In between working on the overhead console, I decided to tackle a fun little project dreamed up by Ed Krantz (Good Plane Living) to control the interior lighting. He came up with a fancy little box full of relays and a timer to essentially make the lights behave as a modern car. While this doesn’t seem fancy, most little airplanes have one dome light from the 1960’s, so this is all pretty high tech. The best part is he designed it to work as a DIY project and kept it simple and functional. The best, best part though is he shared it online for others to benefit from, so thank you!

Without diving into the actual wiring schematic, the little box receives a signal from a micro switch that a door has opened. This in turn causes the three overhead LED lights to illuminate, the footwell lights, and under panel lights all to come on to full brightness, even if they were on using the dimmer. The timer is used to keep them on for a set amount of time then they all turn off. Once the door is shut, the whole system resets and the lights return to their prior state, either off or according to their dimmer.

I’ll have two additional LED lights, one on each door, that shine down on the wing when the doors are open. Ed had put each task light on the control as well, but I chose not to since I think the three overhead will provide plenty of light.

It also has a manual reset switch to allow a door to be open but reset the lights to off or dimmed in case you want to have a door open while taxing or any other reason. There will also be a master switch near the rear baggage door to control overall power. This is because even after the lights are reset, the timer does draw a small amount of power and in theory could drain a battery if left for many days, for example during extended maintenance.

After a few hours of laying out the components and soldering it all up, I hooked up a few cheap-o LED lights to test it all out. Just as Ed did, I forgot one ground wire but that was soon fixed and everything worked just as designed. It was a really fun project and will make night flying / loading a non-issue.

So on the overhead control panel, I will have all lighting switches (Nav, Strobes, Taxi, Land, Interior Reset) along with the dimmers for the panel, instruments, and interior lights.

I also fabed up and installed the pitch trim servo mount. It was a pretty quick job and the wiring for the servo was already pulled during an earlier build session. I’m trying to get as much wiring roughed in now before much more structure goes in place.