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Dangling Dongles

rswalden

Well Known Member
Smoke billowing out from under the panel while taxiing for takeoff in friend's RV-9..... Returned to hangar to troubleshoot.

Found a very fried metal-cased USB flash drive in a Dynon data dongle that had bumped against a hot 12Volt buss terminal behind the panel. The longer than necessary USB cable wasn't secured properly. When the metal flash drive contacted the 12V buss, the entire dongle cable went up in smoke and fried all of the data & power wires inside the Skyview HDX 10" display's 37-pin DB shell. It also fried the USB Wifi adapter plugged into the unit's built in USB socket. Fortunately, the actual Skyview unit survived without damage.

Lesson learned: Secure your wire bundles and data cables behind the panel and never use a METAL-cased flash drive near a hot voltage source.
 
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Good reminder! Not flying yet but mine is dangling around still. Dynon supplies an all metal USB thumb drive with the HDX.
 
Great post.Wow, that sucks, but lucky it wasn?t a lot worse. I hate exposed hot wires, busses etc for this reason. Seems like every time I pull a battery I manage to do a short against the firewall with my hex wrench. While it?s only 12 volts, it always scares the bejeezus out of me. Once I flinched so bad I accidentally threw the wrench across the hangar and struck my buddy?s brand new Audi with it. Yeah, I know, remove the ground wire first and eliminate the problem. Still, The hot bolt on the PC-680 is awfully close to the firewall and the metal battery clamp down plate.

Erich
 
PC680 tip

The battery terminals are very close to the firewall. A quick tip is to put some duck tape on the firewall just above the battery just in case there is contact.
 
I'm somewhat surprised that he had a flash drive plugged into the back of the Dynon to begin with. The HDX has two USB ports in the back of the unit and, the last I knew, will only support one flash drive at a time. Plugging a flash drive into the back makes it hard to update the obstacle database and firmware, you need an accessible USB port to do that. I use one of the rear ports for a USB WiFi adapter and the other for a USB cable that runs to a panel mounted USB port.
 
Yeah, I know, remove the ground wire first and eliminate the problem. Still, The hot bolt on the PC-680 is awfully close to the firewall and the metal battery clamp down plate.

Erich

Yep. No ground wire from battery to firewall/airplane, then no way to make a complete circuit.

Why are you not disconnecting the ground wire???
 
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