A Broken Servo

It was indeed a broken servo that caused all those problems I had encountered before when first testing my avionics. The new one arrived today. The left one is the "new" one - remanufactured that is. That's why it has a serial number lower than the one I had bought from Van's. The left one in the picture is the replacement unit, the right one is the broken one.

I crimped the connectors on and hooked it up to the bus, without installing it yet.

I first booted the avionics without external power, just using the battery. Everything worked fine (remember, before the swap, the fact that the servo was attached to the bus made the EMS and ADAHRS disappear) and I powered the system up with the external power supply. Switching the AP on, didn't cause any problems. Hardware detection showed an additional servo that needed a firmware upgrade. So I did that and then the system showed all 5 devices as operational.

Great! I faked some servo calibrations and confirmed the new unit was working correctly before installing it back in place.

Excellent! Everything is now working as it should have about 25 work hours ago. At least the problem is fixed. All that was left to do was to clean up the wiring, put the backshells back on and hook everything up to the Control Module again.

Then I attached the rudder cables temporarily to the rudder pedals as part of section 32. This is the last thing to do before I wanted to turn the fuselage back on its belly to attach the gear legs.
That means that tomorrow I will clear the carport and move the fuselage out of the backyard.

By the way, I am very amazed that the SkyView system, running two separate network buses, can be so easily confused by an erroneously acting servo. And get so badly confused that it would have been of no help in providing the pilot with essential data to fly the plane. This experience just confirmed that it was a very good decision to plan for analog ASI and ALT devices.