I got home last night after two weeks on the road doing Enhanced Vision System testing. We had at least three "authorities" pilots on each trip, and we rotated through the left seat. So, I had a fair bit of time riding around in the back of the test aircraft. I took my laptop along, and managed to find a fair bit of time to finish off the Perl script to record flight test data from the Grand Rapids EIS-4000 engine monitor.

Grand Rapids will provide a DOS program to record data, upon request. That program works well, but it only runs in DOS, it writes every parametre to disk once per second, even those that are not connected. My program is a Perl script. The current version runs on Unix-like operating systems, such as Mac OS X and Linux. I had an earlier version of it running under Active State Perl on Windows 2000, so it should be fairly easy to get it working there. It records data at a user-specified rate - the fastest practical rate is about 8 records per second, although there is probably no need to record that quickly. The user can specify which parametres to record, and the label for each parametre. And it records the high-resolution computer time of each data record, which is only really relevant once you are recording from more than one "box".

I'll update the script to run in Active State Perl on Windows, someday. But, if anyone wants the current version, send me an e-mail (khorton01 AT rogers DOT com).

Next, I'll finish the script to record data from the Dynon D-10 EFIS, then the Garmin GNS-430.