The One Upgrade That Changes What Stratux Looks Like on Your EFB
If you’ve got a Stratux running and you’re happy with weather and traffic, there’s one more thing it can do that a lot of pilots haven’t tried: feed attitude data to your EFB and unlock synthetic vision.
The AHRS upgrade board is $39. Once it’s installed, ForeFlight® shows you a 3D terrain display with a live attitude indicator. The horizon moves with the aircraft. It’s not your primary flight instrument — but as a situational awareness tool and backup attitude reference, it’s one of the more useful things you can bolt onto a portable receiver.
What AHRS Actually Is
AHRS stands for Attitude and Heading Reference System. In practice, it’s a small board packed with sensors that measures what your aircraft is doing in space:
- Attitude — pitch and roll (is the nose up? are you in a bank?)
- Heading — magnetic or gyroscopic compass direction
- Altitude/pressure — barometric altitude used to enhance the picture
That data gets passed to your EFB over the same WiFi connection Stratux already uses for weather and traffic. Your EFB receives it as part of the GDL-90 data stream and uses it to render the synthetic vision display — the 3D terrain picture with a floating horizon line overlaid on your position.
Without AHRS, Stratux feeds position, weather, and traffic. With AHRS, it adds the attitude layer that makes synthetic vision possible.
What You Actually See in ForeFlight® With AHRS Enabled
Once the AHRS board is installed and ForeFlight® detects it, the synthetic vision display activates automatically. Here’s what changes:
The Synthetic Vision Map View
The 3D terrain map — the one that shows mountains, ridges, and surface features in perspective — becomes live. The horizon shifts in real time as your aircraft banks and pitches. Terrain that’s above your altitude turns a warning color. It’s the same principle as panel-mounted synthetic vision, rendered on your iPad.
The Attitude Indicator
ForeFlight®’s attitude indicator (accessible from the map or the dedicated attitude screen) shows a live artificial horizon driven by Stratux AHRS data. Pitch, bank, and slip are all represented. This is genuinely useful for maintaining situational awareness during turns, in IMC, or as a cross-check against your primary instruments.
Backup Attitude Reference
If your primary vacuum-driven attitude indicator fails in flight — a real-world scenario that still kills pilots every year — having a secondary attitude source on your iPad is a valuable backup. The Stratux AHRS is a $39 board, not certified avionics, but it gives you something to fly by while you sort out the situation and get to VFR conditions or the nearest airport.
How the Stratux AHRS Board Works
The AHRS board uses a combination of MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensors — the same category of technology used in your smartphone for accelerometer and gyroscope functions — plus a barometric pressure sensor for altitude.
A few things worth knowing about the standard Stratux AHRS build:
No magnetometer in standard builds
The standard AHRS board doesn’t include a magnetometer. Heading is computed through a combination of GPS track and gyroscopic integration rather than magnetic compass. This works well in normal maneuvering flight. In slow hover-like maneuvers or during extended taxiing, you may notice heading drift. In the cruise environment where most pilots use Stratux, this is rarely an issue.
Barometric altitude
Altitude shown through the AHRS feed is barometrically derived. This requires proper calibration when you power up — which ForeFlight® walks you through automatically.
MEMS sensors have real-world characteristics
MEMS sensors are good and getting better, but they’re not laser-ring gyros. Brief maneuvers are tracked accurately. Extended steep spirals or unusual attitude recovery may show some drift, which the sensor fusion algorithm corrects when you return to wings-level. Think of it as “very good situational awareness” — not “backup ADI to fly a missed approach.”
The Right Way to Think About Stratux AHRS
The Stratux AHRS is a valuable synthetic vision backup. That’s the most honest and accurate framing. It makes your iPad dramatically more useful in the cockpit by adding the attitude layer to weather and traffic. It’s a legitimate safety enhancement for situational awareness.
It is not a replacement for your primary flight instruments. Your vacuum AI or ADAHRS, your certified GPS, your mag compass — those are your primary references. The Stratux AHRS is the enhancement layer that makes synthetic vision work on your $39 portable receiver. The two roles are different, and both are valuable.
Treat it the way you’d treat any portable cockpit tool: great situational awareness enhancement, useful backup reference, not a replacement for certified equipment.
Compatible EFBs
The Stratux AHRS works with every major EFB that supports GDL-90 attitude data:
iOS: ForeFlight® 7.x+, WingX, FlyQ, FltPlan Go, iFly
Android: Avare, AvNav
If your EFB is on this list, it works. No special configuration beyond what you’d do for any Stratux setup.
Installation: Add Board, Reboot, Calibrate
Installing the AHRS board is about as complicated as installing RAM in a laptop — which is to say, not very:
- Power down the Stratux unit completely.
- Open the case and locate the GPIO header on the Raspberry Pi. The AHRS board connects here — it’s a standard header, and the board only goes on one way.
- Seat the AHRS board on the GPIO header. Make sure it’s fully seated and square.
- Reassemble and power on.
- Check the Stratux web interface (192.168.10.1) to confirm AHRS is detected.
- Open ForeFlight® and connect to Stratux as you normally would. ForeFlight® will detect the AHRS source automatically and prompt you to calibrate.
- Run the calibration — ForeFlight® walks you through this. It takes about 30 seconds and sets the barometric reference.
Total install time: 15 minutes. No soldering, no special tools, no firmware changes. The Stratux software already knows how to talk to the AHRS board — it’s a supported component in the standard firmware.
Add AHRS to Your Stratux
The AHRS board ships ready to install. Same component used in Crew Dog’s pre-built units — no compatibility concerns, no guesswork.
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Synthetic vision is one of the bigger quality-of-life upgrades in the cockpit. The Stratux AHRS makes it work on your existing setup for $39. If you’re already running Stratux for weather and traffic, this is an easy next step.