I'm SO excited!!
I recently learned about an open source consortium of makers/developers working to provide a common open source software platform upon which home builders can make their own avionics. After a couple of weeks of learning and testing various parts of the MakerPlane ecosystem, I think I've landed on a viable solution for experimental home built avionics.
If this interests you as much as it does me, you should go have a look at the MakerPlane website to learn more: https://makerplane.org
The most important part of the entire suite of projects is the CAN FiX (Flight information eXchange) specification. These guys did it right by first producing standardized specifications and then building software around it.
In the middle of MakerPlane's suite of open source software is the FiX Gateway, which is sort of the heart of the whole infrastructure. It can receive data from several sources including, but not limited to: CAN Bus, Stratux, XPlane, FlightGear (an open source flight sim), IP sockets, etc. In this video, I don't mention the FiX Gateway, but everything I'm doing depends on it.
The beautiful screen that you see here is pyEfis. It points to the FiX Gateway for its data - wherever that data comes from. So a good starting point might be to connect the FiX GW up to a flight simulator and run pyEfis against it to see how well it works. In my case, I'm mostly interested in gathering data from sensors on my Sonex that I can display in the cockpit. So the CAN interface is the best way to do that and is incredibly cool!
The hardware will cost several hundred dollars for high-end sensors and parts, but it's literally a fraction of the cost of a new glass panel from any popular avionics manufacturer.
Happy building!