  We derive a nonlinear differential equation for the gap parameter of a
superfluid Fermi system by performing a suitable coarse graining of the
Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equations throughout the BCS-BEC crossover, with the
aim of replacing the time-consuming solution of the original BdG equations by
the simpler solution of this novel equation. We perform a favorable numerical
test on the validity of this new equation over most of the temperature-coupling
phase diagram, by an explicit comparison with the full solution of the original
BdG equations for an isolated vortex. We also show that the new equation
reduces both to the Ginzburg-Landau equation for Cooper pairs in weak coupling
close to the critical temperature and to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for
composite bosons in strong coupling at low temperature.
