iFly GPS Forum

 I woould like to see and probably buy an iFly "750"  that  was just like the 740 or 740b  that had a ADS B  IN built into it!   most of the parts are already there. the WAAS  GPS, the screen  maybe some  dual band antennas or possibly some inside the case,  a mini  SMB connection  on the  case for remote ADSB  IN.  Still 12vdc being supplied from the  ship.   I believe that would be a winner.

 I could go either way with battery or no battery,  If the ADSB in built in then power might could be  sourced  same as ifly.   This  has the possibility of eliminating a lot of  portable cords, power, wifi and and plug in stuff.  Maybe the ifly 750 could  wifi  connect  with your  other "ipad " there on the right side.  Still believe this might be a good product for a  renter or otherwise portable  user.

If you could make something that looked like the 740 form factor and included ADSB-in capability, that would be nifty.  But I would guess that the resources required to solve the challenges associated with such a product would be prohibitive for a company like AP.

Adventure Pilot puchases off-the-shelf devices for their 7xx and 520 devices, then customizes the OS and software load to create a platform for iFly.  Catalogs for these devices cover a wide variety of options useful for embedded computers, including such "standard" features as GPS (including WAAS), Wi-fi, and Bluetooth, but the unique radios required for ADSB reception are not common in general-purpose computing so are not available as built-in options for off-the-shelf devices, and it would not be practical to custom-design such a device for as small a market as this one.

It's likely that AP could source an off-the-shelf panel PC with multiple USB ports that would allow for the software-defined-radio modules to be attached (just like they are with a Raspberry Pi-based Stratux ADSB-in device), but then to get a decent signal, you need decent antennas.  Since those antennas would not be able to be designed into the case or otherwise hidden, they would have to be external to the device.  It would be challenging to devise a physical combination of panel PC + one or two SDRs + one or two antennas that would achieve good reception and not be unwieldy to deal with.

If the physical form-factor issues could be solved, AP would also have to dedicate resources to build the code to re-create the ADSB-in logic that's currently handled by the external ADSB-in devices.  That would be additional development expense, and/or would compete with development resources that would be spent on other features and improvements.

There are already pretty good options for getting iFly and ADSB-in with two separate devices.  I'm guessing the price tag on a combo device like this would be pretty high, and the potential sales of such a device would not justify the investment required to create it. 

But that's just my guess.