golden, basic-T, PFD + EMS) help alignment. Code shows the YAML pane. Delete removes the selected instrument. Save saves the design. Done returns to the dashboard without saving.
Palette (left)	Instruments by category (airspeed, altitude, attitude, navigation, gauges, text, controls, containers and more), and ready-made groups: CHT or EGT bars for 2 or 4 cylinders, and a 4-cylinder CHT + EGT engine cluster. Drag one onto the canvas.
Canvas (middle)	The screen as the device will draw it. The previews are built to match what pyEFIS renders, including the tapes, HSI, gauges and synthetic-vision terrain. Drag to move, drag a corner to resize.
Screens bar	One tab per screen. + Screen adds one, Rename renames it, Set default makes it the boot screen (marked with a star), Delete removes it.
Layers (right)	Every instrument on the screen, front to back. The arrows change the order; a later instrument paints over an earlier one.
Properties (right)	With an instrument selected: its position and size on the grid, and every option the instrument has, with its default.
YAML pane	The screen YAML the device will receive. Edits in the pane apply to the canvas, and canvas edits appear in the pane.

The palette and the option lists come from pyEFIS itself, published with each pyEFIS branch. The production configurator follows pyEFIS's release branch, so an instrument added to pyEFIS appears in its palette once that instrument is released.

Positions are on the screen's grid. A new screen is 110 rows by 200 columns, which suits a 16:9 display. Each instrument has a row, a column and a span in grid cells, and can be nudged inside its cell with move. The editor shows the same fields the YAML uses; their meaning is on Customizing Beyond the Configurator.

Every instrument accepts a font family (DejaVu Sans Condensed by default, DejaVu Sans, DejaVu Sans Mono, B612, Inter, Roboto, Open Sans) and a font size as a fraction of its height. The rest of the options depend on the instrument; the Widget Reference lists them.

Tab sections

A Tab Section holds several pages in one area of the screen, with a tab bar to switch between them. The panel above uses one for its right-hand column: Map, Flight Plan, Engine and Radio.

• Drop a Tab Section from the palette's container category. It starts with one tab.
• With it selected, the properties panel lists its tabs: add, rename, reorder and delete them. It always keeps at least one.
• Drop an instrument onto the selected Tab Section to place it in the active tab. Each tab has its own grid.
• The tab bar can sit on any edge (tab_position: top, bottom, left, right).
• A Tab Section cannot hold another Tab Section.

Several screens

A device can have more than one screen. With more than one, the pulled panel replaces the device's stock screen list, and each screen gets a SCREEN > button so a touch-only panel can step through them. With one screen, the panel replaces the device's default screen and the stock screens stay available. See Setting Up a Device.

Getting the design to the aircraft

1. Save in the editor. The status line shows the saved version.
2. On the device, run pyefis-data config-pull, or power-cycle it: a device with the boot unit installed pulls once at boot.
3. The dashboard shows the device's last pull, and clears update pending.

A design is native pyEFIS screen YAML; nothing is compiled. The device installs it alongside its shipped configuration, keeps a backup, and goes back to the last working panel if the new one stops pyEFIS starting.

Aircraft parameters

Aircraft parameters holds the numbers that make the instruments right for your airframe and engine: V-speeds, gauge ranges and warning bands, fuel tanks, electrical limits.

• Configuration sets the counts (engines, cylinders per engine, fuel tanks), which decide the groups below. It also sets the airspeed entry unit (knots, mph or km/h) and the altimeter setting units.
• Airspeeds takes Vs0, Vs, Vfe, Vno, Vne, Va, Vx and Vy (and Vmc, V1 and V2 for twins and turbines). The bar under them previews the arcs the airspeed tape will draw. Out-of-order speeds are flagged as you type.
• Engine, Fuel and the other groups take each gauge's range and its warning and alarm limits. A blank field means no band on that gauge.
• Load template fills in a starting point: Lycoming O-320 or O-360, Continental O-470, or a complete Cessna 170B. Check every number against your POH.
• Import .ini reads an existing FIX-Gateway initialization file.

These numbers belong to FIX-Gateway, not to the panel: every instrument reads them from the FIX database. Today they reach the aircraft by hand:

1. Download aircraft.ini.
2. Copy it to ~/makerplane/fixgw/config/init_data/aircraft.ini on the device.
3. List it last under initialization files: in FIX-Gateway's config/default.yaml, so it overrides the shipped defaults, and restart FIX-Gateway.

The altimeter setting units are the exception. They reach every paired device of the aircraft with its next config-pull, and every unit-switching instrument starts in them.

The profile's design and validation rules are on Aircraft Parameters in the makerplane-data wiki.