The Evolution of the Panel (Part 2)

6/3/07 I've been working the engine lately and the panel is pretty much done. I did get the control cables for the engine temp installed and everything seems to fit well.
5/16/07 The Falcon clock went away! What a piece of junk. I swapped it for the Flight Data Systems GT-50 clock which is a combined clock, timer, g-meter, and voltmeter. Also on the agenda were a lot of clean-up items. The plan is to move the project out of the shop to the garage for the engine mounting and insatll work.
5/12/07 I managed to spend some quality time on the panel today and got it to a point where it was mostly complete. I started off with installing the radio rack and took most of the morning. The 480 and SL-30 are attached to the sub panel so I needed to fab a couple small tabs to stabilize the 327 and 8000B. Overall I think it worked out fine.
  Here's the panel pretty much done. I'll swap out the clock and I need to add some placards like the passenger warning and the N-number. At least all the avionics came back up after this exercise.
  And another view of the panel which is two pics stitched together.
4/29/07 I did get most of the placards mounted this weekend. For the most part, the switch nuts hold them in place. For a couple I used some double-sided tape.
   
  This is the current status at the end of the weekend. I managed to get the switch placards on and have started mounting the instruments, but I'm stuck waiting a hardware order from Aircraft Spruce. There's always something that's missing when you really need it. The good thing is that stuff is powering up again. I'm also on my third Falcon digital timer and it's just cr@#! This is the third unit that won't power up when applying power, after ground and voltage to the unit have been checked. This one is going back to Van's and I'm swapping for another timer.
4/28/07 Next on the agenda was to straighten out all the wires for the switches since this needs to be done prior to the radio stack going back in. Here's the before picture....
  And here's the after picture. Looks a lot better!
4/21/07 Starting to get the panel final installed. I installed a couple nut-plates for the GRT displays and bolted in the sub-panel for the engine controls. It's nice to see this finally starting to go together for good!
  While dealiing with the panel, the left panel rib was riveted in and the re-einforcement for the radio stack was also installed. The down side was that I ran out of #8 screws. Time for an AS&S order.
4/13/07 I picked up the panel from the powder coater and it turned out well. I think this is going to work. Also received placards from Front Panel Express and for the most part they look good. I sent them a couple of bad files so I need to re-do a couple, but otherwise, I think these are going to work.
3/29/07 I took an hour to disassemble the panel, what a bummer. Took months to get this together and an hour to tear it apart! The good part is that the panel is now destined for the powder coater.
  I shopped around for the best way to do placards. Dave Parsons when through and extended headache with his method and there's a couple vendors out there that do good work, but price to value ratio is out of limits. So....I went with Front Panel Express (http://frontpanelexpress.com) in Seattle. They use some German design shareware (you get some funky German error messages from time to time) that you download and use to create your placards. It's fairly basic but if you want to use your own CAD tool, they have a converter you can buy for a couple hundred $$$. I'll stick with the shareware. After doing some initial design, I needed to validate they were correct. Print the placards, ensure that they are accurate, then I overlaid them on the panel with backlighting.
  Here's what it looks like with the backlight. It took a couple iterations to get this right, but overall, I think this is going to work. From Russ Erb's feedback on his experience, use the DIN17, 1-Stroke font, and make sure the engraving tool has the .2mm selection. A .4mm tool doesn't turn out as nice. I should get these submitted in a day or so via their on-line order and have them back in a week.
  Placard placement on the panel. Randy Pflanzer had used Front Panel for his Rocket so I'm hoping mine turn out as well.
3/3/07 GRT doesn't supply the manifold pressure sensor with the stock EIS, so you need to order one. From some of the earlier posts from others on this, the early units didn't come with a mounting point. It looks like they use the same case as the magnatometer so it's easy to mount. I drilled a couple holes, installed a couple nut plates, then wired it up. Next step was to look at it and think, this is going to be a real pain to one, rivet around this when the skin goes on, and two, how the heck am I going to secure the DB-9 connector when the skin in on. Soooo, it's going to come off and I'm going to reposition this vertically to give myself some room . Also, the pressure fitting barb is extremely fragile and I ended up breaking the barb off the unit. Need to figure out the fix.
2/24/07 Well this was a long day with what looks like, little accomplish. I had pretty grandiose plans to get a lot done. It all started well with the wiring of the TT autopilot controller. Wires were already run so all I needed to do was strip and attach wires to the D-sub connector. I was pretty much done, when I realized, I had just connected the 480 ARINC429 A/B and RS232 lines. Not a problem except I had already wired 429A/B and 232 to the Source select switches. Hummm. This isn't good. I have an extra set of signal sources. So....I spend the next couple hours running down wiring and re-pinning the correct wires to the DB-25 connector.

That done, I wanted to get the clock wired in. The wires were run and I soldered the connector. Everything looks good. Apply power, no display. Bummer. I confirmed that it's getting about 11V, and the internal battery is showing 3V. GND connection also checks good so I sent a note to the supplier. I suspect I have a bum unit.

Finally, I did get the TT T&B wired up. There's not much to see once it has power but I can detect a small hum from the box. It also tilts when I pick up the side of the fuselage. For the most part, I think I'm almost there. I need to drill some holes for the throttle/ mixture/ prop controls, as well as the alt air inlet. Otherwise, I hope to take everything apart in the next couple weeks and send the panel off to the powder coaters.

For this week, I'm still trying to figure out the configuration setting for the GRT -> 480 -> 327. At this time, I really don't think that the fuel/air data is making it to the 480, although I do get GPS data from the 480 OK. Once I confirm that good fuel/air data is getting to the 480, I'll work the 480/327 configuration.
2/14/07 It's been a while since I did an update. Network Solutions decided that they'd pull the site for the domain registration. Not normally a big deal, but they had my really old contact info so they couldn't authenticate. Normally, they use the last-4, but in their wisdom, they had previously encryped users SSN numbers, and they had some issues with the encryption. Needless to say, I've been going around with them on proving who I said I was.

I spent some time getting all the ARINC429 and RS232 wires connected between the GRT, GPS, and SL-30 units. There's a number of wires that need to be connected, and once that's done, there're some config settings that need to be set in both the GNS-480 and the GRT DUs. The biggest issue was teh GPS data over the 232. Once I figured out the right format, everything seemed to work.

I have my GPS antenna pointing out the window and I get a valid signal about 25% of the time, but when I do, everything looks good. Overall, to get this far, integration has been relatively pain-free. It took one call to Stark and one to GRT and that was it. I'd say that my upgrade to Vista on the work computer was a bigger challenge!

I'm still getting air/data, and transponder errors when the 480 boots up so I need to run that one down. I suspect it's a port setting for the 480.
  You can see two of the map pages in this view. Using the top screen, you can select a given airport and.....
  Select the details. The really cool part is highlighting a frequency, selecting the COM or NAV update buttons and having the frequencies load to the SL-30 standby positions. Very cool stuff.
  Probably a common configuration, Flight Display on top, and map below. EIS will warn of any out-of-limits conditions so displaying engine data all the time isn't necessary. RPM, MAP and other measurands can be displayed on the flight display.
  Another picture with airport details on DU#2
  And finally the current configuration of my EIS on DU2. This needs some setting work and is going to take a little time.
2/13/07 Here's the pictures from the 12th. Once the magnatometer was hooked up, everything seemed to communicate just fine.
  AHRS and magnatometer both have power and are now talking to both EFIS DUs. EIS is also talking to both units. There's a bunch of set-up I need to do with the EIS but the physical box connections are good.
  2/12/07 Pictures to follow...
Got the AHRS and Magnatometer to talk to the DUs which was really cool. Everything seems to be getting power so the next step is to connect the ARINC429 and the remaining 232 inputs. I only connected the EIS to DU1 so I need to split this signal off to DU2. I also needed to validate the analog inputs for the RAC servo green leads to the DUs. The light at the end of the wiring tunnel seems to be getting stronger.
2/07/07 The easiest way to get rid of some of this mess was to run the wires aft to the magnatometer from the AHRS. Power and ground is handled through the AHRS so I just need to run the five wires. The trick was figuring out where to run them and you can see from the "arrowed" bundle, it kind of goes all over. It's away from everything else so this ought to work well.

I also took some time and connected the EIS 4.8V regulated feed to the trim and tested the roll servo by jumpering the Green and Orange roll signals to ground. Both work!

Dave Parsons and a couple guys from the company were over at lunch to take a look at the status. Z is starting a -7 and Scott has a -6 he's starting a panel upgrade on so it was good time to get a way and talk RV's. While Dave was here, we pulled out the Icom, then tested transmit and receive from across the yard. Both 480 and SL-30 seem to work well with no noise. That's a big relief!
2/06/07 Next step was to pull apart the harness as supplied by GRT for the DUs. Man, what a mess. The 25 pin connectors had way too much wire length between the two DUs and the AHRS so I had to figure out how to extract pins, then insert the correct length. Once I got the hang of this it wasn't too bad. It's now one wire at a time.
2/04/07 The good thing was looking at the manual and seeing that one of the DB-25 connectors was only for the EGT/CHT sensors. That's a relief. Now to start taking the other one wire at a time. The power and ground wires are pretty simple but there's a violet wire for a warning light that I'm not sure of, but I did run it though the warning lamp. Once that was done, it came right on as advertised when powered up.
  Next up with the EIS. I figured I just start here and leave the Horizon DUs for last. Pulling out the wiring for the EIS was a little intimidating. There are a ton of wires here.
2/03/07 Still making progress on the panel a little at a time, or a wire at a time. Plugged in the transponder and it fired right up. All components on the radio rack seem to be powered and working so far. This is a good sign!
  1/30/2007 Well something that Stark forgot to mention when I ordered all the avionics was the additional sensors from GRT that I needed. Dummy me for not looking deep enough, but I did have to order the fuel flow sensor kit, fuel pressure, two hall effect sensors, OAT, oil pressure, and manifold pressure sensors. That adds up to some change!

Also got some clarification on the RAC servo inputs to the GRT using the green leads. I was going to pull the power off the trim buss but found that I needed the 4.8 regulated voltage from the EIS pin 25.  Minor change but I need to run another wire through the spar.
1/21/2007 This is the current status as of this evening and I'm pretty happy so far. I did have the SL-30 installed and powered up but removed that for now. The cool thing was getting the CNX-480 powered up. I verified the comm side of the 480 works, but once I received a couple TNC connectors for the GPS antenna, I connected the GPS and tried to acquire. Due to a fairly narrow sky visibility from the shop window, satellite acquisition is hit and miss, but it did capture the enough to update position and draw the map. I'm really going to have to figure out how to run this unit, but so far, it's very cool. I'm starting to look forward to getting the GRT units wired in.
  1/16/2007 Spent some time and made a backing plate for the right Com antenna, which I installed for now. I made up a coax for Com 1 (GNS-480) and did the connections. The interesting thing is that the female BNC connectors for both the SL-30 and 480 com leads were both loose. I re-crimped these and they seem to be firm now. Anyway, after seating the unit and installing the three 5A fuses, I found the guts to flip the switch. No smoke and the unit seemed to power up OK. No GPS or NAV yet, but the Com seems to function through the audio panel. Very cool. Now I need a user manual.
  1/15/2007 Again, no new pics, but I managed to get the SL-30 powered up and checked the reception. Seems to work OK but I need to do further tests with the antenna mounted in the correct place. I drilled the right antenna mount holes and also ordered the second Comant antenna.
1/13/2007 A truely cruddy picture, but it gets the point across. I ordered some EI lighting from Jab-Tech, which sells funky computer assessories like case lighting. The EI  ordered is here: http://www.jab-tech.com/5ft-EL-tape-Green-pr-2118.html. For about $9 per strip, I couldn't pass up trying this. It's a strip 5' x 1/2" and seems to work OK. I bought three strips in case I needed the extra lighting. Each strip comes with an inverter which was really easy to wire up and works well with the LC-40 dimmer. I may use a second strip (inverter will handle two strips) but it looks good,especially for the $.
  Here's my testing partner Alex. We had to try out the intecom with the spare headset.