On Monday, January 7, 2013 5:18:32 PM UTC+1, Tobias Bieniek wrote:
I've contacted LX Navigation about their LX1606 vario and they replied with the documentation in a matter of days. No problems on my side.

There is no problem on your side because you did not consider the pass-through bug.

The Butterfly vario apparently can be configured to behave like either an LX, a CAI302 or a Triadis Vega vario. Since XCSoar supports all those devices there really shouldn't be many problems in connecting the two.

You are talking only about the NMEA extensions, only a very small part of the protocol. And anyway, the NMEA extensions you named are not capable of the advanced Butterfly features. Why buy such an expensive vario, when a CAI302, Vega or LX will do the same?

"Not many problems" is not a desirable state of affairs for glider electronics. We can do better than that. I want us to do better. Therefore, I will only promise that Butterfly works after I have confirmation that it does.

As Evan stated already the ClearNav will use the CAI protocol, so I see no need to publish any protocol documentation from their side. We might just have to disable those workarounds for the ClearNav vario.

You don't understand, and your post is misleading. This is about a vendor who explicitly says he is not willing to support XCSoar. The vendor will not tell us which workarounds shall be disabled, which new bugs may be in the firmware, and how to detect the ClearNav vario in the first place. You don't even know where to start.

I find it very problematic that you implicitly suggest that problems with ClearNav interoperability will magically be solved. That is a promise to (potential) ClearNav customers. Will you take responsibility for it? Because I won't.