B&G Auto Pilot Crash!!!!!

In previous posts, I’ve been heaping praise on “Otto,” our faithful autopilot. He’s worked tirelessly—24 hours a day, 7 days a week—for our first 10,200 miles.

Today, he decided he needed a break and simply shut down!

Fortunately, Diorbhain was on the helm and quickly took over steering. It wasn’t a big deal—daylight, flat seas, light winds, and we were flying the jib. If left unattended, the boat would have rounded up into the wind, sails flogging, but nothing to panic about.

That said, it would’ve been an entirely different story if we’d been flying the parasail. Not crew danger ugly—but shredded parasail ugly. And that’s a whole lot of $$$.

The lead-up

Over the last few days I had been observing that the B&G chart plotter UI response was slow. I also saw the system struggling with adding waypoints and uploading weather routing from Predict Wind. Ialso lots of "Sync" messages at the bottom of the screen. I had tried to remedy this by deleting all waypoints, routes and tracks; Then rebooting. This did not help.

Then, earlier today the main screen at the chart table spontaneously reboot itself and failed to come back up. A total restart was required to recover. This reoccured 30 minutes later.

I had a suspicion that this could be a storage issue as I have been uploading weather routing from Predict Wind and each update comes with 100's of new waypoints. I went to the "Waypoint" screen and cleaned out everything (waypoints, routes and tracks). This did not help!!

The fix (I think)

Next I went into the Setup > Storage menu and noticed it had a "Waypoint" tab. I opened this up and saw I had 1000's of "deleted" waypoints. Apparently delete on the main waypoint screen does not mean delete. I pressed "Purge", this has the desired effect of permanently deleting all of those "deleted" waypoints/ So far so good, screen is responsive again and no crashes. It blows my mind to see how bad some of the software is on boats. This should not be hidden from the user.

This comes to mind: