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Thinking about installing Flyleds

cwilkins

Active Member
I?ve been having issues with my Whelen strobes, and was thinking about upgrading to Flyleds on my RV-8. I?m not worried about building the boards or connectors, but I am concerned about routing the wiring. I recently installed a G5 as a backup, and routing the wires to the GMU11 (located in the empennage) was a nightmare. Thankfully I have a tiny 11yo daughter who was able to help me run the wires through the fuselage.

For those of you who have upgraded your lights, how bad was routing and properly securing the wiring in the wings?
 
While I haven't done a retrofit, I have assembled and installed "the works" on a bat-wing RV wing tip like the early 8's and 7's had. There's even more room in the newer tips. Anyways, the power requirements are low and the general AWG size is small (18 AWG or less). So my guess is that your existing strobe / Nav wire would work....and your existing strobe wire should already be shielded. Maybe I'm missing something.....

Ellis
 
dont think, DO!


they are fantastic.

i used the wiring that was already in the wing for the whelans that came out. use the red for nav power, white for strobe power, and black for ground.

bob burns
RV-4 N82RB
 
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Hi Craig

You can easily reuse your existing strobe wiring. The Flyleds kit has a central controller board to drive the strobes which you can mount in the same spot as your existing strobe power supply.
There is a wiring diagram on the last page of the System Wiring Guides that covers this, as found on the Information page of the website.
The strobe wires will need to be re-terminated to suit the Flyleds controller board so I would recommend you order a crimp pin connector as well (assuming you choose to buy a kit!), as they are easier to work with in the confines of the cockpit.

 
Highly recommend the FLYLEDS kit. I installed in on my -10 and couldn?t be happier with the ease of install, Paul?s great support and their performance.
 
reuse existing wiring

You can easily reuse your existing strobe wiring.
This is what I did and it worked perfectly, both for tips and tail.

If for some reason you still need to run new wires, use your existing wires to pull new wires. Also, with the tips off, the wing inspection panels off, wing root fairings off, and the floors removed, you can run wires without too much trouble.
 
I retrofitted a set of the ?Works? lights in my Rocket. The kit was a fun build and the install went very smooth.
 
Fly leds

I replaced my whelens/vans landing lights with the fly leds. It was a fun project, much brighter landing lights. With the strobes on steady mode the area just ahead if the wing is lit up, making night landing in tail dragger easier. Also, you drop a little weight by removing the whelen strobe power pack. Go for it!
 
If you have basic soldering skills you can build the board. It was a lot of fun and Paul was great with customer service and answering my questions!

I can't wait to have my aircraft flying so they actually get used, right now they are done as I work on the fuselage on my RV-7
 
Get the Whelen connectors on eBay.

cwilkins,

Go to eBay, and type in 10x 3 A441 and 10x 3 A442. These are the Whelen male and female connectors. $4.00 plus shipping from China for 10 of each type. ACS wants $17 for just one connector. I used 4 of one and 3 of another, so I have spares. I received the connectors in just over a week.

I put them on each light assembly and the connector coming from the controller board, so it is becoming a true plug and play with my installed Whelen harness when I actually install within the next few weeks. I did a little modification from Paul’s direction, so I just have to add two power wires from the panel to the controller board. One for the landing light control and one for the wigwag control. All the rest are the existing wires.

Tested it all out on the bench, and these things are “BRIGHT”.

When I change it out, does anyone want a Whelen Strobe light system? Power supply, right and left and tail strobe with position, and brand new connectors with pins. You will just need to get new strobe wire to run from the power supply to the strobe lights.

Brian
 
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Blake (my son :D ) hooked me up with a full set of FlyLEDs for my 1994 RV-4. The installation went smoothly and I am very happy with them. The first flight was in the late afternoon and the ground observers confirmed that they are BRIGHT.

I installed a double spot landing light, and that also is... BRIGHT. FlyLEDS even makes a 7-star landing light for incinerating nearby birds, etc.

For anyone unfamiliar, Blake at www.flyboyaccessories.com carries the complete line of FlyLEDs. So, if you're in the U.S., we can typically ship PDQ, and we can answer your questions, offer soldering services, or parts, if needed.

Normally, Paul McVitty would be camping with us at Oshkosh. Great sadness this year though.... stupid virus. :mad: Oh well, we'll be there next year.... with even more cool stuff to show off!
 
About to pull the trigger

I?m sitting here getting ready to order ?The Works? kit. My -8 has a separate switch for NAV, Taxi, Landing, and Wig Wag. Do I need to order the landing light/wig-wag switch or can I just use my existing switches?
 
existing switches should be OK

The existing switches you have should be OK. Just double check your current wiring to see it will match with the controller board inputs.
 
I?m sitting here getting ready to order ?The Works? kit. My -8 has a separate switch for NAV, Taxi, Landing, and Wig Wag. Do I need to order the landing light/wig-wag switch or can I just use my existing switches?
Geoff beat me to it. You can use your existing switches (and wiring), and the Works controller board will take care of wigwagging the landing lights for you.

I assume you have another switch for strobes as well?
A progressive switch could be used to combine some functions together like Nav and Strobe, or Landing and Wigwag, but if you already have the holes drilled and the panel labelled then no need to change.

The only issue for a retrofit might be that if you mount the controller board behind the bulkhead for example where the old strobe power supply was, you would need to divert the landing light wires here as well to take advantage of the wigwag function on the board. If that sounds like a pain to do then our wigwag module or switch mounted on the panel will be much easier to fit.

 
I also enjoyed building the kits and installing in my -7 Bat Wing wingtips. I cleaned up the boards and painted them the same color as the wing skins. Looks real good, I think. Make sure you follow the directions carefully.
I used the Wig Wag module so I didn't have to re-do the landing light switch & circuit. That was a big deal for me. I also used the existing wiring from the old Whelan strobes.
Folks are amazed at visibility from ahead. On a recent x cross country flight, ATC called out traffic at about 10 miles. They saw me at about 6 miles and I didn't see them until they were passing underneath me. Perhaps my aging eyeballs, but I do think the strobes and wigwag LEDs work well for our airplane.
 
Landing Light Wires

Paul, when you say, “divert the landing light wires” do you mean I’d need to cut the landing light wire coming from the switch, run it to the control board, and then run a wire from the control board to the landing light?

Oh, and too late to add a wigwag module as I already placed the order.

Also, I do have a strobe switch, just forgot to list it in my earlier post.
 
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Yes, I think we're on the same page.
Where the landing light wire takes a turn at the wing root from the panel out to the wing you could intercept those wires to run to and from the Flyleds controller board, again assuming you're mounting it down the back somewhere.
If your wires are running down each side of the plane you'd then also need to run a connection across to pick up the landing light wire out to the other wing. If they are all run down the centre then life is easier.

If I had the opportunity (ie still building or had the interior panels already removed) I'd pull the left and right light wires back from the panel ("divert") and run fresh wires up to the panel switches to avoid having splices/colour changes/future confusion/maintenance points in wire runs. Personal preference only, and I'm guessing that the difficulty factor is much higher in an RV-8.

Or, go with a wigwag module placed up front for about 20 minutes installation time...

Lots of options to cater for the fact that there are no "standard" wiring installations, and/or I might be way overthinking this beyond my experience wiring the -10!

 
I recently retrofitted some FlyLED's to Josh's RV-9A.
It was a bit of work, since we had to also replace the plexiglass wing tip covers. The existing covers had been modified for the Uavionix blade antennas to poke through.

The directions were good. We used the existing wires, but had to rework the connections.

Here's some feedback:

The wiring diagram colors were interesting. The tail light has blue going to the white wire on the tail light, and white going to the black wire on the tail light the black wire just goes to the shield.

The instructions do say to be careful where you drill for mounting, since there are trace layers on the PC boards. I managed to hit a trace drilling from the top. It would be nice if there were more clearly defined "safe" locations for drilling. Even moving the hole out a 1/8" would have been tight for mounting on the wing tip recess. You can see that there just isn't much room for installing nutplates on the wing tip recess. The boards get trimmed to fit, but you can see how close the LED's are to the edge after trimming the edges of the PC board.

IMG_8511_heic-M.jpg


The big resistors on the back of the boards could also be moved inward a bit to make the trimming of the wing tip recess holes easier. You can see where the bottom edge has to be trimmed way down at the vertex. I tried to leave 3/4" of edge to the new cutout.

IMG_8506_heic-M.jpg


The ribbon connector between the boards is difficult to trim to expose the wires. The instructions do mention that you can simply use any type of wire here. None of my wire stripper tools could handle this type of ribbon cable.

IMG_8509_heic-M.jpg


Lastly, the DB-15 male connector supplied for the control board is a solder type. In this retrofit, the existing wires all came to a spot under the baggage floor where a strobe unit used to be. There was just no way to get down in there with a solder gun. I ended up having to go and get an insertion type DB-15 connector so that I could just crimp pins on the wires. I had to supply the housing/shell for the connector also.

The new nav/strobe lights are plenty bright. The rear strobe isn't as strong as the side strobe lights.
 
Lastly, the DB-15 male connector supplied for the control board is a solder type. In this retrofit, the existing wires all came to a spot under the baggage floor where a strobe unit used to be. There was just no way to get down in there with a solder gun. I ended up having to go and get an insertion type DB-15 connector so that I could just crimp pins on the wires. I had to supply the housing/shell for the connector also.

I used a DB-15 breakout connector as I'm not good at laying on my back and soldering :)
 
I just got done installing "The Works" kit and am very pleased with them.

Paul and FlyLED's represents everything that's great about experimental aviation. It's a superior product (lighter, less current draw, brighter) and a fraction of the price of the certified stuff. Two big thumbs up from me.

If I were doing it again, I'd have him do the soldering, though. Took me a while and a few of the solders don't look all that professional. Although, I did enjoy learning a new skill.

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