Interestingly, I didn't see any advanced scanners at Kansas City airport (KMCI) last time I was there (last August). Also, they don't have TSA, they have a private contractor, and a solid half of the security staff is comprised of retirees. They have always been friendly and professional.
On a common rail engine, you're right, there isn't much to adjust. If you're getting black smoke, the injector timing could be off, or the injectors are pushing too much fuel.
If the rings are shot and you use heavy diesel oil (like Rotella 15W40), you're likely going to get atomized oil droplets in the exhaust. Its gross. However, this scenario won't last long, because you're going to have compression loss and the engine will cease to function.
On a more traditional engine, there are adjustable injector pumps.
The Mercedes IDI engines have a linear injector pump with an adjustable aneroid compensator. You can tweak this knob to adjust the base amount a fuel that is provided to the engine. Since the knob is spring-loaded, over a long period of time, this may need adjustment for proper running.
The Detroit Diesel 6.2 has a Stanadyne injector pump that allows for some fine tuning. I have a 1983 Chevy Suburban 6.2 with a quarter million miles, and the exhaust is clean. Even with my foot to the floor, the only time you can really see the exhaust is at night when there are headlights illuminating it. I'm proud of the engineering that went into my truck, especially when I pass most 90s American and Japanese econoboxes spewing burnt oil out the tailpipe.
The Van Allen belts are completely ineffective against gamma radiation. Only interaction with matter can stop a gamma ray. Generally, the atmosphere absorbs them. The thickness of the atmosphere is the key.
I have a friend, who was a former coworker at an experimental aircraft design firm, with advanced degrees in Aerospace Engineering (summa cum laude) and Mathematics. He unloads boxes from trucks at Target.
You got a bogus signal and it got confused. Restarting the unit probably fixed it I'm guessing. Drive around a large parking garage with open sides some time, you may find interesting things happen.
We said very clearly in the installer that when installation was complete, the user would be taken to a registration page. Registration included name, organization, address, email, and software serial number. Upon successful registration, you were sent your unlock key (based on the serial number).
The registration page was hosted on our own web servers, so we knew when software was installed (and the IP of the machine it was on) based on when a registration page was loaded. No other data was transmitted, ever.
We only started tracking this information after the old EOL'd software that used unlock codes was no longer sold or supported. Therefore, every time the old registration page was loaded, it was a pirated copy that was being installed. All legitimate users got upgraded as part of their included maintenance.
I agree. At $OLD_DAYJOB, we sold software for about the same price per perpetual floating license. Early versions of our software used password protection which was easily circumvented, then a software key based system (quickly cracked) and you could find those versions of our software all over TPB. After a major overhaul to the software, we incorporated WIBU key dongles and peppered our code with various kinds of dongle interactions. There were literally thousands of license checks. There was also encrypted data stored in the key itself that instructed the program how to run. In three years of working there, I never ran across a single instance of our new software being successfully cracked. We were very happy with this, especially considering we sold the full version (at huge discount) to students, and had several commercial and academic customers in China.
The only problems I ever had with piracy of our software included a guy who had the old version who came onto our forums asking for help, apparently not realizing we knew who every one of our customers were. We also had some students at a Canadian university install pirated software on lab computers. The installations phoned home to say "I've been installed!" (there was nothing nefarious, it was designed to do this as part of the registration process) and we noticed that the school wasn't licensed for that version. Their IT department was very helpful in tracking down those responsible.
My employer, a large, multibillion dollar electronics company, doesn't play the game of outsourcing engineering or manufacturing. We make personal gadgets, and devices for cars, motorcycles, boats, and airplanes. Once we have sourced components, we control the development, manufacturing and distribution ourselves.
For aircraft, all engineering and manufacturing is done in the US in our own facilities. A product goes maybe 1000 ft from the people who come up with the concept, to engineering, to manufacturing, to the warehouse for shipping. And we're the largest and most respected GA avionics manufacturer in the world.
Our automotive electronics are engineered in several offices in the US, Germany, Romania, and Taiwan, with manufacturing in our own plant in Taiwan. These products constantly win awards for their quality.
Marine electronics are engineered in the US and England, manufactured in our plant in Taiwan. Our marine chartplotters are regarded as the most advanced in the world.
Personal gadgets for workouts, hiking, cycling, are all engineered in the US and manufactured in our plant in Taiwan.
I chose to work here because it was an ethical company. I could have made more money somewhere else, but I knew that I wouldn't have as clean of a conscience. However, I have better benefits than everyone else I know in the area and in the industry, and the company has never had an unprofitable quarter in its entire existence (over 20 years). Its perfectly possible to be in the electronics industry, run a clean business, treat your employees well, and be profitable.
Hi, I'm one of the people who was involved in the testing of GPS equipment for PNT EXCOM. GPS is a unique form of radio communication, and you cannot apply the same principles you would for a conventional radio to GPS. I highly suggest reading up on how GPS actually works (its pretty darn impressive) because I think with your background, fully informed, you'll understand the problem.
Big telcoms? They are puny compared to who Lightsquared was really pissing off. Lightsquared was screwing with the primary user of GPS, which is the USAF, which has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. I think they are somewhat scarier (and more important) than Sprint.
You understand radio a bit it seems. Here's what you're ignoring though, so follow me here: a high-precision GPS receiver must pick up signal at -165 dBm. This is right about at the noise floor. Its incredibly easy to cause interference with a receiver that must operate with these conditions, and incredibly difficult to design a filter that would actually be useful. You're talking about transmitters with 10^5 W output interfering with other transmitters in the same class. Its apples and oranges.
Modern nuvis are rocking 300MHz ARM11 based application processors on the low end. The midrange to high-end nuvis have 500-720MHz Cortex-A8 based SoCs. They have more horsepower than meets the eye.
You can do pretty good speech recognition and processing on a PXA272, and a Cortex-A8 can handle it easily. Siri could be integrated into the handset, but that wouldn't give Apple a huge database of queries to analyze.
Good for these kids. I don't agree that this should be big news, as this is becoming a fairly common project for advanced high school students. I mentored a team of high school students in the Kansas City area that sent up balloons last fall. They designed and built the payload, fitting all the instrumentation and cameras. One made it to 97,000 ft. The other managed to fly all the way to Illinois. In both cases the payload was recovered undamaged. They got some *awesome* video and pictures.
I understand your frustration. We get bombarded with calls and emails. Ten years ago, we had a customer base of tens of thousands of people. Today its tens of millions. I do not envy product support.
Like I said, there came a point where software engineering seemed to lose its way. I'm sorry you got caught in that. The 7xx/7x5 series was a huge jump in complexity from what had been developed before. While they are uber-packed with features, I'm not surprised that came at a price.
There have been a lot of changes in how things are done since the 7xx/7x5. The stability of the 12/13xx is very good. My girlfriend has a 1390, and has never had it crash, but sometimes the speedo gets stuck. I haven't seen a 22xx crash in over a year, and my 23xx has been very stable on recent software. For something the same generation as your 765 though, the 8xx/8x5 series was rock solid. Also, the 295W/G60 are absolutely unstoppable. In 4 years, I've never seen a G60 official release crash. The 8xx/8x5/295W/G60 were all Linux based though, so maybe that had something to do with it.;)
I can't tell you about anything in the bug tracker, sorry. But, everything you mentioned has been passed in from product support. The 765 hasn't been EOL'd yet, expect more releases and bugfixes. I know that there are some crash/reboot bugs that will be fixed. My knowledge of the fitness devices is extremely limited, they're a whole different group. I know there are Edge 705 releases out there to fix Powertap bugs (especially the wheel size computation). You were right before though, there's more focus on the 800.
Thanks for sticking with us. We love the products we make. I'm mostly involved in automotive engineering, and outside of work, I drive everywhere and do rally racing with my girlfriend. Wherever I go, there's a bunch of nuvis on the windshield. Many engineers in the aviation group are pilots. There are lots of employee-owned aircraft and there are probably close to 20 certified flight instructors here. The fitness engineers are almost all running or cycling fanatics. There's always really nice bicycles decked out with instrumentation in the hall or in their offices. We even sponsor a local marathon (and half-marathon and 5K). I guess I'm trying to say we take what we do seriously and have a personal interest in seeing our products work well for others, so we do the best we can.
Kansas City, Kansas, seized entire neighborhoods under eminent domain, paying the residents a laughable fraction of what their property was worth, and then sold the land to developers at a profit. They built an enormous mall and the Kansas Speedway on that land, and are raking in megabucks in property and sales tax.
Garmin clearly believes in "release early, release often", especially with device firmware (desktop software not so much). Early versions of device firmware typically lack features and have more than a few bugs, but there will be a constant stream of updates which fix bugs and add features.
I wouldn't call that characterization entirely accurate. However, there have been differing philosophies over the years, and you definitely have been exposed to the segments that are experiencing the most change. Remember that historically, we are first an avionics company, second a marine electronics company, and for those business segments, "release early, release often" can kill people. The consumer electronics side diverged and kind of forgot this legacy for a while (as you've unfortunately experienced) but it is rebounding. There are more testing teams that are well organized, better engineering processes, and improved methods of assuring you get a quality product.
But when you use customers as testers like this - which is fine; that's the Open Source development model less the open source and the ability to submit patches - there needs to be a communication channel back to the customers to let them know what is going on.
Forcing customers to test after they've bought a device is *not* part of the philosophy. These days, by the time a nuvi is on store shelves, there are usually dozens of releases that are extensively tested and debugged. Personally, I drove more than 5k miles with a nuvi 3790 prior to its release. And there were at least 50 other random employees that did also. Technical and non-technical people used these devices in the real world for a long time to help find and work out bugs. This extensive testing program has only ramped up the last couple of years. When we do get a problem that lots of customers report, it does go straight to engineering for resolution. As far as I know though, at that point, there really isn't feedback other than "wait for an update."
As with any software development project though, yes, there will be bugs and regressions. We are trying our best to reduce them.
I wish there was a way to be more communicative about development, but we've been rather accurately compared to a certain computer company in Cupertino, CA when it comes to secrecy. However, rest assured comments to product support do not go into a black hole, they are forwarded on to engineering. What happens then though is up to management.
Obviously, what I've said here is not official company position and I'm not an official mouthpiece. I'm just an engineer who takes pride in his work and wants to give others the best I can. That's descriptive of a large number of us here. The suggestion box I linked you to goes to real engineers (special "guide the company" types) who read what is submitted, so I encourage you to write them. Thank you for your understanding.
1. I don't know much about the Edge devices. It may need its memory wiped if any erroneous garbage has accumulated there; its possible for a device to get into a weird state where things simply don't work right for no obvious reason. I think you power it down, hold the bottom two buttons down, press the power button once while still holding the bottom two buttons down, then let go when the Garmin logo disappears. My Edge 800 had issues that this fixed. Don't quote me on that. I don't know how much effort is going into bug fixes on the 705.
3. Yikes, another fitness gadget question;) All I can suggest on that one is to bug product support, if you make a good case for it, they might just send you a new one.
4. Ah, these I know about. The Audible player is on newer nuvis. Its on my 3490 and 2390. I'd expect it to be on other products in those lines. Ah, the infinite reboot. These pop up every once in a while. If you don't see them after your latest firmware update, its probably fixed. Sorry about that! We perform a lot of drive testing on everything we release, but there are some bugs that are slow to pop up.
See my other comments on the GPS 12 for an example. Similarly, there are *tens of thousands* of GNS 430\530 GPS\NAV\COM units in aircraft around the world, and those had a time on market of over a decade. They'll have support for years to come as well. At $15-20k each, people aren't going to run out to replace them.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly, I didn't see any advanced scanners at Kansas City airport (KMCI) last time I was there (last August). Also, they don't have TSA, they have a private contractor, and a solid half of the security staff is comprised of retirees. They have always been friendly and professional.
On a common rail engine, you're right, there isn't much to adjust. If you're getting black smoke, the injector timing could be off, or the injectors are pushing too much fuel.
If the rings are shot and you use heavy diesel oil (like Rotella 15W40), you're likely going to get atomized oil droplets in the exhaust. Its gross. However, this scenario won't last long, because you're going to have compression loss and the engine will cease to function.
On a more traditional engine, there are adjustable injector pumps.
The Mercedes IDI engines have a linear injector pump with an adjustable aneroid compensator. You can tweak this knob to adjust the base amount a fuel that is provided to the engine. Since the knob is spring-loaded, over a long period of time, this may need adjustment for proper running.
The Detroit Diesel 6.2 has a Stanadyne injector pump that allows for some fine tuning. I have a 1983 Chevy Suburban 6.2 with a quarter million miles, and the exhaust is clean. Even with my foot to the floor, the only time you can really see the exhaust is at night when there are headlights illuminating it. I'm proud of the engineering that went into my truck, especially when I pass most 90s American and Japanese econoboxes spewing burnt oil out the tailpipe.
The Van Allen belts are completely ineffective against gamma radiation. Only interaction with matter can stop a gamma ray. Generally, the atmosphere absorbs them. The thickness of the atmosphere is the key.
"Everybody gets a nice light show"
Yeah, except all the people you just gamma ray'd.
I have a friend, who was a former coworker at an experimental aircraft design firm, with advanced degrees in Aerospace Engineering (summa cum laude) and Mathematics. He unloads boxes from trucks at Target.
Remember Asus is guilty of having manufactured Garmin's nuvifone line of cell phones. :(
You got a bogus signal and it got confused. Restarting the unit probably fixed it I'm guessing. Drive around a large parking garage with open sides some time, you may find interesting things happen.
Euro toxin? I didn't know this plant was found in Greece.
We said very clearly in the installer that when installation was complete, the user would be taken to a registration page. Registration included name, organization, address, email, and software serial number. Upon successful registration, you were sent your unlock key (based on the serial number).
The registration page was hosted on our own web servers, so we knew when software was installed (and the IP of the machine it was on) based on when a registration page was loaded. No other data was transmitted, ever.
We only started tracking this information after the old EOL'd software that used unlock codes was no longer sold or supported. Therefore, every time the old registration page was loaded, it was a pirated copy that was being installed. All legitimate users got upgraded as part of their included maintenance.
I agree. At $OLD_DAYJOB, we sold software for about the same price per perpetual floating license. Early versions of our software used password protection which was easily circumvented, then a software key based system (quickly cracked) and you could find those versions of our software all over TPB. After a major overhaul to the software, we incorporated WIBU key dongles and peppered our code with various kinds of dongle interactions. There were literally thousands of license checks. There was also encrypted data stored in the key itself that instructed the program how to run. In three years of working there, I never ran across a single instance of our new software being successfully cracked. We were very happy with this, especially considering we sold the full version (at huge discount) to students, and had several commercial and academic customers in China.
The only problems I ever had with piracy of our software included a guy who had the old version who came onto our forums asking for help, apparently not realizing we knew who every one of our customers were. We also had some students at a Canadian university install pirated software on lab computers. The installations phoned home to say "I've been installed!" (there was nothing nefarious, it was designed to do this as part of the registration process) and we noticed that the school wasn't licensed for that version. Their IT department was very helpful in tracking down those responsible.
Good luck.
My employer, a large, multibillion dollar electronics company, doesn't play the game of outsourcing engineering or manufacturing. We make personal gadgets, and devices for cars, motorcycles, boats, and airplanes. Once we have sourced components, we control the development, manufacturing and distribution ourselves.
For aircraft, all engineering and manufacturing is done in the US in our own facilities. A product goes maybe 1000 ft from the people who come up with the concept, to engineering, to manufacturing, to the warehouse for shipping. And we're the largest and most respected GA avionics manufacturer in the world.
Our automotive electronics are engineered in several offices in the US, Germany, Romania, and Taiwan, with manufacturing in our own plant in Taiwan. These products constantly win awards for their quality.
Marine electronics are engineered in the US and England, manufactured in our plant in Taiwan. Our marine chartplotters are regarded as the most advanced in the world.
Personal gadgets for workouts, hiking, cycling, are all engineered in the US and manufactured in our plant in Taiwan.
I chose to work here because it was an ethical company. I could have made more money somewhere else, but I knew that I wouldn't have as clean of a conscience. However, I have better benefits than everyone else I know in the area and in the industry, and the company has never had an unprofitable quarter in its entire existence (over 20 years). Its perfectly possible to be in the electronics industry, run a clean business, treat your employees well, and be profitable.
Hi, I'm one of the people who was involved in the testing of GPS equipment for PNT EXCOM. GPS is a unique form of radio communication, and you cannot apply the same principles you would for a conventional radio to GPS. I highly suggest reading up on how GPS actually works (its pretty darn impressive) because I think with your background, fully informed, you'll understand the problem.
"GPS signal are so weak they are below the noise floor. I dont know about you, but that just boggles my mind."
Hooray! Someone who gets it!
Big telcoms? They are puny compared to who Lightsquared was really pissing off. Lightsquared was screwing with the primary user of GPS, which is the USAF, which has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. I think they are somewhat scarier (and more important) than Sprint.
You understand radio a bit it seems. Here's what you're ignoring though, so follow me here: a high-precision GPS receiver must pick up signal at -165 dBm. This is right about at the noise floor. Its incredibly easy to cause interference with a receiver that must operate with these conditions, and incredibly difficult to design a filter that would actually be useful. You're talking about transmitters with 10^5 W output interfering with other transmitters in the same class. Its apples and oranges.
Modern nuvis are rocking 300MHz ARM11 based application processors on the low end. The midrange to high-end nuvis have 500-720MHz Cortex-A8 based SoCs. They have more horsepower than meets the eye.
You can do pretty good speech recognition and processing on a PXA272, and a Cortex-A8 can handle it easily. Siri could be integrated into the handset, but that wouldn't give Apple a huge database of queries to analyze.
Good for these kids. I don't agree that this should be big news, as this is becoming a fairly common project for advanced high school students. I mentored a team of high school students in the Kansas City area that sent up balloons last fall. They designed and built the payload, fitting all the instrumentation and cameras. One made it to 97,000 ft. The other managed to fly all the way to Illinois. In both cases the payload was recovered undamaged. They got some *awesome* video and pictures.
I understand your frustration. We get bombarded with calls and emails. Ten years ago, we had a customer base of tens of thousands of people. Today its tens of millions. I do not envy product support.
;)
Like I said, there came a point where software engineering seemed to lose its way. I'm sorry you got caught in that. The 7xx/7x5 series was a huge jump in complexity from what had been developed before. While they are uber-packed with features, I'm not surprised that came at a price.
There have been a lot of changes in how things are done since the 7xx/7x5. The stability of the 12/13xx is very good. My girlfriend has a 1390, and has never had it crash, but sometimes the speedo gets stuck. I haven't seen a 22xx crash in over a year, and my 23xx has been very stable on recent software. For something the same generation as your 765 though, the 8xx/8x5 series was rock solid. Also, the 295W/G60 are absolutely unstoppable. In 4 years, I've never seen a G60 official release crash. The 8xx/8x5/295W/G60 were all Linux based though, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I can't tell you about anything in the bug tracker, sorry. But, everything you mentioned has been passed in from product support. The 765 hasn't been EOL'd yet, expect more releases and bugfixes. I know that there are some crash/reboot bugs that will be fixed. My knowledge of the fitness devices is extremely limited, they're a whole different group. I know there are Edge 705 releases out there to fix Powertap bugs (especially the wheel size computation). You were right before though, there's more focus on the 800.
Thanks for sticking with us. We love the products we make. I'm mostly involved in automotive engineering, and outside of work, I drive everywhere and do rally racing with my girlfriend. Wherever I go, there's a bunch of nuvis on the windshield. Many engineers in the aviation group are pilots. There are lots of employee-owned aircraft and there are probably close to 20 certified flight instructors here. The fitness engineers are almost all running or cycling fanatics. There's always really nice bicycles decked out with instrumentation in the hall or in their offices. We even sponsor a local marathon (and half-marathon and 5K). I guess I'm trying to say we take what we do seriously and have a personal interest in seeing our products work well for others, so we do the best we can.
Kansas City, Kansas, seized entire neighborhoods under eminent domain, paying the residents a laughable fraction of what their property was worth, and then sold the land to developers at a profit. They built an enormous mall and the Kansas Speedway on that land, and are raking in megabucks in property and sales tax.
Garmin clearly believes in "release early, release often", especially with device firmware (desktop software not so much). Early versions of device firmware typically lack features and have more than a few bugs, but there will be a constant stream of updates which fix bugs and add features.
I wouldn't call that characterization entirely accurate. However, there have been differing philosophies over the years, and you definitely have been exposed to the segments that are experiencing the most change. Remember that historically, we are first an avionics company, second a marine electronics company, and for those business segments, "release early, release often" can kill people. The consumer electronics side diverged and kind of forgot this legacy for a while (as you've unfortunately experienced) but it is rebounding. There are more testing teams that are well organized, better engineering processes, and improved methods of assuring you get a quality product.
But when you use customers as testers like this - which is fine; that's the Open Source development model less the open source and the ability to submit patches - there needs to be a communication channel back to the customers to let them know what is going on.
Forcing customers to test after they've bought a device is *not* part of the philosophy. These days, by the time a nuvi is on store shelves, there are usually dozens of releases that are extensively tested and debugged. Personally, I drove more than 5k miles with a nuvi 3790 prior to its release. And there were at least 50 other random employees that did also. Technical and non-technical people used these devices in the real world for a long time to help find and work out bugs. This extensive testing program has only ramped up the last couple of years. When we do get a problem that lots of customers report, it does go straight to engineering for resolution. As far as I know though, at that point, there really isn't feedback other than "wait for an update."
As with any software development project though, yes, there will be bugs and regressions. We are trying our best to reduce them.
I wish there was a way to be more communicative about development, but we've been rather accurately compared to a certain computer company in Cupertino, CA when it comes to secrecy. However, rest assured comments to product support do not go into a black hole, they are forwarded on to engineering. What happens then though is up to management.
Obviously, what I've said here is not official company position and I'm not an official mouthpiece. I'm just an engineer who takes pride in his work and wants to give others the best I can. That's descriptive of a large number of us here. The suggestion box I linked you to goes to real engineers (special "guide the company" types) who read what is submitted, so I encourage you to write them. Thank you for your understanding.
1. I don't know much about the Edge devices. It may need its memory wiped if any erroneous garbage has accumulated there; its possible for a device to get into a weird state where things simply don't work right for no obvious reason. I think you power it down, hold the bottom two buttons down, press the power button once while still holding the bottom two buttons down, then let go when the Garmin logo disappears. My Edge 800 had issues that this fixed. Don't quote me on that. I don't know how much effort is going into bug fixes on the 705.
;) All I can suggest on that one is to bug product support, if you make a good case for it, they might just send you a new one.
2. You can submit your idea here
3. Yikes, another fitness gadget question
4. Ah, these I know about. The Audible player is on newer nuvis. Its on my 3490 and 2390. I'd expect it to be on other products in those lines. Ah, the infinite reboot. These pop up every once in a while. If you don't see them after your latest firmware update, its probably fixed. Sorry about that! We perform a lot of drive testing on everything we release, but there are some bugs that are slow to pop up.
Hope this helps!
See my other comments on the GPS 12 for an example. Similarly, there are *tens of thousands* of GNS 430\530 GPS\NAV\COM units in aircraft around the world, and those had a time on market of over a decade. They'll have support for years to come as well. At $15-20k each, people aren't going to run out to replace them.
Fire away.
Comments like this make my day. :)