frying circuit smell!

Today was a perfectly normal, uneventful day of flying around at 165 knots in my wonderful RV7A, albeit with a lot of turbulence on the outgoing leg. While taxiing back to my hanger after landing at my home field (KLDJ), I became aware of a distinct and undeniable smell of a cooked transistor or circuit or something electronic. It is a very distinctive smell that I'm pretty sure all of you are familiar with.
I thought I might be on fire, but there were no other indications of anything amiss. I scanned the gauges, looked around and was priming myself to stop, pop the canopy and step out, as soon as I saw any smoke.
The smell soon faded, and I continued to taxi back to my hangar. After shut down, and before opening the canopy, I sniffed around for the source of the smell. I smelled Each instrument, the cig lighter chargers, the external GPS, the headphone power supplies, etc...but couldn't find it. Once in the hangar, I removed the top cowling and smelled the mags and the alternator. Nothing.
My airstrip is right next to huge tanks of oil storage, with a refinery not far away, and this part of NJ does sometimes have an industrial stink to it, but this was very specific, and quite alarming.
All systems seems to function normally on the taxi back. I wonder if I should pursue more diagnostic work, or if I should shrug it off and assume it was external. Kinda scary though. Any thoughts at all?
Thanks all.

Try sniffing your brake pads.

aha!

Great thought!!! I was leaning pretty hard on the brakes until I gave up and decided to take the next turnoff. ****, that's got to be it. Makes perfect sense. I now feel like a dumb dumb.
Thanks man!

On the "A" model, you have a direct path from your left gear leg, from the brake smell, up the landing gear fairing, to the cabin.

Rubbing

Look for scuffing/rubbing of alternator pulley on the lower cowl.

dont fly until you figured it out. And inflight fire could be disastrous.

Tom

Any evidence that you skidded a tire?

I had the same experience when I braked a little extra hard to make a turn off the runway. First reaction was electrical smell but then realized it was brake smell coming up through the gear leg fairing into the plane. I sealed off the gear leg opening with aluminum tape and never have had that smell again.

Also learned to take it easier on the brakes….

Test the brake theory. If that was the cause, wouldn't it be repeatable.

Ditto on the brakes.

That burned circuit smell is distinctive, doesn't really smell like brakes (to me). Have someone else take a look - always good to get a second set of eyes to offset the confirmation bias we all tend to have.

I once had a panel light rheostat burn out. Took me a little while to realize it was something that would only become obvious at night.