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Look Mom! No
Hands!
One of the gadgets we added to Toy Boat 2 was a Simrad AP12R autopilot.
Luxury? Or irreplaceable tool?
Background
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Installation
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Commissioning
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Peformance
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Safety&Reliability
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Summary
Safety issues
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Collision avoidance - Just because the autopilot is
steering doesn't mean your brain can go into neutral. You still need to keep a
close watch for floating obstructions, other vessels, etc.
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Kill switch - Without an autopilot, boats with rotary steering
tend to turn in a big circle. The advantage of this is that if you happen to
get tossed out while the boat is moving, the boat will eventually circle back,
and there is an outside chance you might be able to catch it. With an
autopilot, the boat ain't comin' back. So make sure you are using a kill switch
/ safety lanyard when you are using an autpilot.
Reliability
As you can see in the Toy Boat 2 Scorecard, we've had a few issues with the
boat veering to starboard, even after we corrected the issue with the
solenoids. Ultimately, it came down to certain components on the
motherboard getting overheated and damaged from constantly being driven to
extreme ends of the steering range.
What caused this? Leaving the unit in navigate mode while not under power
was the culprit. If you leave the autopilot in navigate mode while
the boat is drifting, the unit is constantly hunting and trying to steer the
boat onto the last heading.
If the boat is unable to come back to the correct course, or worse yet, it
is spinning due to wind or a fish dragging the hull around, the autopilot will
try its hardest to save you, even if that means overheating a transistor. In a
larger boat, this may not be too much of an issue. But in Toy Boat 2, it's not
unusual for the boat to swing around 90 degrees or more while drifting. TB2's
bow is high, and catches a lot of wind.
The answer, of course, is to take the autopilot out of navigate mode when
the boat is not making headway. Once we did this, the unit worked
fine for quite a while, until the damaged component on the motherboard finally
gave up the ghost (more than a year after the problem started). We expect
the replacement unit to last indefinitely, now that we know what to do.
One of the things that became apparent while trying to figure out what was
happening was that there was no way to really tell what the AP12R was
thinking when it swung hard right. That's because the AP12R has no
display of any kind, just status LEDs. According to Simrad Tech Support, the
AP14R controller, with its LED display, can really help in this regard, since
it shows the heading information the autopilot is trying to maintain, as
well as some status indicators.
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