Vern Little, who developed our energy display told me we've got three options with hardware: "good, fast, cheap. Pick two." We went with good and cheap, and the inexpensive M5 stack video is NIT challenged under the bubble canopy of the RV-4, where I have it mounted directly in my line of sight on the canopy rail. The easiest, cheapest way to mitigate that is to fit the display with a hood. The AOA visual indicators on the F-4 canopy bow had a hood too, so we keep circling back to the excellent engineering that McDonnell Aircraft did a half-century ago.
I also want to post a link to Vern's website that allows folks to develop multiple widgets to use with the display (which also interfaces with an EFIS). We decided to go with a combination of energy display and attitude display for test work. In our case, the attitude display is driven by the V3 IRU, which will let us assess performance as well as directly monitoring some key performance parameters (including digital pitch read out). Here's a pic of the widget running on Tron's bench:
You press the left button to toggle to the energy display and the center button to pull up the attitude display. The right button controls brightness. The software boots in "full bright" mode, so the right switch essentially is a dimmer.
Here's a short video of the attitude widget in use in Lenny's RV-10:
Here are some photos of the various hoods Phil designed to snap on to the M5 display. They are printed and fit extremely well! I'm currently testing out a couple of shapes in the RV-4, and have initially settled on "narrow and deep" since this display is mounted directly ahead of me. The "deep" part provides maximum shade at most sun angles. For side-by-side airplanes with the display mounted on the glare shield, the wide FOV likely makes more sense. I'll post video of the hoodie in action at the first opportunity.
