Your humble author apologizes for the lack of blog-updating. Working sixty hour weeks is incompatible with airplane building! Also, the garage is a furnace this month. However, I did manage to sneak in some time this weekend playing with electronics. I'm designing an annunciator light controller for the panel, which has turned out to be a fun way to exercise the very rusty hardware skills I haven't used since I became a full-time software weenie.
I soldered up a little microcontroller board I bought as a cheap mail-order parts kit:
Then I breadboarded a prototype circuit to verify that the basic design was sound. For this part I raided some old boxes of electronic junk I've been hauling around for at least a dozen years. You just never know when you'll need a 10uF cap on a Saturday night!
Then I spent an afternoon routing a little board. When I used to get paid to design PCBs, I had access to some pretty nice CAD tools. Not so much anymore – the free ExpressPCB software is much less capable, but I got the job done eventually. Next time I might try Eagle, but I think that all the free board layout tools pretty much suck in different ways.
I still haven't settled on the actual annunciator lights I want to use, but at least by next week I should have all the parts I need to make a board to control them.