Installing an Auto-pilot:
Look Ma! No Hands!
One of the gadgets we added to Toy Boat 2 was a Simrad AP12R autopilot. Luxury? Or irreplaceable tool?
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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.
- 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 autopilot.
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.
As we said at the beginning of the article, installing an autopilot was one of the best things we have ever done to the boat.
Would we do it again? - Absolutely! Although we would take a much closer look at the Raymarine Sportpilot Plus.
Was it worth the money? - Absolutely! Like we said before, it's one of the best things we've done to the boat.
What's next? - It turns out the AP14R controller can be retrofitted to the AP12R, and is available as a spare part. We're considering switching out controllers to see if the new controller is worth it. Stay tuned!
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