tailwheels

Unintended Adventures

Tag: Raspberry Pi

Plane Stuff

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On October 22, 2017

In S-20

It’s been almost 3 months since the last update. I’d like to say I’ve gotten a lot done, but it hasn’t turned out that way. Lots of school obligations that I didn’t entirely plan for manifested and here we are almost to November.

I have gone to work on the plane, but just nothing ground breaking to report. We did head out to the hangar yesterday though and got the horizontal stabilizers mounted and all of the tasks required to get to that point. It’s always fun to start something and be able to finish it in the same day. Getting the bolts to go through the stabilizer and fuselage bushings was an exciting activity, but just needed a loving tap from a small hammer to coerce the correct behavior. 🙂

I brought home some steel parts to get powder coated before I completely install the stabilizers since there are some tabs where the tail wheel spring mounts to. I’d like to get them to the powder coat place this week and have them ready to go for the next time I go down.

Since the last update we have also worked on the mounting brackets for both the flaps and ailerons and they are complete and ready to be installed.

We started to also fit the wingtips up and still have some work to do on that front.

The engine monitor has been neglected somewhat as well. In the beginning of the semester I acquired a few more components for it, but I need time to get some soldering done so I can start testing and integrating them. The new stuff will be a power supply/regulator so it can be hooked up to a 12V supply. In addition, there is a small battery that will provide power after the plane’s power is turned off so that the engine monitor can shutdown properly and avoid corrupting the file system.

(30 h)

Riveting

By

On October 13, 2016

In S-20

Little late, but wanted to get a short note written to just stay on top of the log.

Last weekend was devoted to getting the fabric on the right wing riveted down. I thought it would be fairly quick, but as usual it was not. Nothing hard for this part, but just a lot of repetition. The plastic strips all laid down nicely and seemed to go better than when I was using the strips on the horizontal stabilizer.

Maria helped out with the riveting and we got it done pretty quick. It was a quick work day, but now we’re all set to start adding exit rings, patches, and tapes.

On an aside, I have started on a side project to attempt some simple avionics. I really like the systems produced by Dynon and Garmin, but I’m haven’t been able to fully commit myself to one for this airplane. The information that I really am interested in is engine data and specifically temperatures. My idea is to use a popular micro controller (Arduino) to interface with the thermocouples and then display this data on a small screen. The end goal would be then to use the power of 3D printing to make a case for the system and be able to mount it in the panel.

I’ve looked into also using a small Linux computer (Raspberry Pi) in order to get access to nicer displays and graphics, but my lack of GUI programming has limited that area. I have a Raspberry Pi, so I may try to figure something out, but the Arduino is a relatively simple platform with a lot of community support for sensor applications.

If anyone reads this and has questions or has done this sort of thing shoot me an email. Should be a fun project and lower my desire for a full-blown glass cockpit. I’m going to add this stuff to the avionics page on the blog and try and track some progress there.

(5 h)

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