|
Message
Holiday greetings to
all,
The wiring, and EM-2
calibration is complete. So far, everything seems to work, but I won't
know what I miswired to the engine until I try to crank it. I retrieved
the trailer from the hanger this afternoon, and plan to haul the Kolb to the
hanger tomorrow. First (attempted) run of the single rotor should be next
weekend.
Since I've gone crazy
ordering RV-8 stuff, the current plan is to do the ground testing of
the single rotor as time allows at the hanger, but to concentrate on getting the
RV-8 flying before I actually finish the Kolb. Once the weather gets
warm again, and I get sick of working on the RV-8, I might change my mind, but
for now, the RV-8 is the priority. My wild and crazy goal is to have it
flying by the end of the Summer. It's ambitious, but possible.
Now, for the important
part. I seem to be drawn to manufacturers who don't seem to think
datalogging is a very high priority. Oh, we've heard all the excuses, "I'm
too busy working on my 3 rotor RV-8". Ha, I can't even type THAT
with a straight face :-) Anyway, I'm now buying a Dynon D180,
which is an EFIS, and EMS all in one box. Unfortunately, it would seem
that Dynon is another one of those companies who is "going to
add datalogging in the future". Once again, data everywhere, but
none of it being logged.
On the Dynon unit, they
spew ALL their flight, and engine data onto the serial port at real time
speed. To quote "waiter" (who's parents must have lost a bet when he was
being named <g>):
When connecting to the
serial port to capture data, keep in mind that the Dynon is spitting out an 80
byte serial stream approximately 64 times a second. Thats about 5k per second,
300k per minute, 18meg per hour. The amount of data and the speed its coming
out, presents a challenge to any program that wishes to receive the data.
He has written a program to capture this, if you have a fairly
fast laptop. Unfortunately, I don't have room, nor the desire to carry a
laptop in the RV-8, and certainly not in the Kolb. In looking for other
options, I found this little gizmo, that takes serial data, and stores it to a
CF memory card. Best we
can tell, this will work right out of the box for the Dynon, though it's a bit
pricy.
While thinking of all this
for the Dynon, I began to wonder if the same thing will work for the
EM-2/EC-2. Tracy said that he doesn't currently push much data out on the
serial link, but that he could certainly tweak the software to send it out if we
wished to capture it. His serial link is not RS232 format, which the
above recorder uses, but he said converting his serial data to RS232 was a
simple, one chip project if we needed it in that
format.
The real question for
anyone here is whether there are other serial data recorders that would be
suitable for this purpose. The one above is all I can find, and though
it's almost exactly what I'm looking for, it just doesn't seem like it
should cost nearly as much as it does. Are there any other
options?
BTW, with the popularity of
digital devices in planes now, I think there's a very real market for a flight
data recorder. Imagine capturing data from the GPS, EFIS, EMS, in real
time, and saving it for analysis. It would be way cool, and is
probably the perfect project for Ed :-)
Cheers,
Rusty (no idea when this
will arrive)
|