I've been down in Wichita since Monday, and I had a bit of spare time Tuesday evening. I brought my Grand Rapids EIS-4000 engine monitor, a 12v DC adapter to power it, a Keyspan 4-port USB to serial adapter, and a patch cable I made. This allows me to connect the engine monitor up to my laptop the same way it would be in the aircraft. I had messed around trying to record data from the engine monitor several times in the past. I finally figured out how to record the raw, binary data using a terminal program, but I never succeeded in getting clean data using Perl. Almost every record had spurious extra bytes in it, which meant it was useless.

Tuesday I threw out the part of my Perl program that sets the serial port parametres and started over. Success! I recored 20 seconds of data, with every record perfect. I recorded 15 minutes of data on Wednesday and every record (about 11-12 per second) passed the checksum, which means the data is valid.

I have a lot more work to do on this program, but I'm over the major hurdle. I need to write some code to only grab a data record at desired interval (once a second for example), convert it from binary to ASCII, add a time stamp and record it to disk.