I calibrated the fuel tank senders today. \u00a0I’m using the Princeton two-point capacitive senders which are pretty straightforward to calibrate. \u00a0Here are the basic steps:<\/p>\n
The sender then puts out the full 0-5V range from empty to full. \u00a0This is much better than the Dynon capacitive senders which can’t be calibrated and generally put out a small fraction of that voltage range across the whole tank capacity. \u00a0The Princeton senders solve the dynamic range problem, but the voltage still doesn’t necessarily follow the fuel volume in a linear way. \u00a0The SkyView system solves that by including a separate calibration mechanism where you add fuel 2 gallons at a time. \u00a0Each time fuel is added, a button is hit on the SkyView to correlate that particular voltage reading from the sender with that fuel volume. \u00a0Unfortunately, this means that I need to start over with an empty tank to do the SkyView calibration. \u00a0Since I don’t have any interest in draining that much fuel out of the tanks, I’ll have to wait until I’m flying and can burn down the fuel.<\/p>\n
I did this for the left tank by pouring fuel from gas cans into the tank, but it was very time consuming and I ended up spilling some gas. \u00a0Since I hadn’t run the engine in a month, I taxied the plane down to the pump to calibrate the right tank. \u00a0I used that as an opportunity to break in the brakes a bit more too.<\/p>\n
Using the capacitive probes with the Princeton senders should result in a nearly perfectly linear fuel gauge reading across the entire tank capacity. \u00a0This is quite a bit better than the resistive senders which read empty when there is still a fair amount of fuel in the tanks and reads full well below the full capacity of the tank…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I calibrated the fuel tank senders today. \u00a0I’m using the Princeton two-point capacitive senders which are pretty straightforward to calibrate. \u00a0Here are the basic steps: Empty the tank (I had already done this when determining unusable fuel for the W&B). Power on the sender. Hit the set button to set the empty point. Fill the … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avionics","category-wings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3687,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/3687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonbeaver.com\/rv7\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}