Sunday, June 29, 2014

The magic smoke...

When I was in nuclear power school many years ago they taught me of a concept called magic smoke.  The idea being that every piece of electronic gear is given a magic puff of smoke to make it work.  If you let the magic puff of smoke out the electronics will no longer work.   Well....I powered up my avionics today....wait for it....wait for it...NO MAGIC SMOKE!  Yessirree it all powered up correctly and the only issue I had was with my magnetometer.  Seems I swapped a pin when I rebuilt the cable run.  Fortunately it was a communication circuit that I swapped and not the power pins.  After a little head scratching trying to figure out how to get the G3X to recognize my VPX I can now say that everything I have hooked up seems to be working.  I didn't try to transmit or receive on the radio yet but I will get to that soon.

The headphone jacks are now wired up.  You will notice there are actually three jacks where normally you would see two.  I decided to include a LEMO plug which includes a power plug for ANR headsets like the Bose or Lightspeed (no more dead batteries because I left one on).  I think I mentioned it in the past but here it might make more sense when you can see it.

I also managed to finish up the labels on the panel.  I think I finally got the hang of using the DecalPro process and the labels are looking pretty good.  Not perfect but that's because I am not great at alignment with just my eyeballs but they are close enough that I think they are fine.  I actually used my GoPro to make a short how-to video so that when I have to do this again someday I will remember what I was doing.  I may post it online for others since the DecalPro process is a bit challenging.

Headphone and Microphone jack on the left and LEMO plug on the right.

Underside view.  I actually took this picture because I couldn't see what they looked like under there.

And here it is!  All powered up, labeled and itchin' to go flyin'