The relays and all of the associated wiring will mostly live in the spar carry through gap. I made a couple of brackets to hang the relays from some existing bolts.
Of course the wires that could be short are long and the wires that should be long are short. I briefly thought about cutting down the long wires just so there was less to stuff into the spar opening, but I don't have any matching pins to replace in the connectors. So I just coiled everything up and moved on.
Here you can see where it all lives - one relay for each seat (at least I think they may be relays...I haven't actually bothered looking up the parts to see what they are).
The wires for the switches will connect in the spar gap and the power wires will exit forward in the new holes from yesterday and go to a fuse panel on the subpanel (the ACM doesn't have allowances for the heated seats. I am putting in a simple fuse block for blade fuses to handle some of these random needs.). The last couple of wires are for the power to the seats themselves and will exit out the aft side and down the center tunnel. I want to be able to easily take out the seats without having to fish the connectors out of the tunnel, so I ordered a couple of barrel jack connectors. I'll install these next to the flap housing (between the seats near the back) so they are out of the way but can easily be unplugged when necessary.
This small addition of heated seats doesn't seem like it should be a big deal, but it took quite a bit of time to sort out! I figure a warm wife is a much happier passenger though.
I still haven't decided on which control sticks to get, but I figured I may as well put wiring together for the functions I'm going to put on them. At least as of this moment, I don't plan on putting any functions on the co-pilot stick. The only thing that I think might be used once in a while is the push to talk, and that would be rare. I may put a PTT button on the panel for the copilot, just in case it's ever needed. Leaving it off of the copilot grip means I don't have to deal with wiring that side (and figuring out a way to easily connect/disconnect the wiring, since the copilot stick is removable). On the pilot side I've wired up a harness that has PTT, roll/pitch trim, and autopilot CWS/Disconnect (control wheel steering - basically a function that allows you to hold the button down and temporarily override the autopilot, then have the autopilot take back over as soon as the button is released). I went ahead and did the pin out for the ACM dsub since that is the same regardless of the grip I choose.
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As I was working on the wire bundle for the sticks, I had a head slapper moment. I looked at my notes and realized that I didn't twist the data wires for the two autopilot servos. Oops. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's doing something twice! So I pulled out the 4 data wires for each servo and twisted the correct pairs together. You'd think getting the wires pulled back through the same holes would be easy, but nope! In between pulling them out and putting them back in, the holes apparently shrunk in size. I did finally get them through though. I'm interested to see what I get to redo tomorrow.
