The last few days has once again been ones of digging into my various engine, engine components and engine sensor manuals both for research and education on the operating limits of each item that will be tracked by the GRT EIS4000 Engine Information System.
As many of you are probably aware, GRT’s EIS Engine Information System was the first product produced by GRT back in 1991 as a result of GRT founder Greg Toman’s search for an automated engine management system for a 2-stroke ultralight engine. Since he couldn’t find one, he simply built one! How’s that for the spirit of homebuilt aircraft?
Barring some sideline and unexpected maintenance issues on my truck, today I was able to get both the initial and secondary (more refined) engine sensor upper and lower limits configured into the EIS unit.
Additionally, Nick Ugolini was kind enough to share his EIS4000 wiring configuration diagram with me as well, which served as an excellent qualitative crosscheck on my configuration. Moreover, my decision to mount the EIS4000 control head in the GIB headrest (i.e. “D-Deck” or “Turtleneck”) was based on Nick’s configuration that he shared on his blog (admittedly, in my ignorance at the time I didn’t think it was best to mount the unit so far aft… but it didn’t take long to realize that it was a great idea).
You might be asking how exactly this EIS control unit mounted in the GIB headrest displays engine data on the panel EFISs. It’s actually very simple in that it relies on one 22AWG wire RS232 serial connection between the EIS4000 and the panel mounted HXr and Mini-X EFISs.
Besides just getting the unit powered up, as you can see in the pics I was able to get some “stick time” on navigating through the EIS4000’s menu pages and getting the initial settings configured. Also, by assessing the configurations on my AUX ports I was able to play the shell game on paper and reassign 3 of the engine sensor connections with newly associated AUX ports which allowed me to avoid major re-configurations of EIS menu items.
Tomorrow I have some more digging around in the manuals for some “final” verifications on some of my upper and lower limits, such as the ECi IOX-340S’s EGT and CHT numbers. I’ll also continue prepping for the engine build and knocking out panel wiring tasks.