Dynon Lean of Peak

We flew to Sedona, AZ for breakfast this morning. On the way there, I was playing with the leaning mode in the Dynon EMS. I was able to get the engine lean of peak without running rough which I hear is pretty rare on carburated engines. I attribute it to the new10-5217 carb that we installed last year. It runs lots smoother and uses less gas than our previous carb. I had noticed that the rpm will decline when leaning before it gets rough so thought it might run LOP. We were told that the 10-5217 incorporates an atomizer on it that more evenly distributes the gas into the incoming air.
Heres proof.

















We were still climbing in this picture. I leveled off at 7500 feet and was able to get the gph down to 58% hp, 6.1 to 6.3 gph at 2350 rpm and 170 mph TAS.
This would give us a range of over 6 hours in our RV-4 (41 gal tanks). We were showing about 22 nautical mpg. Will try this at 10k to 12k and see what happens at the higher altitudes.

11/28 Programming Dynons continued...

Tonight I set in the airspeed set points for Vs0, Vs1, Vfe, Vno, and Vne into the Dynon EFIS-D10a.

Then I taxied the RV-4 to the compass rose on the airport and calibrated the remote magnetometer for the Dynon EFIS. It turned out to be a very easy procedure. I lined the RV-4 up pointing magnetic north on the compass rose and started the calibration program and pressed the north button on the Dynon. Turned the aircraft to face magnetic east and pressed the east button on the Dynon. Turned the aircraft to face magnetic south and pressed the south button. Turned the aircraft to face magnetic west and pressed the west button. The program took about a second to finish the alignment program.

After calibrating the remote magnetometer, I calibrated the fuel tank level sensors for the Dynon EMS. I drained all of the fuel out of both tanks. Then I arranged to have the fuel truck from the local FBO help me calibrate the tanks. Again it was very simple with the Dynons, put it into fuel calibration mode and press the start button. The screen prompts you to add 2 gallons at a time and press the add button.


















The sensors didnt change after 14 gallons so I pressed "FULL" to finish up with that tank then repeated the steps for the right tank.
The tanks actually hold 16 gallons in each but the sensors hit the top of the tank before the last gallons can be added because of the tilt in the wing. The picture below shows the fuel levels on each tank with full tanks.

11/20 Remote Magnetometer rewiring

Tonight after work I squirmed back into the fuselage and took the D sub 9 pin remote magnetometer connector apart. The 2 wires from the outside air temperature (OAT) probe have been put into the wrong holes as I counted from the wrong side. Using the D sub extraction tool, I removed them and reinserted them into the correct holes. Dynon supplied a plastic D sub extraction tool with the wiring harness which I thought wouldnt work as well as my metal ones, but it seemed to work ok. I dont think it would hold up to repeated use though.



















Here is what the connector looks like almost reassembled.

11/18 Dynon Remote Magnetometer and OAT install

Saturday, a friend and I went hiking in the West Fork of Oak Creek wilderness area. Its about 15 miles north of Sedona, AZ and is a great hike. Since its so easy to get it, it gets crowded during the day, but if you leave at daybreak you have the trail to yourself. Normally we fly into Sedona, but since the plane is down, we had to drive up. Note to self: Get RV-4 back in the air!!























The RV-4 has manual pitch trim, but we want to convert it to electric pitch trim. Since Vertical Power included a 25 ft 5 wire cable for pitch trim in the wiring harness and I had the floor removed for the remote magnetometer installation, I decide to go ahead and wire the electric pitch trim cable up and run it to the tail so it will be an easy electrical hookup in the future when we convert the trim system to electric.























The 5 wires go into the connector J6 on the control unit. 3 wires on the top row and 2 wires directly underneath them on the bottom row.


















The Dynon EFIS Outside Air Temperature Probe (OAT) is installed to the remote magnetometer. This means if you put the remote magnetometer in the tail, the OAT needs to go somewhere close to it. I decided to put the OAT probe under the horizontal stabilizer. It should be out of the sun and hopefully not get any of the engine exhaust.
Dynon does sell an OAT that connects to the EMS instead of the remote magnetometer. I originally was planning on putting the OAT under my left wing about half way out in an access panel. With the EMS OAT, I could have did it. However, until the release of the latest firmware, the EFIS couldnt use the EMS OAT for all of its functions. Now I think either OAT works great with the EFIS if you have the Dynon Smart Avionics Bus hooked up.


















The wiring harness for the remote magnetometer comes with the D sub pins already connected.
The blue wire and the ground wire from the OAT probe has to connect to the white ground wire that goes into pin 1 of the remote magnetometer connector. The picture below shows how I hooked them together. I removed the insulation from part of the ground wire on the remote
magnetometer cable that comes from the Dynon EFIS.


















After stripping back the insulation in the OAT cable, I used a pick to remove the red, yellow and blue wires from the shielding without damaging it.


















The blue wire and the ground wire from the OAT is then soldered onto the ground wire from the EFIS and shink wrap put around it to protect it.
Here is a picture of the complete connector.


















I had to build a bracket to hold the remote magnetometer in the fuselage where it is away from any metals that may interfere with it. This turned into a major pain because I decided to put in the the rear of the fuselage. The bulkhead is about 1/2 the width of my body. It a real tight fit and then my arms wouldnt be in the right position to do what I wanted so I would have to squirm out and turn over or on my side and try from a different angle. The remote magnetometer is supposed to be within 1 degree on all three axis of what the Dynon EFIS is at.
I was able to get this with the help of a smart level but it sure was a lot of work. It took about 10 hours to do everything. Here is a picture of the installation. What the picture doesnt show is that my OAT is not working so I will have to go in tomorrow and take the connector apart and see if I have something wrong in the connector.


















The plan was to get the remote magnetometer installed and button everything up and go flying today. I severely underestimated how long it take to install the remote magnetometer and the OAT.

11/16 Right side cleanup

dI worked on the right side of the aircraft this evening after work. Since Friday is date night, I only spent a few hours on cleanup. I temporarily wrapped up tied off the dynon dual serial ports. I will build a little bracket for them and shorten them up to remove the excess wire in the future.

11/14 Dynon upgrade to 4.0 firmware

Tonight, my friend Mike Taylor came over with his laptop. He had just upgraded his Dynon D-10a to the latest version 4.0 software and offered to upgrade mine as well. It turned out to be very easy. Plug the serial cable from the Dynon into the serial port on the laptop. On the Dynon support software running on the laptop, you select the Dynon type you want to upgrade and have it autodetect your equipment. With the Dynon turned on, the software program takes control and downloads the necessary software. For the Dynon EFIS, the software program wants the remote compass connected as well because it upgrades the firmware on it. I had run the cable into the back of the fuselage but had not connected the remote compass module yet. The cable comes from Steinair with the connectors already on the wires but not inserted into a DB-6 connector yet. I just plugged the four wires directly into the remote compass connector so I could upgrade it.


















The Dynon EMS-D10 took only a few seconds to update to version 4.0. The Dynon EFIS-D10A took a couple of minutes. With the new software and the DSAB wires from each unit tied together, you can swap the screens on each unit to the other unit. Heres a picture of both units showing the primary flight display window.


















Or you can put the HSI from the EFIS on the EMS.


















Or you can swap both displays if you would rather have the engine stuff on the left side.


















Another combination is to show the checklists from the EFIS on the EMS.


















Oops, the vertical compass is in upside down! Don Ridder, the president of our EAA 538 chapter, actually spotted it. Don is building a RV-8 and is putting in dual large screen Dynons.

11/08 Dynon Wiring -continued

Here is a picture of the Dynon wiring diagram for the EMS. The handwritten Xs are the wires that I removed from the Dynon wiring harness because they were not used. I did not install the Dynon amp shunt because the Vertical Power switch panel shows volts and amps.


















I did not purchase the flowscan fuel flow sensor from Dynon as our airplane already had the same fuel sensor installed. However, I dont have the right connectors to connect to it. I will make a visit to Aerozona parts tomorrow and see if they have them. Otherwise, I will have to order them or cut off the existing ones and replace them with different ones.


















The wires in the Dynon EMS wiring harness were long enough to run to the left and the right fuel tank level sensors.


















I started building a small shelf behind the instrument panel.


















A plate goes over the angles. This should give me room to mount the remaining electronic components which are shown in the picture below.


















I have to make sure there is room for the Vertical Power switch panel in front of the shelf. The switch panel and control unit was shipped yesterday from the Vertical Power and is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. After fitting it, I will decide on the final layout of the shelf.

11/06 Dynon EFIS wiring

The Vertical Power Contol Unit is all wired up except for tidying up and testing each circuit. So today after work, I continued working on the Dynon EFIS wiring. The Dynon D-10A has one set of blue and green wires for the Dynon Smart Avionics Bus (DSAB) that lets you swap screens on the EFIS and the EMS. The EMS harness has two sets of blue and green wires for DSAB in case you want to use tie two EFISs and one EMS together. I removed both sets of DSAB wiring from pins 34, 35, 36, 37 on the EMS connector. Then I ran the DSAB wires from the EFIS pins 4 and 5 to the EMS connector pins 34 and 35. This made a neat installation without having to splice any wires. The DSAB wires are on the bottom of the connector in the picture.



















The next step was to wire the serial to parallel converter box for the blind encoder for the transponder. The Dynon EFIS has a serial encoder output but it wont work with the Garmin GTX-320A transponder. Dynon makes a little converter box to change the serial output to parallel (gray code) so it will work with the transponder.
The converter is much smaller than the altitude encoder it replaces which frees up a lot of room behind our panel.














I already had a 15 pin D sub female connector on the transponder cable, so I went to Frys Electronics and got a 15 pin D sub male connector and pins.
The label on the old altitude encoder has the wiring diagram on it so it was a simple matter of stripping about 1/8 in off each lead, crimping a D sub male pin on each wire.














Each wire is then inserted into the 15 pin male connector.














The next step was to run the 20 ft shield cable for the magnetometer from the Dynon EFIS.












The magnetometer needs to be installed someplace where it is not influenced by metal objects around it. A suggested location is the wing tip. However, we have extended range fuel tanks and strobe power supplies in each wing and tip. We decided to run the wire back into the fuselage and install the magnetometer in one of the back bulkheads.

10/29 Dynon EFIS and EMS installed

Tonight after work, I installed the Dynon EMS senders that came with the kit. I already had senders on the aircraft but am not sure if some of them are compatible with the Dynon EMS or not so replaced them all with the Dynon senders.
The Dynon senders included the oil pressure sender, oil temperature sender, fuel pressure sender and manifold pressure sender.
None of them matched the existing senders so had to redo mounting and connections for each one.
I also wired up the power to the Dynon EMS and took a picture with both units on.
The existing circuit breakers/switches in the picture below are all being removed and being replaced by the Vertical Power VP-100.














The two Dynon units replaced all of the units in the picture below. The Dynon units also have extra features that the existing panel didnt have as well such as relative wind direction and speed, AOA, TAS, 4 cylinder EGT and CHT monitoring, leaning function, etc. RV4chick is really going to like her new panel!














Tomorrow the fun starts as the VP100 Control Unit will be installed in its final position and the wiring of the Control unit begins.

10/22 Start of Conversion

We decided to document the changes in upgrading from a classic 6 pack analog instrument cluster to a Dynon EFIS (Electronic Flight Information System ) and a Dynon EMS (Engine Monitoring System) (see www.dynonavionics.com) at the same time we upgrade all of the electrical system to use the new Vertical Power VP-100 electrical control system. See www.verticalpower.com for info about their system. This basically means we will be gutting our panel and electrical system for a complete retrofit to a more modern glass cockpit and electrical system.

The picture below shows our current RV-4 panel before the start of upgrade. It consists of a standard 6 pack, Trio AP, various analog engine gauges, Fuel flow computer, Dayton density altitude computer and breaker switches.
A radio, transponder and intercom are located on a subpanel underneath the main panel.















The picture below shows the left side of the aircraft in front of the instrument panel.















The picture below shows the right side of the aircraft in front of the instrument panel.
You can see its real packed and lots of wiring everywhere.















The original plan was to put the Dynon EFIS-D10A in the top center part of the six pack. Upon measuring the room, we found out that the Dynon will overlap both of the instruments to the left and the right. The Dynon EFIS-10a is 4.09 in wide.

We decided to remove the turn coordinator and the vertical airspeed indicators and move the airspeed and altimeters down to the lower six pack.
















The picture below shows the panel with the Dynon EFIS mounted and the airspeed and altimeter relocated. The Dynon EFIS is powered off a temporary connector because we didn't want to do the final sizing on the wiring until the VP-100 system is installed. It only takes 2 wires to run the EFIS, a power and a ground. A third keep-alive power wire will keep the clock set to the correct time.














In programming the EFIS, we found out that we have the version 2.19 firmware installed. Dynon just released the version 4.0 firmware on Oct 15th. To upgrade to the latest firmware, we are going to have to install 3 more wires in our temporary connector to connect to a 9 pin sub D serial connector so we can download the version 4.0 firmware from a laptop PC. We want to upgrade to version 4 because it enables the Dynon smart avionics bus so we can easily show different screens between our EFIS and EMS monitors.