Originally Posted by
msbbarratt
Does your little Honda petrol generator need software to reliably produce 240V 50Hz or 110V 60Hz? No.
New ones apparently have electronic fuel injection, so probably... yes.
So what's that got to do with the control of a generator? It's still all about monitoring.
And, apparently, shutting it down when the monitoring says it exceeded safe parameters. As someone touched on earlier in the thread, if the 'safe parameter' is 'voltage didn't exceed X for Y seconds' and the time since the last check is calculated as -20,000,000 seconds because the counter just jumped back to zero, then the software may well barf and shut down because it doesn't know what's going on. For something that 'can never happen', that behaviour makes sense... until it happens.
One of the benefits of software control systems over analogue is that you can make them as complex as you want. One of the downsides is that they may contain completely unexpected failure modes, while analogue systems tend to fail in predictable ways. Just because the software has worked perfectly for 248 days doesn't mean it won't fail completely after 249, whereas an analogue system will usually degrade before it fails.