The Head-up Display is a home-made version of the displays used on military jet fighters but designed and built using off-the-shelf software and materials. HUDs essentially "project" an artifical image that appears to float in mid-air and to blend with the image of the real world.

The optical design is based on a Petzval lens with a field flattener similar to the designs used on most jet fighters and was developed and optimized using the OSLO EDU software. The optical performance of the design was validated by comparing it against the performance of the A-10 HUD provided in the book "Optical Design for Visual Systems" by Bruce H. Walker. Overall, the optical performance is very good with most optical aberrations being well corrected and comparable to the A-10 HUD design. The only exception is spherical aberration which was impossible to correct to optimal values due to the difficulty to obtain aspheric and doublet lenses of large radius which are very expensive. Nevertheless, the performance is very good and results in a high quality image that is comfortable to look at.

The image is provided by a common LCD display that I modified to provide the high brightness required for the HUD image to be visible against daylight. The modification consisted in replacing the original backlight of the LCD by a high power LED light. The LED light generates lots of heat both on its back surface and on the LCD panel so a heat sink and cooling fans were added to keep the temperature under control.

A Raspberry Pi is used to provide video signal to the LCD display and to distribute electrical power from the USB port to the cooling fans.

The structure was designed in CAD software and manufactured using a 3D printer.