Ed_Wischmeyer
Well Known Member
After you’ve flown your plane a while, you always find that there are things that you wish you had. Since the plane was going to the avionics shop anyway to get the 406 MHz ELT hooked up, I addressed some of those things…
If you’ve ever shot video, you’ve undoubtedly wanted to hook into the plane’s intercom. The standard way is with a Y cable between the headset and the panel, the extra connector being a 3.5 mm plug. Those cables are long – often usefully long – but sometimes way too long. So why not install a 3.5 mm jack in the panel and hard wire it in parallel to the copilot headset jack? It’s easy to find short stereo cables of the appropriate length. So I bought jacks on the web, the smallest package containing ten, and drilled the panel. Then I found out that the threaded portion of the jack was too short to reach through the panel. Not sure what Plan B is, but the avionics shop says they have the equivalent of a Forstner bit that can thin the panel from the back. Or if anybody has a lead on a better part, or has a better idea… I’m not keen on making a shorter Y cable, although I have thought of it. Besides, the hole is already drilled.
And if you’ve shot a video and want to correlate the video with the digital flight data, it can be a pain to find the start of the maneuver in the digital data. What’s needed is an Event Marker like the big jets have. That’s just a fancy name for a push button whose actuation is recorded in the digital data. Push the event marker, fly the exercise and it’s simple to find the start of the corresponding digital data when you get home. I used one of the available discretes on the engine interface for the event marker.
In my loss of control research flying, I often take videos of the right side display screen. (It would be nice if there was a video output on the Garmin G3X, or if it could record video, not just screenshots, to the SD card – maybe in the next hardware version.) With a recent system software mod, you can now have two PFDs instead of just a PFD and an MFD. Perhaps the Scrappy bush plane had something to do with this, as the system software will now support three PFDs and three MFDs. In my application, the real difference between PFD and MFD is what is shown in full screen mode – the flight instruments or an MFD screen. Full screen flight instruments are easier to read for pilots unfamiliar with the avionics who are flying with me. When operating as an MFD, the screen can display video input, and it makes a great monitor of the video being shot. My solution to PFD/MFD was a toggle switch so that the right side screen can be either MFD1 or PFD2. The pleasant surprise was that the change is instantaneous and you don’t have to reboot the screen. The two screens have some independence, like, you can bring up the G meter on just one screen, but I’d like more independence. For example, I’d like to demonstrate in flight simultaneously the difference between single and two cue flight directors, and also between round dials like God intended and vertical tapes. After all, some of my friends are tapeworms and some are more well rounded…
Lastly, some of the database uploads take a while. In my system, only the two display screens get the huge, time and battery consuming uploads, and I want to power them up without powering up the rest of the airplane, especially when the battery is weak and coming to the end of its life. My current (sorry) solution is to pull all of the other circuit breakers to reduce battery drain. Since the display screens have each have two separate, diode-protected inputs, I will now use the second power input for database uploads, drawing power directly from the battery through a circuit breaker switch and bypassing the normal master switch. My guess is that the two inputs were designed for main and emergency bus, but why not have three power inputs?
If you’ve ever shot video, you’ve undoubtedly wanted to hook into the plane’s intercom. The standard way is with a Y cable between the headset and the panel, the extra connector being a 3.5 mm plug. Those cables are long – often usefully long – but sometimes way too long. So why not install a 3.5 mm jack in the panel and hard wire it in parallel to the copilot headset jack? It’s easy to find short stereo cables of the appropriate length. So I bought jacks on the web, the smallest package containing ten, and drilled the panel. Then I found out that the threaded portion of the jack was too short to reach through the panel. Not sure what Plan B is, but the avionics shop says they have the equivalent of a Forstner bit that can thin the panel from the back. Or if anybody has a lead on a better part, or has a better idea… I’m not keen on making a shorter Y cable, although I have thought of it. Besides, the hole is already drilled.
And if you’ve shot a video and want to correlate the video with the digital flight data, it can be a pain to find the start of the maneuver in the digital data. What’s needed is an Event Marker like the big jets have. That’s just a fancy name for a push button whose actuation is recorded in the digital data. Push the event marker, fly the exercise and it’s simple to find the start of the corresponding digital data when you get home. I used one of the available discretes on the engine interface for the event marker.
In my loss of control research flying, I often take videos of the right side display screen. (It would be nice if there was a video output on the Garmin G3X, or if it could record video, not just screenshots, to the SD card – maybe in the next hardware version.) With a recent system software mod, you can now have two PFDs instead of just a PFD and an MFD. Perhaps the Scrappy bush plane had something to do with this, as the system software will now support three PFDs and three MFDs. In my application, the real difference between PFD and MFD is what is shown in full screen mode – the flight instruments or an MFD screen. Full screen flight instruments are easier to read for pilots unfamiliar with the avionics who are flying with me. When operating as an MFD, the screen can display video input, and it makes a great monitor of the video being shot. My solution to PFD/MFD was a toggle switch so that the right side screen can be either MFD1 or PFD2. The pleasant surprise was that the change is instantaneous and you don’t have to reboot the screen. The two screens have some independence, like, you can bring up the G meter on just one screen, but I’d like more independence. For example, I’d like to demonstrate in flight simultaneously the difference between single and two cue flight directors, and also between round dials like God intended and vertical tapes. After all, some of my friends are tapeworms and some are more well rounded…
Lastly, some of the database uploads take a while. In my system, only the two display screens get the huge, time and battery consuming uploads, and I want to power them up without powering up the rest of the airplane, especially when the battery is weak and coming to the end of its life. My current (sorry) solution is to pull all of the other circuit breakers to reduce battery drain. Since the display screens have each have two separate, diode-protected inputs, I will now use the second power input for database uploads, drawing power directly from the battery through a circuit breaker switch and bypassing the normal master switch. My guess is that the two inputs were designed for main and emergency bus, but why not have three power inputs?
