Dangerous LTC Firmware Update Bug

[Salasko Racing]

Unfourtunatly I don't have any real documentation to help with this but I figured it should be known. I had two LTCD units that were both factory defaults connected at the same time. In hind sight I obviously should have connected them one at a time but I thought they had already been set correctly. LTC manager asked if I wanted to update the firmware and without realizing both units were on the same CAN address I clicked yes. That's when it got real exciting real fast, I am working on a car that I just finished wiring and was going through initial setup. Whatever hiccup that failed firmware update caused turned every single on of my 30 PDM outputs on including outputs that didn't even have a channel assigned. Nothing bad happened but you can imagine the panic when an engine that's never turned over starts turning on it's own along with every pump, fan, wiper, light, super loud horn, and god knows what else all turns on at the same time. The PDM also showed over current on a handful of channels that realistically could not possibly have been over current.

After I got everything shut down (folks this is your warning that your PDM master kill doesn't always work). I had to put the PDM and LTC units on my bench and resend a PDM file and update LTC firmware & CAN ID's. Everything is back to normal with no issue. That said be warned this is possible.

Just to make it all more exciting the wiper motor was bad (resto-mod) and caused a fireworks display under the dash...

[adrian]

I have done a fair bit of testing on this to replicate it on the bench. The only way I could get it to happen was by being connected to the PDM (Monitor PDM or Test Outputs windows open) with the UTC and gatewaying to the LTC's with another device (such as an M1).

Was your setup similar to that? It sounds like you were connected to the PDM so were you using another device to gateway to the LTC's?

The PC comms to the PDM and LTC are somewhat similar so if you try to do both at the same time it can cause problems.

I am going to raise a ticket in our system to look at the best way of preventing this from happening.

[Salasko Racing]

Sorry for the delayed response. I actually think I was even using the test outputs to power the LTC's for the first time. So yes that must have been exactly it.