Aircraft Electronics Association – Experimental Avionics Class Day 1

The first day of class went fairly well. Levi Self from Midwest Avionics was the instructor for the class and he did an excellent job of answering our questions and the content was well organized. We covered the regulations for an avionics installation (what you want to include, how it should be done, etc) and they briefly covered the major brands of avionics. We then hit the topic I was the most interested in which was the tools we would need, and how to use each of them. Some of the pictures below include the toolbox contents, and some of the examples of the terminations I did. I ordered a few tools and some parts to label my cables that I’ve already run in the wing. The only one I didn’t buy yet was the DMC AFM8. I have the generic tool already for this but since this tool is just over $1000 with all of the dies you need I think I’m going to research this first before I buy it. Luckily I have quite a bit of time before I need it anyways.

We ended the day by laying out the wires we would need for starting our harness we are building for the test stand. I’m excited for tomorrow where we start going into systems design, planning, documentation, etc. I need to start working on that as I research through the Garmin G3X manual on the pinouts, interconnections, etc. so I can then determine locations of devices, length of wire runs, etc. Just so much planning that I need to work through. Luckily they use Visio too so I’ve already got a leg up there on documenting my system design since I know Visio.