Pike Aero is a humble Canadian Corporation since 2003. Our goal is aimed toward advancing the state of digital and semiconductor technology where it applies to experimental aviation.
Pike's flagship product, the STINGRAY III ECU (Engine Control Unit) has been designed to bring the potential for state of the art engine management to the experimental aviation community at a reasonable price, while making no compromises with respect to safety. The design has been taking place in an open forum with all design details fully disclosed. We hope the end result will be a platform which is open to experimentation in a fashion consistent with the spirit of the experimental aviation community.
Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy
Unlike most things that we engineer, software has a binary notion of correctness: either it is correct, or it is flawed. That is, unlike a bridge or an airplane or a microprocessor, software doesn't have physical parameters that limit the scope of its correctness; software doesn't have a rated load or a maximum speed or an environmental envelope. In this regard, software is much more like mathematical proof than physical machine: a proof's elegance or inelegance is subjective, but its correctness is not.
And indeed, this lends a purity to software that has traditionally only been enjoyed by mathematics: software, like mathematics, can be correct in an absolute and timeless sense. But if this purity of software is its Dr. Jekyll, software has a brittleness that is its Mr. Hyde: given that software can only be correct or flawed, a single flaw can become the difference between unqualified success and abject failure.
Of course, this is not to say that every bug is necessarily fatal—just that the possibility always exists that a single bug will reveal something much larger than its manifestations: a design flaw that calls into question the fundamental assumptions upon which the software was built. Such a flaw can shake software to its core and, in the worst case, invalidate it completely. That is, a single software bug can be the proverbial spoonful of sewage in the barrel of wine, turning what would otherwise be an enjoyable pleasure into a toxic stew.