Working on the avionics is really fun to me. I enjoy all this electrical stuff and it is a welcomed break from working on the fiberglass cowling. Sand, refit, sand, refit. Yuck. That gets old.
So, I figured out some pros and cons about our current avionics selections recently. We are going with skyview, garmin 696, ps8000B audio panel, sl40, and eventually a garmin 430w. That part hasnt changed. What has changed though is how things will work together - at least in my mind. I had it in my mind that I would make the sl40 com1 and on our stick grip I would have frequency swap as a button. Well, the sl40 doesnt have that ability (natively although I found a guy on VAF who made a small board that plugs inline with the dsub that enabled the functionality). Also, I just assumed the skyview had SOMETHING it could map to a stick grip button... I mean why wouldnt it? Seems like such an easy and obvious feature to me. Well, it doesnt either. So theres two buttons on the stick grip that now need to be something else. Have to figure out what I want them to be now. I guess we can eventually just make the 430 the com1 radio and do a frequency swap on there.
Also I have been noodling about the 696 a bit lately. It has a 'power + data' cable that has 4 wires total. power, ground, data in, data out. Thats it. Not as robust as I thought it might be but turns out its fine to do most everything we need. Here's how it will go for us - Data in will be from the 430 so that we can feed flight plans and I think couple the autopilot to it for better instrument approaches. I still have more learning to do on what all can be done but the idea is valid none the less that its a chain where 430 can feed the 696, which can then feed the dynon system. I was temped at first to use the 696 data in for TIS traffic because thats an option but there can only be one input to the 696 and it will be better in my opinion to use the 430 and leave the TIS traffic solely on the skyview system. For the 696 audio output I was thinking we could setup the xm radio portion on the entertainment input of the audio panel (music 1) but there is only one audio output for the whole 696 so it makes more sense to just put it as an unswitched input rather than a music1 input. This is because the 696 outputs audio alerts from various events so that will be nice to have as unswitched instead of as an entertainment mode.
Very exciting news is that we just got our first Skyview screen in today! I'm so excited because I have a 4 day weekend and have lots of toys to wire up!