Joel Koltner wrote:
"John Larkin" wrote in message
...
Well, I'd have preferred "quick and clean." We did one box that was
flash based, field upgradable, and it added a lot of hassle, both in
the design and in walking customers through upgrades.
What was the hardware interface? We have some widgets that, by contract, have
to be field upgradeable and the way the update software works is that, once
configured properly (which we can do here before sending them the upgrade
software), you drop the device into its battery charger and -- poof! -- about
3 seconds later it's been completely re-flashed (128KB of microcontroller
code). It's all done over USB.
I'd be a little concerned about the ability of someone to successfully take
apart your box and stick in a new EPROM if they couldn't manage to run the
typical flash ROM update program without needing a lot of hand-holding...
IrDA used to be an excellent tool for doing that with minimal cost at
the target. But it fell from grace, most laptops don't have it. There
are adapters though. I used an older spectrum analyzer at a client last
week (Rohde&Schwarz FSH23). It only had IrDA but there was a transfer
cable which made it RS232 so my laptop could talk to it. That kind of
saved our day.
The last two pieces of test geat I bought (Keithley 2100 DVM, Aeroflex
spectrum analyzer) both were shipped with pretty serious bugs,
probably on the theory that, hell, it's flash, let's ship now and we
can always upgrade them later.
That's the general mentality of most programmers (and their managers) these
days. There are even folks who'll try to make the business case that it's
better for a company overall to ship a product with known bugs than to delay
its release (and thus revenue) by fixing them first. Unfortunately, they're
probably right in that most people today are completely used to the
Microsoft-model of Internet-based patches/upgrades.
Not with folks like me. When a company seriously burns me chances are
I'll never use them again for the next 50 years or so.
And I guess with Vista even MS got a big egg in the face, didn't they?
The Aeroflex is designed and made in Korea, and Keithley refuses to
answer my question about whether they designed the DVM; they certainly
didn't manufacture it.
I'd take a refusal to answer a question like that as an admission that they
didn't design it themselves.
That would be my guess as well. Usually things become obvious very soon
if you can read some of the firmware back out or parse the next firmware
upgrade for common error message words like "the" or "input", then read
some of the messages. If they are lacking articles and have the usual
typos you'd know. My DSO instantly revealed it when I accidentally
unplugged the USB cable: "DSO not connect".
---Joel
P.S. -- Remember that discussion we were having about HP-35S calculators? I
found a pretty nasty bug in how it evalutes equations sometimes... for
particular program sequences it evaluates...
-R*X/(X*Q-R)
as
-R*X/([completely different variable than X]*Q-R)
:-(
I've advised HP of this; they haven't written back up other than to
acknowledge receipt.
(Some might recognize that equation up there are having to do with L-matching
networks with a load of R+jX and a quality factor Q.)
I guess those can't be re-flashed, or can they?
--
Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/