Happy New Year!

Over the holidays I’ve been quietly working on the odd & end aspects of various areas of electrical stuff in my push to get as far as I can on finalizing the electrical system before moving on with the rest of the build.

Yesterday I finalized a 2-day process to figure out the wiring going out to the wing Nav, Strobe & Landing lights.  I had a quick but informative discussion with Dean from AeroLEDs and pulled the trigger on a couple different types of shielded 20 AWG electrical wire and some more connectors from Stein.  I also assessed & designed a reroute of my com radio antenna cables to get them away from the noisy wing tip light wire runs.

With final decisions made on the wing wiring, I finalized updating my wiring diagram for the Landing/Taxi/Nav/Strobe lights.  I also updated the wiring diagram for the AG6 warning annunciators, driven in part by my decision to only have actual warning annunciations communicated by the AG6 displays.  Thus, I decided to transfer the simple ON/OFF LED displays for those items that I merely want to know if they are in an on or off state (start armed, taxi light, pitot tube & fuel pump) off of the AG6s.  I ordered what look to be some high end LED annunciator buttons off of Ebay for these 4 ON/OFF indicators.  I’ll assess those when they arrive and move on from there.

I have one more item to report as for warning annunciators: as I was doing my research for what I should employ as simple device ON/OFF indicators, I ran across a post on the VAF forum from Paul Dye (Editor in Chief for KITPLANES magazine) arguing the merits for having a backup Oil Pressure warning indicator that was not integrated into the glass cockpit system… in other words, not reported by the EFIS or the Engine Management System.  I assessed this for a few days, and finally concluded that if I did have a catastrophic display outage and was looking at nothing but red “X”s on the EFIS displays that it would be nice to have ONE annunciator light to provide the overarching status of my engine health, and oil pressure is arguably (as Paul Dye so eloquently does) the biggest. For a weight penalty of 3 ounces, I decided I would incorporate this backup oil pressure status into my warning annunciation scheme.

Today I finally received my L12-S mini-actuator for driving the Taxi Light assembly deployment and retraction.  As you can see in the pic below I bought a number of ancillary parts that should facilitate the install.

Although I knew it when I ordered it, the tiny size of this actuator is really hard to believe until you actually hold it in your hand, which is exactly what I did!  Again, seeing this pic it’s not hard to believe that this thing only weighs 34 grams.

Here’s a shot of the Taxi Light swing down assembly parts that I picked up with the L12-S mini-actuator.

I also decided that I was long overdue in doing a thorough ops check of the Trutrak 3-1/8″ ADI that I picked up off of Ebay from an RV driver as an attitude reference backup to my glass panel.  I did a quick review of the instructions and fired it up.  Since I had the GPS puck plugged in I wasn’t quite sure why I wasn’t getting the GPS track info in the window where the 3 lighted dashes appear.  Well, I got back into the manual, did a quick online search and still couldn’t find an answer.  Hmmm, did I have a bad unit that needs repaired?

I couldn’t ponder on it long since I had to run out and help a friend move some furniture (the bane of being a pick-up truck owner!).  Well, I arrived at the location a bit earlier than they did, so I decided to call Trutrak and find out the story on the 3 dashes.  It turns out that the 3 dashes are normal & that no track info is displayed until the aircraft is in motion…. Ok, another good instrument ops check!

Tomorrow I’ll test out my taxi light actuator circuit design & operations by wiring it up to the DPDT relay I have on hand.