April 25, 2004

Rob Hickman from Advanced Control Systems came up with a theory a while back as to why the ACS2002 may have blacked out on me. The strange thing was that the CPU/screen and analog box that I exchanged ran just fine on his test bench. So it was definitely something pertaining to my particular setup that had caused the problems. The one thing that may have been different was that I was running the Princeton capactive sender adapters. Rob had a theory about the fuel senders possibly exceeding expected voltage. He sent me some 4.99k resistors to use inline with the fuel tank signal connections at the analog box. His theory was: 

"I started looking at what could cause power interruptions.  We have a
diode that limits the input voltage on the fuel input to 4.7 volts. If
the input voltage goes above that the diode will short it to ground. The
resistor will limit the amount of current that can be dumped to ground."

Cool! Well, everything has been working just fine, but I definitely wanted to get these resistors installed. I just used some AMP butt splices and heat shrink to make little inline resistor connections.

After installing these resistors, the fuel tank calibration had to be redone...which was no sweat, since it had to be done after swapping out the analog box anyway, and I hadn't done that yet. It was time to get caught up with these details. Flying is great, and the plane has been rock solid, but I gotta take care of the little stuff sooner or later.

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Dan Checkoway ()