Thursday, May 24, 2012

Waiting For a New Servo

I received the new Control Module from Van's yesterday thanks to $40 for overnight shipping. So I could verify this morning that it didn't change a thing. The problem was exactly the same as it was before. The CM was not the culprit. Sigh!
So back to measuring and trying to disconnect and swap wires. At a moment I thought I had it. I had disconnected the SV Net 2A/B pins from the Options plug as I had a hint from the electrical diagram that the pins might be swapped. At least that's according to the plan. We know by now that reality might be different. So I diconnected the pins to see if they maybe interfered with the bus operation. At first it looked like it.

All wired up and jumpering the bus to the AP 74 wires again. That resulted what looked like victory:

All 5 devices recognized and correctly behaving all at once. Toggling the AP switch, turned the servos and and off without affecting anything else. However, after a while I noticed that the EMS sporadically was shown as offline only to come back online a second later. That all happened without me doing anything but watching he screen.
After a while I turned the system off, let it rest a bit and turned it back on. On the second power cycle one servo stayed offline regardless of what I was doing. Everything else worked. I put all the pins back in their spots, removed the bus jumper wires and brought everything back to the state when I first tested the system. It all worked without any problem, only that one servo, the pitch servo, stayed dead.
I called the Dynon Tech Support and they told me to send the unit in after they sent me a replacement servo. I believe that this servo was faulty from the beginning, causing the problems I was seeing. That explains why the ADAHRS and the EMS were disabled as soon as this faulty servo came online or was just connected to the bus. Why the other servo did work I don't understand but we will soon see what happens when I attach the replacement servo.

I also verified that the wires were correctly hooked up. Well, sure they were. The servos did work after all and I ran a few calibration tests with the wiring.
After "solving" my Avionics problem I went back to other waiting tasks at hand. This was the map box. The yoke had arrived and I happily squeezed the last rivets.

This 4" yoke is quite massive and you can feel that it's getting springy at that length even with AD3 rivets. No way you could reliably squeeze AD4 rivets with that, I believe.

I installed the Camlock receptacle with another two AD3 rivets.

And then riveted on the door, pulling the rivets from the inside so you wouldn't see the ugly shop heads.

That finished the map box installation and covering the holes was finishing the assembly of the right panel.

All I had to do now was to install the panel in the cockpit which finished section 29A.

While I am waiting for the servo, I will probably work on trimming some fiberglass tips and also cut the rear bulkhead and the panel floor. I might even look into the gear leg installation or put up the temporary garage as my truck will get expelled from the carport for a while.

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