I just had a problem that was difficult to diagnose.
My oil pressure sender failed (dead short).
It's a VDO sender with a normal range of 10-180 ohms. The current D180 firmware displays BOTH a short circuit (< 10 ohms) or open circuit (> 180 ohms) as 0 oil pressure. This not only makes it hard to diagnose the problem, but may lead a pilot to a precautionary off-airport landing when there is no loss of pressure, only a failure of the sender and/or wiring.
The current firmware actually made it more difficult to diagnose the problem than with an analog "steam" gage as the normal technique of shorting the sender to ground (which would make an analog needle jump from full scale to full scale) resulted in the no change on the D180. That initially lead me to believe (incorrectly) that the wiring was bad...
My oil pressure sender failed (dead short).
It's a VDO sender with a normal range of 10-180 ohms. The current D180 firmware displays BOTH a short circuit (< 10 ohms) or open circuit (> 180 ohms) as 0 oil pressure. This not only makes it hard to diagnose the problem, but may lead a pilot to a precautionary off-airport landing when there is no loss of pressure, only a failure of the sender and/or wiring.
The current firmware actually made it more difficult to diagnose the problem than with an analog "steam" gage as the normal technique of shorting the sender to ground (which would make an analog needle jump from full scale to full scale) resulted in the no change on the D180. That initially lead me to believe (incorrectly) that the wiring was bad...