Cloud Cap warns of bug in Piccolo autopilot

7th November 2008 - 08:39 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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Cloud Cap Technology says there is a firmware bug in the Piccolo autopilot affecting all customers using v2.1.0 software. The company has issued the following statement:

‘There is a bug in all versions of autopilot firmware 2.1.0 up to and including rev 'g'. The bug is a timer overflow that manifests itself as a reset caused by a floating point exception.

‘There are four timers in the system that are subject to this bug, the communications timer, pilot timer, GPS timer, and Orbit timer. A timeout for any of these that is greater than 35.7 minutes (28.6 Minutes on LT autopilots due to the different timebase rate) will cause the exception whenever the timer is serviced. Each of the timers listed are those for which the user has control of the timeout value, and typically the timeouts used are much less than the limiting value. Except for the Orbit timer (which is in the flight plan) the other timers are controlled from mission limits.

’The next version of autopilot firmware will correct this bug.

’Versions of firmware prior to 2.1.0 do not have the bug.’