MGL Avionics User Forum

I have a new iEFIS lite along with an extender. In a new build/installation. Every time my extender is connected to the EFIS, and enabled I can check the system diagonostics and see good signal from the extender to the EFIS. That is all that is connected to either the EFIS or extender. When I turn power on after a few minutes (either letting it sit or paging through the menu) the EFIS freezes, shuts down, and recycles, and will do this non-stop. I have checked all the pin out on the harnesses. My hangar mate is building and airplane with the same MGL system (we shared designs). I have swapped out one at a time all the wire harnesses, as well as new power/ground wires and different fuse block for power supply.

I had sent the EFIS and extender back to Michigan Avionics to have them check out the units, they tested and said they were fine. I reinstalled and sitt had the issue so started the swap out described above. Tomorrow I am borrowing my hangar mates EFIS and extender and will swap out the extender (had done that previously) and if the issue still occurs will swap out the EFIS. No radio, no CAN, nothing connected to the EFIS or extender, just connected to each other. Has anyone have any experience with a similar issue?

Please make sure you are running the current firmware on the EFIS.
Early versions would continuously try and initialize the serial ports on the extender if it was seen as connected but the TX to the extender RX was not connected - the EFIS this never gets a reply if it sends an instruction to the extender and it keeps trying - this affected serial devices on the EFIS itself including the GPS which could result in an unstable situation and crashes (this depended very much on exactly what was configured and how on the EFIS).
The current firmware still tries to initialize but will give up after a while and it also does the process with less chance of conflict.

We have had one report of the EFIS crashing with extender connected which we could not isolate until the cause was discovered by accident. In this case one of the CAN bus connections on the iEFIS CAN bus was swapped on a device - the CAN bus remained operational (except for the one device) but this caused heavy traffic on the CAN bus due to message retries. Somehow this caused the EFIS to crash when it was also serving the Extender at the same time.
So in your case have a look at your CAN bus as well - note that the CAN diagnostics in the system diagnostics menu is quite comprehensive in the latest firmwares - you can see each device that is connected and how many messages it sends per second and how much of the CAN bus bandwidth it consumes. You can quickly identify CAN bus related issues with this tool.

I have a Discovery Lite. I want to enable AOA. Therefore will be buying an iefis extender. What AOA probe or probes are recommended?

I used the Dynon unheated probe. Works great .