The Spring 2018 semester is almost ready to start. This weekend I will be wrapping up some painting for my rudder, doors, and a few fairings around the tail area.
Not much work was done over the Fall mainly because of me taking on quite a few projects at school. Sort of depressing, but projects are good and they provide me with things to talk about during interviews when I’m not talking about the RANS :-).
The big task going on since the last update is painting. Although it has only taken place over two weekends, that is the big project for the last 4 months. I finally painted the landing gear and as mentioned above will have completed the rudder and doors. The bigger task before that was completing the door trim. That was a fussy task, but as with all other things, it has passed. If you have questions or want some tips, get in touch with me. I would like to write a detailed process, but it was messy haha.
Other little things were getting the tail brace wires installed, some hardware installed on the ailerons, attaching some interior fabric, and starting to fit up the wing tips.
In other big kit news, I ordered the firewall forward kit back in mid-November. I’m hoping that will keep me busy for a while. I will be out of town for 3 months over the summer, so I won’t have any airplane work going on although I do plan on working with some of my electronic projects.
On the electronics side, the Engine Monitor software is pretty much where I’d like it. It is really ready for some higher level testing. I’m preparing for this by working on some circuits to help protect the electronics from voltage surges and other things.
For some new ideas, I am beginning to toy with some components that would provide a means for an electronic circuit breaker and provide current monitoring for individual loads. My idea is to somewhat emulate other commercial offerings that provide electronic circuit breakers. I’m going to go slow with this one and test as much as I can. Even if I do put it in the airplane, I am planning on some standard fail safe circuit protection devices.
Here is an example of the circuit that I am going to play around with for the circuit breaker. The green line in the graph shows a simulated current draw. The system senses a voltage drop across a resistor. By changing the value of that resistor, the device will trip at the specified current. This example is using a resistor that should trip at 2A. The simulation shows it being tripped at 1.8A, which is caused by an additional resistor on on of the sensing pins of the chip. I need to do some researching on why they have used a resistor in that location.
