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AeroLED Shielded wire and routing

AviatorJ

Well Known Member


There's a crop of my light section of wiring. The Yellow, red and blue lines off to the right go to VPX pins. The jist is the VPX controls the wig-wag, recog stuff so each Landing light is wired separately to the VPX, however the Taxi wires will be joined and put to a single pin.

For the Nav lights and Strobes all three get wired together to include the green sync wire and put to a pin for Strobes and a pin for Nav.

First part that is confusing for me is the use of shielded wire. For the landing lights I believe I can use an 18 gauge 2 conductor shielded wire. Since I'm centralizing my ground do I actually use solder sleeves at each end and the shield becomes basically the ground 'wire'?

If that's the case for the Nav and strobes I can use a 20 gauge 3 conductor wire to bring the two wing lights and the tail lights together. Again using solder sleeve on the shielding to act as the common conductor.


The next question I have deals with routing of the actual wires and how to tie shielded cables together to not reduce the shielded properties. The landing lights are pretty straight forward, I'll run the wire in from each side then up the side of the fuselage to the panel. At the VPX I'll have to split out the Landing light wires and punch those down into their VPX pins and join and connect the Taxi light to their pin. Are there any precautions I need to take at this point? My thought is keep the shielding of the landing light wires to essentially the VPX pin and break the Taxi light out which will be shielded for about 8 inchs to connect and then go to the pin.

For the Nav and Strobes it's a bit different. Obviously they still have to come from the wings and the tail but is it best to tie them all together at the panel to not break the shielding at different points or is there some other preferred method of doing this?

Just want to make sure I understand all this before moving forward with the physical layout of this stuff.
 
The aerosun VX do not require shielded wire. The nav/strobes, I am putting a terminal block under the seats so only one wire (shielded pair) needs to go to the vpx from there.
 
That right you just jogged my memory on that. I think I was deciding to go with some shielded wire just for convenience. I'll have to think a bit on what I want to do with that.

How do you use a terminal block with shielded wire? Do you solder sleeve a ground wire and then hook that to the terminal for all the grounds? Do you think a 4 place plug would work? but from the plug to the panel only use a single 2 conductor shielded wire? Essentially using one of the molex connectors to group the 3 sync wires together.
 
Aeroled lights

I bought the 3 conductor shielded wire from Aeroled to wire up the same Nav and Strobe lights you have. I ran all 3 sets of wires right up to a bus bar next to my VPX box. I ended the shielding a couple of inches short of the bus bar and soldered earth wires to each, covered the join with heatshrink and ran the 3 earth wires to my ground bus on the firewall. Don't forget to earth the mounting screws to each lights shielding as per the Aeroled instructions.

The 3 Nav and 3 Strobe wires were connected to their respective connections on the bus bar. From the bus bar I ran short two short wires down to two pins on the VPX J10 connector.

The Sync wires I twisted together and crimped them in a larger modified connector, covered that in heatshrink and tied it into the harness with lacing tape.

I have Duckworks LED landing lights and wired them with single conductor shielded wire connected to separate pins on the VPX to enable wigwag. I connected earth wires to the shielding as above and ran them down to the earth bus bar on the firewall.

I hope this helps.
 
high temps with landing/taxi lights

Has anyone experienced high operating temps using the Aeroled landing/taxi lights? I applied power to them and am concerned that the heat generated will damage the wing tip lens. Any recommendations? Thoughts?
 
Aeroled lights

Using shielded wire, how it the shield carried through a molex connector at the wind tip. Use a small grounding bus on the outboard rib?
 
Aeroled lights

Process to be used if you want the flexibility to remove your wing tip fairings at some stage.

You use either a Molex connector or a 9 pin D-Sub connector to join the existing Aeroled wires to the shielded wires at the wing tips.

Run the four existing Aeroled wires (i.e. Nav, strobe, Sync and earth) plus the screw earth wire to the connector and wire them into separate pins.

On the opposite side connector you wire the nav, strobe and sync wires to the corresponding pins. You also run two short earth wires from their corresponding pins and solder them both to the shield.

The role of the shield is to reduce any RF interference with your radios, etc., as the shield neutralises the inner wire(s) electromagnetic field. Plus running your earth wires back to the firewall also reduces the chance of RF interference.

I am not a fan of Molex connectors and nearly all my connectors are the D-Sub type, but that is my preference. Typical units I have used are listed below with their Aircraft Spruce part numbers.

9 Pin male connector 11-12150
9 Pin female connector 11-12149
Housing - by 2 11-13014
Female pins 11-11877
Male pins 11-00139

If you use D-Sub you should provide a bracket attached to the outboard rib to support the connectors. With Molex you could use a bracket or simply cable tie the to the rib. The idea is no earthing to the wing rib.
 
Great point! I've been using molex connectors or spade connectors with heatshrink on anything I may have to remove in the future; lighting, fuel pump, flap actuator ect. Usually it's only 2 wires so I didn't want to use a dsub. These lights though I'll have 6 wires including the common ground so maybe that's the way to go.
 
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