What's Inside a VOR Indicator Aircraft Gauge? Research for our Home Sim Cockpit Builds
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- Опубліковано 16 лют 2024
- We teardown 2 different styles of VOR gauges for research and development for our HomeSim cockpit simulator builds. Or if your just curious what's inside of them, well that works too!
- Наука та технологія
Thanks for pulling back the curtain. I met a couple guys years ago who bought a 737 cockpit section from Tucson, trucked it to Cincinnati and put it in their garage. They used projectors for exterior views and CRT’s inside the cockpit. This was back in the 90’s. Keep up the good work and thanks again 👍
Now there’s commitment!
@@Piston_Pounder and here I am happy with my next level racing sim chair in front of a 45” monitor with my trusty trackIR
Ohhh there you go!
The movement where the whole needle appears to move is called a rectilinear meter movement. The gray round item is an OBS resolver. The card is actually show the bearing To or From the VOR station based upon if you are going to or coming away from the station and the selection of the card.
mr carlsons lab we need you haha
Those so called 'tiny motors' are called 'movements' They can only rotate a small way and are thus not motors. They are exactly the same as the movement in an analogue meter say in a multimeter.
Clever design.
Ohh that’s fascinating. Thanks
Awesome video! Please do a same video on Artificial Horizon Indicators too...
I have one of those as well, and yes we will!
With any troubleshooting you start with the symptoms, then go to the middle of the suspect area and work forward or backwards depending on the results of your tests.
The “ARC” is for “Automatic Radial Centering” which automatically turns the card until the needle is centered with a “TO” indicator.
It has nothing to do with flying a “DME arc”. This instrument has no DME.
The BC light illuminates when you are tracking inbound on the back-course. The LOC needle operates with reverse sensing.
Ahhh. Thanks for the proper info on that! I didn’t get that far with my student pilot training, unfortunately🙃
@@Piston_Pounder you can probably do it now. I taught myself on MSFlightSim first.
Not to be confused with ARC, the Aircraft Radio Corporation.
I love the pumps, generators, compressors and other basic controllers that are from aircraft. They are made beautifully, and are far better quality that one gets from a big box store. They are replaced in aircraft after a "regulated usage interval", which means they really have a lot of usable life left in them. If you are doing a DIY around your house; say, a sump pump or a bird bath, then they just last for years.
Absolutely. They just go and go and go
im not finished the video yet, but i wanted to point out the screw for that knob (8:22). When you flip it over to show the side and teeth, you can see the screw for a moment. Pause at 8:33 and by your thumb knuckle, on the sideface that is at a 45 degree angle to the top & side, you'll see a screw that's recessed a bit. I'll bet $10 that will let that knob loose!
Lets see if I jumped the gun and you spotted that later.
ooooo, even better shot of it at 8:52
I'll stop editing my comment and see if im wrong!
I tried pulling that set screw out but no success to remove the knob. It looks like there’s a small roll pen in the knob itself but I don’t have anything that small yet for tools. My automotive tools don’t go down that small haha! Very good eye!
That thing around 19 minutes you called points is a tunable capacitor. You’re adjusting the surface area between plates separated by a dielectric (air) tuning the frequency to the correct VOR.
Edit: wrong component
That's a relay. The coil is wrapped in yellow foil, and multipoint contacts which open/close in unison are next to it.
@@coriscotupiI thought I saw him twist it but I made that part up. It is just a relay. A variable cap looks similar and is necessary to tune the center frequency.
Actually the analog signals for the VOR gauge could be recorded or replicated and fed into it to operate the gauge without modification.
Interesting. Makes sense if you need to bench test it on the ground. Way too advanced for me but great to know!
You're entering into a very specialized field of electronics. Avionics are very hard to work with and, believe it or not, it's actually harder to drive general aviation indicators like these VOR indicators. Some parts are easy. The "meter movement" flags and pointers are easy to drive. The servo motors and feedback synchros/resolvers use for dial position and heading servo loops are a problem. Yes, with great effort, you can rebuild those indicators, but you need a set of setscrew allen wrenches that are tiny and expensive. Also hole adapters to replace something with the footprint like a synchro with a simple potentiometer. One of those indicators has a DC gearmotor for the heading ring and that's a big help. The big resolver under it sensing the ring's position? Not so much. General aviation horizons and turn/bank indicator, for instance, run from real gyros built into the instrument and may be air or electrically driven. Neither method helps a simulator builder since the case of the indicators actually have to move with the panel they're installed in. There are a lot of companies that specialize in providing home simulator "friendly" copies of general aviation indicators for a reasonable price. Changing out a physical gyro from an artificial horizon indicator, and replacing the guts with servo loops, is terribly intricate work and simply far too time consuming.
About 10 years ago I had the cockpit of a 747-300 (The last of the 747 "steam gauge" cockpits removed from an airframe in Victorville, CA and had the monster trucked all the way to eastern Iowa. Air Transport class avionics are a whole other step above general aviation instruments. With the exception of the backup instruments, everything is electrically wired to sensors and black boxes in the avionics bay. So some thing like a primary attitude director indicator is run remotely completely by electrical interfaces. (Minus the little ball in liquid) which makes driving them possible, but at great cost as aircraft avionics in large aircraft use 115V 400Hz instead of the 115V 60Hz you have in your home. Running avionics at 60Hz will destroy almost all 400Hz instruments. I had to take apart and reverse-engineer all t=of the analog instruments in the 747 cockpit and a lot we fine as they are. Others are more complicated and it's easier to remove the circuit boards behind the dial and replace them with a simpler off-the-shelf servo loop design.
If you're really committed to reworking general aviation instruments, you can definitely do it. I have, and many others have, so it's not impossible. I just want to warn you that it might take up tremendous amounts of time and tools you may not have.
I love seeing this stuff taken apart! Especially by someone exploring the technology for the first time. Forge ahead and have fun!
Thank you very much! Yeah, I will mostly use this as a model and 3-D print most of it using stepper motors. By at least I wanted to get the size and proportions and the face plate. dimensions as accurate as possible for a good reproduction. Thanks for watching!
Might I suggest you check for hazardous substances BEFORE you open aircraft instruments. The old Glow in the Dark paint on arms and dails will effect your health in a bad way.
As mentioned in other comments most instruments operate at 115 V and 400 Hz where the indicators work in tandem with the sensing synchro. Have been working on restoring AT 10 and AT 100 flight trainers for a museum.
My best guess is you would be able to synthesize signals for instruments with a microprocessor. Or keep it strupid simple and use RC servos.
Good point about opening up the old school stuff. I think I’ll just use this as a model and will 3-D print copy most of it using stepper motors. Still fascinating to see though!
Very nice video thanks❤
Bless. Thank you for stopping by🙂
On the older unit the beige transformer is the discriminator transformer. Used to process a part of the VOR signal. That unit was made in two versions. You could remote mount the electronics section and put the indicator in the panel. Then run wiring between them. Most of the voltages in those older units was 12-20 volts. Usually no harmful shocking on the parts. The NARCO is either VOA 4/5 or a VOA 40/50.
That’s what that is! Wonderful info thank you much!
If you want to replicate the curve of the face, just know it is part of a sphere.The center of the sphere is on the axis of all four "motors". The motors are actually meter movements, or galvanometers, Hope this helps.
I think we can 3D CAD this design and print it using a 3D printer. Thanks for commenting!
Excellent..!
Old peoples genuinely are genius 😊
Amazing, a team of engineers must have spent countless hours engineering this thing.
Absolutely!
cool stuff mate. if you are looking into printers i cant recommend the bambu labs X1C for fdm or Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra for resin enough. i use both and together you can make factory quality parts
Thanks for your input I’ll do some homework on that!
That NARCO is probably more likely post Korea or early 60's as the transistors would not have been available in those packages in the 40's.
Ahhh. I appreciate your insight ✌🏼
So at 5:31 the "encoder wheel" is a resolver, I've been looking for a way to read that with an arduino for a while, if you have any suggestions im all ears
Ohhh. Let’s hope some watcher will have an idea. Not sure myself 🙃
wow!
Indeed. Lots of witch craft here haha!
it's not a VOR gauge.
Excuuuuse me! VOR Indicator lol🤪