Sharing of data around the aircraft is desirable for a number of reasons.

• Display purposes.
• Data recording from a data acquisition system.
  
• Instrument Control based upon same external data.
  

Low bandwidth data can easily be achieved via ASCII data packets.  Comma Separated Value (CSV) data makes for a convenient easy to read and implement scheme.  The IWG1 packet is a CSV data packet.

Achievable sample-rates will depend on available bandwidth and other instruments  sending packets.  A 20 byte packet sent at 50Hz will consume about 10Kbps.

Two parts are required:

• The Data Packet
• A header file to describe the data (variable names, units, titles).