Been doing a lot of work around the house lately, so not much RV time during the day. The evening is still available, so work has progressed.
I have five annunciator lights on my panel. These are simple LED lights. For night flying I wanted the ability to dim the lights so they don't blind me in the dark. I also wanted to have a function to test the lights as part of the pre-taxi checklist.
I decided to make a control box to add the DIM and test functions. The controller is pretty simple. The contact inputs are connected to ground when activated. The lights have a common positive input. The test funtion grounds all the lights so they illuminate. The lights are isolated from eachother with diodes so I can use a single-pole switch for the test. Dimming is via resistors. There are two positiove busses within the controller. The buss is powered depending on the position of a panel-mounted toggle (ON or DIM). The ON buss is also isolated from the DIM buss with diodes so that the brightness of the lights is the same no matter how many are lit.
I stopped by Frys and bought a small project case and two PCB mount DB connectors (9 and 15 pin).
This evening I formulated my plan for the layout and drilled holes in a clad board to match the connector PINs.
Since I don't have enough time to finish the layout of the board tonight, I started wiring up the ground buss also.
