Well, I’m back from my nearly weeklong trip down to the North Carolina coast and Virginia Beach. This past Thursday Marco flew down to New Bern, NC and picked me up and flew me back to his EZ’s home base at Chesapeake. At 45 minutes airport to airport and averaging just over 6 gallons of fuel an hour, you can bet I’m motivated more than ever to finish my Long-EZ!
Spending a few days with Marco and Gina was great of course. Since Marco is actually interconnecting all his panel upgrade components (GRT EFISs, Garmin GNS480 GPS, etc), it gave me a lot more insight on the configuration settings required to get all these panel components to talk to each other.
With all this configuration settings stuff fresh in my mind, when I returned home on Saturday I spent about 3 hours digging into the manuals to facilitate adding port speeds, port labels and IDs to my wiring diagram interconnect wires for my PFD, MFD, GNS480, Trio AP, transponder, etc. With a deeper understanding of the ARINC connections, this process also allowed me to further find a couple of design configuration questions that I need to get some answers to. So I fired off an email to Chuck at Trio to get some of those answers.
I continued my digression (or distraction!?) yesterday as I got close to wrapping up my panel wiring diagram by ID’ing specific wiring types (twisted pair, shielded, standard) for each cross connect. I also created a spreadsheet that IDs all the major programming configs for my separate panel avionics/instruments. I’ve already configured the majority of settings –as far as I can currently– on both my Garmin GNS480 GPS receiver and my GRT Mini-X EFIS.
Tomorrow I’ll start off by rewickering my Panel Quick Disconnect (PQD) D-Sub pinouts to allow both GRT EFISs –PFD & MFD– to be quickly disconnected when I remove the panel. So, a minor rabbit hole, but I think it will be good to get the avionic/instrument components’ configurations tweaked while it’s all still clear in my mind. I’ll also continue my electronics quest by testing out my GIB lighting circuit and then try to get those into place inside the covers that get installed over the GIB thigh support sump low fuel sensors. Not only will that be another major GIB area install out of the way and confirm some proposed circuitry, but will be another electrical install task completed.