I ran the wires to the flap motor tonight.  I put a two position molex connector on the wires so that the motor can be easily disconnected if it needs to come out.  There will also be a second connector here for the three pins from the flap position sensor.

I cut away a chunk of the forward end of the aft tunnel cover (basically the part that will be inside the flap motor housing.

This lets the wire that runs down the flap tunnel pass through the rear spar before coming up behind the flap weldment.  All of this will be secured by some wire tie mounts to keep it from coming in contact with the weldment.

I’m working quite a lot of hours at work now, so I’m not getting much time on the plane, but I want to make some progress on the plane every day that I can.  Since I got the flaps wired up last night, I decided to wire up the flap position sensor tonight.  These will be the last wires that need to run down the center tunnel.  I installed a three position molex connector for the position sensor.  I’m still not sure how I’m going to anchor these to the rear cover.

I didn’t want the wires from the position sensor to rub the screws that attach the side covers to the flap housing, so I used a small drop of E6000 to secure the wires to the side of the position sensor.

I also swapped out the four position molex connectors on the fuel senders for three position connectors.

I attached the two flap wires to J12, pins 5 and 6 (the lower left red and black wires).

And the three flap position sensor wires to J1, pins 17, 18, and 19.

I received some interior lights from pilotlights.net.  They were great to work with and even through in a couple of small bonus products with my order.  I’m trying to use all dual color (white/green) interior lights.  From the research I’ve done, everyone is moving away from the old standard of red for cockpit lighting at night.  Although it did fine at preserving your night vision, it makes reading maps really hard.  The military has moved to green, but research has shown that a really dim white light is actually best for preserving night vision while still giving you the best visual clarity.

Here’s the LED light strip I’m going to use under the glareshield (this is the 12V, high-power, dual-color white/green strip).  This is with just the white LEDs illuminated at full power.  It’s hard to capture with a camera, but this is definitely more light than you’d need in a cockpit.

Here it is with just the green LEDs illuminated.

And here it is with both (although I’m not going to wire it in the plane with the ability to light both colors at the same time).

Using one of the PWM dimmers (also from pilotlights.net), you can dim the light down pretty far, but not quite far enough.  A dropping resistor of 150? or so makes the range just about perfect.  You can dim almost down to off and the brightest setting is still plenty bright.

Here’s the PWM dimmer I’m using.  I bought three of these to replace the ones I purchased from periheliondesign.com.  The more I played with those, the less I liked them.  The lights flickered as you ramped up and down through the brightness range and putting the resistors to cap the low and high voltages wouldn’t expand the range of the dimming knob which means you would have to turn the knob a bit before it would come off the low dim setting and you’d hit the bright setting long before hitting the upper end of the knob’s range.  These PWM dimmers ramp smoothly across the whole range of the knob.  They also come with a much nicer machined aluminum knob instead of the plastic one on the dimmer from periheliondesign.com.

I also picked up this little four LED white light.  I’m going to put a dropping resistor on this and use it to cast a very dim light in the footwell.

I also went ahead and hooked up the four SkyView power wires to various pins on J10 and J12.  Each SkyView has one power wire going to bank A and one going to bank B for redundancy.

I finished up the fuel sender wiring by running some wires from the other side of the molex connector.  The red and black wires go to power (VP-X) and ground respectively.  The striped wire is the included wire from the EMS running directly from the necessary pin.

I’m using a single pin on the VP-X (J8 connector) to power both senders.  The wire comes out of the connector and through the adel clamp on the right.  I then used a solder sleeve to split this wire into two: one that runs directly forward to the left fuel sender and one that goes through the left adel clamp and across the plane to the right fuel sender.

I grounded the two fuel senders as well as both SkyView screens (the two twisted pairs of the wires).  I’m down to 11 available spots on my grounding block which seems pretty tight.

I was down to just a handful of unconnected wires on the EMS, so I decided to finish that off tonight.  Two of the wires ran to the fuel senders.  One more ran over to the annunciator control circuit (not connected yet).  Another ran forward and will connect to the left ignition switch to get an RPM reading from the magneto.  Finally, I hooked up the low voltage RPM pins to the Lightspeed Ignition to get a second RPM source.

Here’s a closeup of the Lightspeed Tach line coming into the DB-37 connector.  It’s a shielded 22AWG wire.  I split the shielding out and put heat shrink over it and the split point and wired the center conductor to pin 35 and the shield to pin 16.

I received my capacitive fuel senders from Princeton Electronics.  They don’t have a website, but you can reach them at (616) 243-8800.  They have both 2 level and 5 level senders.  Both convert the capacitance range from 0-5 volts, but the 2S model only has calibration points for empty and full.  The 5S model has three intermediate points which is important if you want a linear movement on an analog gauge.  Since I’m using the SkyView which has numerous intermediate calibration points, it doesn’t matter if the sender is linear or not, so I’m just using the 2S sender.  I cut most of the wires off and installed some four position molex connectors on each sender so that they can be easily removed if necessary (well, except for the cable with the BNC connector).

I installed the senders on the aft side of the subpanel since they need to be accessed during calibration.  This is the left sender.

The right one is in the same relative position.

The cable to the fuel tank will get routed down the vent line, but I’m leaving it loose for now until I nail down the overall routing.

I drilled 1/4″ holes just above the vent bulkhead fitting and ran the cable with the BNC connector out through it.  This will get connected to the BNC fitting on the fuel tank which is wired up to the capacitive plates inside the tank.

I wired up the voltage regulator (except for the wire going to the annunciator control circuit for the low voltage light).

The two power lines (red) are connected to separate pins on the VP-X.  The larger (18AWG) wire on the top provides power for the alternator field.  The voltage regulator takes power from this wire and sends it out the white wire to regulate the alternator.

I installed the second SkyView battery on the right side in the same spot as the one on the left.

I also laid out when the radios will penetrate the subpanel, then installed the custom circuits on either side of that.  The IC-25 Bus is on the left and the AN-1 Annunciator Control circuit is on the right.

I fabricated 1/4″ aluminum spacers to keep the back of the circuits from contacting the subpanel.

I measured where the SkyView connectors will sit on the back of the panel and taped them in place so that I could start wiring them.

I separated out all of the wires and labeled them.

All of the wires from the right SkyView display that need to connect to the bus will reach across the panel.  They will need to be run across the top of the audio panel and through the two panel support ribs.  I can’t run any of these now since I don’t have the radio stack yet.

I got an order from Aircraft Spruce today with some 6AWG wire, so I fabricated the wire from the output side of the alternator current limiter to the Vertical Power VP-X.  Here’s the alternator current limiter end of the wire (protected by the boot).  All of this metal down here is hot when the master contactor is closed.  I need to research if it is necessary to shield all of this in case something were to inadvertently connect any of this to ground.

Here’s how the wire is routed up to the firewall pass-through.  You can see that the wire to the battery bus (the one that forms a U shape right in the center of the picture) also follows this wire up.  Behind the VP-X wire is also the alternator field wire.  I’ll be installing a few more adel clamps and some high-temp zip-ties (replacing the cheap zip-ties currently installed).

Here’s where the main VP-X wire comes through the firewall and drops down under the subpanel support rib through an additional adel clamp I installed just for that wire.  Being 6AWG, it’s fairly heavy (especially when pulling 6 Gs), so I want it well supported.  You can also see that I installed the main battery bus with some hardware that also showed up from ACS and connected the battery bus supply wire.  You can also see the alternator field wire (the small white wire in the upper right) has been cut and connected to the voltage regulator.  Finally, I connected the voltage regulator ground wire (the black wire in the upper right.  I could have taken a short-cut through the rib lightening hole and made the wire substantially shorter, but I’m trying to keep all the wire bundles neat and organized instead of running them haphazardly around the plane.

The VP-X supply wire has a short straight shot from the bottom of the subpanel support rib to the VP-X power post.  I installed a boot on this end of the wire as well.

I received an order from L-Com today with a bunch of additional connectors, shells, etc.  I installed the female DB-37 onto the annunciator control board.  After installing this, I hooked up a couple of annunciator lights and the dimmer and verified I could trigger the lights on both high and low signals as well as verified that accidentally grounding the high trigger or putting +12V on the low trigger had no effect.  Everything tested out perfectly.

I also installed some longer jack screws in the connector.

I soldered the other side of the jack screws to the circuit board to provide some additional support to the connector.  This thing is very strong now.

I also installed jack screws in the avionics interconnect circuit and soldered them to the board.  These circuits are ready to install.

I fabricated and installed the cable to the roll servo in the right wing and hooked it up under the pilot’s seat.

I ran the wire under the passenger seat and coiled the wire in the outboard bay.  I’ll drill the hole and then pull this out to the servo when the wings are attached permanently (or add a connector in the wing root; I haven’t decided).  I previously ran some servo wire in the wing that I bought from SteinAir, but I’m going to swap that out for the harness wire I purchased from Dynon.  I’d like to keep all network wires the same color throughout the aircraft so that it’s easier to maintain things down the road.

I prepped the wires for the transponder harness.  The white wire has a 1.2k? resistor inline.  The wires overlap the resistor on each side to support the resistor.  I added a layer of heat shrink over the resistor after I took this picture.

I added the wires to the transponder connector.  The red and black wires are power and ground respectively.  The green and yellow wires will connect to one of the SkyView serial ports.  The white wire (under the heat shrink) will connect to the serial TX line of the Garmin GTN-635 to provide location into to the transponder.

Here’s the connector attached to the transponder.  I’m generally avoiding using the thumb screws on DB connectors for weight reasons, but it would be pretty tricky to get a screwdriver on the lower screw, so I used them here.

I ended up deciding not to use the splitter I built yesterday since it ended up introducing extra connectors for no good reason.  I still ended up with 3 pair of DB-9 connectors since I split the servo power, ground, and Control Wheel Steering (CWS) line out into a separate connector.  I realized this was unnecessary, so I rewired this for the third time.

Now there are only two DB-9 connector pairs.  The SkyView network cable comes out of the conduit and into a female DB-9.  The male connector it attaches to splits out the two serial TX and RX lines into a second female DB-9 connector on the left.  The servo power, ground, and CWS lines come out of the conduit and also go into this connector.  Now there is only one male DB-9 for all of the servo attach wires.  The other wires coming out of the first male DB-9 connector (on the right) go up to the ADAHRS.

I added an adel clamp where the wires come out of the conduit to keep the wires from pulling on the conduit.

Here’s the next bay to the right (where the pilot’s stick goes.  There is a pair of DB-9 connectors here to provide another point for the network to split.  The red, black, and yellow wires are for the servo power, ground, and CWS wires.  The power and ground wires will connect here to another pair of wires that will run forward to the VP-X and ground block.  The yellow wires will connect together and go the CWS button on the pilot’s stick.

I also used the thumb screws here since it would be a pain to get a screwdriver on these screws.

The next bay to the right of that contains the two output connectors for the splitter in the previous bay.  I used one male and one female connector here since these aren’t electrically identical.  The male connector is a standard SkyView network connector and it is connected to a cable that runs up behind the instrument panel.  The other side of the splitter (the currently unconnected female DB-9 connector) only contains the two serial TX and RX lines as well as the servo power, ground, and CWS lines.  Another connector will attach here and go out to the right wing to hook up to the roll servo.

I also added another adel clamp to help stabilize the wires where they cross under the elevator push tube.

I hooked up the transponder power and ground wires.  You can also see the yellow, green, and white serial lines as well as the SkyView network cable routed through here.