Auto Pilot

Another project that I have in the works is to figure out why my new autopilot resets itself occasionally. The old pilot that we replaced did this also. This can be a big problem, because when the reset happens, the boat steers off course. Right now, we have a hard time trusting the autopilot, which defeats the purpose of having it.

My suspicion is that there is a voltage fluctuation in the power that feeds the pilot. Now, how to see this happen...? A voltmeter doesn't really help, because you might not be looking at it when the failure occurs. So, I am building a voltage datalogger that I can hook to the power supply leads to the autopilot. This will log the voltage to an SD card 5 times per second, and hopefully this will provide enough data to prove or disprove that voltage dropout is the cause of the problem. Stay tuned for updates on this ongoing project.