LINC 2.0 Repetitive Booting

[BFelton]

I have a 2018 Ski Nautique and the LINC 2.0 system started to act up this past weekend. It was mostly fine up until this year. It boots up, then shuts off (black screen), then reboots. The process repeats itself over and over again. The battery voltage is 12.5 volts. I had to use a Garmin to determine the speed since there is no screen information/data available. Has anyone else had this issue?

[bturner]

JP's the man on these but this sounds like a low voltage/bad ground issue to me.

The cheap but labor intensive way to go at this would be to clean everything really well at the battery and make sure you're connections are clean, in good condition and tight. Do the same at the dash while looking for loose, dirty or damaged wires/connectors. If still no joy, pull the battery and have it load tested at the auto parts store.

The more expensive but quicker option would be the parts cannon approach which would entail just buying a new battery, inspecting/cleaning the battery terminals and hoping the new battery fixed it.

I personally would take option 1 since they're so close in the approach. That said JP may be aware of another issue with the new fangled devices.

[BFelton]

Thanks for the response - much appreciated!

[jpwhit]

I "think" a 2018 would be a LINC Panoray not a LINC 2.0. Can you post a picture? Also, is this really a Ski Nautique which I thought 2019 was the first year, or is it a Ski Nautique 200? It matters because a 2018 Ski Nautique 200 would be a Bryant built boat and there are subtle differences.

In general, 12.5v would be no problem for a LINC screen unless it wasn't stable. LINC screens are rated to run on anything between 6 and 36V. They have a very robust switching power supply internally. So, in general they are pretty tolerant of power fluctuations.

From an statistical perspective, it's most likely an internal problem with the screen. They have a fair number of "booting" issues caused by uneven wearing and poor bad block management of the NAND Flash memory that contains the firmware. The screens are actually made by Ennovation Controls and the same screens are used in many different kinds of boats. For some reason, Nautiques seem to have way more booting issues than the other brands. My educated speculation, as to why, is their firmware probably writes new data in the form of saved setting more often than other manufacturers. Also, the obtuse way they power the LINC screen doesn't help either.

In most boats, simply turning on the key sends power to the screen. In the Nautiques, the process is quite a bit more complicated. The LINC screen is wired to a power output pin on one of the Power Distribution Modules (PDMs). Another Ennovation Control made black box. The power up process starts with the silver power toggle switch below the throttle. When you switch that on it send power to the keypad. The keypad firmware boots up and initializes the CAN communications bus. Then the keypad sends commands to the PDM telling it to setup a bunch of inputs and output and finally tells it to energize the pin that provides power to the LINC screen once a code has been entered and the start button pressed enough times. Then when the LINC screen boots up, it takes over control of all the PDMs. It then sends a message to the keypad letting it know it's taken over control. I "think" if the keypad doesn't get that message it may try restarting the LINC. A whole lot of trouble to save from having a key......

So while the most common problem when I've helped people deal with LINC screen booting issue is a problem with the screen itself. It's also not uncommon to be dealing with keypad issues, PDM issues, CanBus wiring problems, etc. It's usually easiest to just start testing stuff separately. But that takes special wiring harness to power the LINC screen, and the other devices with them removed from the boat. I think most dealers just have a set of test devices so they can just try swapping things out.

You can of course try to power up the screen without using special connectors, but the 23 pin connectors on the back of the screen is dense enough that it's easy to touch 12v or ground to the wrong pins. So it's quite easy to blow the screen up.

What you should do is disconnect the black 23 pin connector from the screen and look for corrosion in the connector. Don't bother with the gray 23 pin connectors, there is nothing critical to the screen powering up and booting with the gray connector. Also make sure none of the wires going into the black 23 pin wiring harness connector have pulled out.

[bturner]

Dang son, I like my gauge package boat more every day. Can you imagine these boats in 5, 10 years from now? I bet the FL boats are going to be a treat to deal with as they age out as well. Everything rusts/corridoes there.