The Garmin 496...a teenager's review

EridanMan wrote:
The closest comparable consumer products with equivalent engineering
requirements that comes to my mind is the just-released iPhone and
notebook/tablet computers.

Hell, forget Iphone, pick any mobile phone released in the last 5
years, they're all running 120-400 mhz Arm Chips, which any decent
programmer worth their salt should be able to make sing.

I'm a mobile software engineer... And I can assure you that what you
guys are seeing is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what
these boards are capable of- hell, we give our mainline game
programmers three days to do the menus of their games, and the stuff
they come up with wipes the floor with what I've seen from most
handheld avionics. To me it just smacks of pure lack of will, they
take the basic, designed-in-one-hour engineering interface and pass it
off as a consumer product because they know they can.

They are systems are under utilized for one reason, dependability.I have to
restart my Razor at least once a day and it will, at least twice a week,
just shut down on it own.

EridanMan wrote:

Ok, as a 25 year old "Senior" Mobile Framework engineer with a dozen
mobile games under my belt and an 200mhz ARM reference board I play
around with at work, not to mention 2 years experience with GPS and
Location services, I think I know something about this.

And Jay is right on the money... seriously.

Given capability of the hardware and the maturity of the embedded
platforms at this point, the current crop of avionics (handheld and
otherwise) isn't just substandard, its a downright embarrassment, and
it smacks of _ZERO_ effort on the part of the current producers.

I think you all underestimate the extent to which aviation has
completely fallen off the radar of the younger generation. There is
the sense that it is a dying market, and as a dying market, its not
worth investing in, so the fact that a trivial investment is all
that's needed to break into it doesn't matter. The young tech-dork
generation is all chasing after youTube and Google and social
networking and 'the next big thing'. That's how they'll (we'll) make
our cool hundred million and join the ranks of the Sillicon Valley
elite. A small side business in a 'dying' industry simply isn't what
they're watching.

BTW, the reason I have that embedded board is because of this very
topic... Although I was focusing more on PMA instrumentation
replacement, not handheld GPS's.



So can you load the 496 software onto your ARM board ?

"EridanMan" wrote in message ups.com...
Ok, as a 25 year old "Senior" Mobile Framework engineer with a dozen
mobile games under my belt and an 200mhz ARM reference board I play
around with at work, not to mention 2 years experience with GPS and
Location services, I think I know something about this.

And Jay is right on the money... seriously.

Given capability of the hardware and the maturity of the embedded
platforms at this point, the current crop of avionics (handheld and
otherwise) isn't just substandard, its a downright embarrassment, and
it smacks of _ZERO_ effort on the part of the current producers.

I think you all underestimate the extent to which aviation has
completely fallen off the radar of the younger generation. There is
the sense that it is a dying market, and as a dying market, its not
worth investing in, so the fact that a trivial investment is all
that's needed to break into it doesn't matter. The young tech-dork
generation is all chasing after youTube and Google and social
networking and 'the next big thing'. That's how they'll (we'll) make
our cool hundred million and join the ranks of the Sillicon Valley
elite. A small side business in a 'dying' industry simply isn't what
they're watching.

BTW, the reason I have that embedded board is because of this very
topic... Although I was focusing more on PMA instrumentation
replacement, not handheld GPS's.

"EridanMan" wrote in message ups.com...
Ok, as a 25 year old "Senior" Mobile Framework engineer with a dozen...

BTW, the reason I have that embedded board is because of this very
topic... Although I was focusing more on PMA instrumentation
replacement, not handheld GPS's.




Do you have any stock?

On Jul 11, 2:22 am, "Blueskies" wrote:
"EridanMan" wrote in oglegroups.com...
Ok, as a 25 year old "Senior" Mobile Framework engineer with a dozen...

BTW, the reason I have that embedded board is because of this very
topic... Although I was focusing more on PMA instrumentation
replacement, not handheld GPS's.

Do you have any stock?

LOL...

Nah, currently I'm just a tech dork learning Embedded system digital
signal processing in my spare time.

I've got ideas of where to go with it, but before I go convincing
anyone else, I need to convince myself it's practical.

So can you load the 496 software onto your ARM board ?

There is nothing sacred about the 496's software. As I said, any
given month I hand A complex menu user interface to one of our mid-
level programmers and expect something cool back in three days to a
week (Far in excess of what you would need in a mobile device- Smooth
scrolling, live sprite elements, etc), all switchable so that we can
hit the full range of handsets without difficulty (and designed with
relative references to work on any screen size from 96x74 on up)

The 'hard' part is the GPS interface, and even that is growing more
and more trivial, with SiRF and others now offering integration
directly into an onboard embedded operating system with a runtime
library (rather than formerly having to process the analog signal to
digital and parse the data yourself).

Just go to your local electronics shop and see how trivially available
in-car GPS's are now, from every manufacturer... The technology is
_NO_ different (not even more reliable).

Hell, the 'truly' hard part for any device I would want to build would
be the 3d engine, and even those are coming available for some of the
wider-supported embedded platforms... If not, I'm good friends with
the gentleman who did the 3d engine for Commanche and several other
mid-90s products, so worse comes to worse I could do my own. (I'm
very interested in 'virtual-forward' views and perspective terrain).

The map data itself is fairly trivial... a bit of licensing expense,
that's all.

It actually strikes me more and more that, I will bet you dollars to
donuts that the only reason Lawrence and Avmap don't have XM weather
is an exclusive contract with Garmin that Garmin is paying good money
to maintain... (that's how things work in my industry, its not about
the technology, its about the Licenses... its not what do you make,
its who do you have). Why take the risk on designing a new project
when for a stipend per month you can have the whole market to
yourself?

I have _NO_ evidence of this of course... But its standard fare
business practice in my industry, and frankly I would be surprised if
that _wasn't_ the case.

EridanMan wrote:

It actually strikes me more and more that, I will bet you dollars to
donuts that the only reason Lawrence and Avmap don't have XM weather
is an exclusive contract with Garmin that Garmin is paying good money
to maintain... (that's how things work in my industry, its not about
the technology, its about the Licenses... its not what do you make,
its who do you have). Why take the risk on designing a new project
when for a stipend per month you can have the whole market to
yourself?



How many dollars you got because I can come up with a lot of donuts?

http://www.xmradio.com/weather/hardw...lutions_av.xmc

"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
EridanMan wrote:

It actually strikes me more and more that, I will bet you dollars to
donuts that the only reason Lawrence and Avmap don't have XM weather
is an exclusive contract with Garmin that Garmin is paying good money
to maintain... (that's how things work in my industry, its not about
the technology, its about the Licenses... its not what do you make,
its who do you have). Why take the risk on designing a new project
when for a stipend per month you can have the whole market to
yourself?

[Where in hell do people come up with this stuff?]



How many dollars you got because I can come up with a lot of donuts?

http://www.xmradio.com/weather/hardw...lutions_av.xmc
Snicker!!

(Oh, is that a copyright infringement on the Mars Company?)

--
Matt Barrow
Performance Homes, LLC.
Cheyenne, WY

"Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become
dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest
authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
-- Omar Ahmad, Chairman Emeritus, Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR).

Matt Barrow wrote:
"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
EridanMan wrote:

It actually strikes me more and more that, I will bet you dollars to
donuts that the only reason Lawrence and Avmap don't have XM weather
is an exclusive contract with Garmin that Garmin is paying good
money to maintain... (that's how things work in my industry, its
not about the technology, its about the Licenses... its not what do
you make, its who do you have). Why take the risk on designing a
new project when for a stipend per month you can have the whole
market to yourself?

[Where in hell do people come up with this stuff?]



How many dollars you got because I can come up with a lot of donuts?

http://www.xmradio.com/weather/hardw...lutions_av.xmc
Snicker!!



Yes it is Matt. I'm sure you will be hearing from their lawyers soon if they
can finish up the licensing deal for the peanuts.

"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
Matt Barrow wrote:
"Gig 601XL Builder" wrDOTgiaconaATsuddenlink.net wrote in message
...
EridanMan wrote:

It actually strikes me more and more that, I will bet you dollars to
donuts that the only reason Lawrence and Avmap don't have XM weather
is an exclusive contract with Garmin that Garmin is paying good
money to maintain... (that's how things work in my industry, its
not about the technology, its about the Licenses... its not what do
you make, its who do you have). Why take the risk on designing a
new project when for a stipend per month you can have the whole
market to yourself?

[Where in hell do people come up with this stuff?]



How many dollars you got because I can come up with a lot of donuts?

http://www.xmradio.com/weather/hardw...lutions_av.xmc
Snicker!!


Snipped too much, Gig!

[(Oh, is that a copyright infringement on the Mars Company?)]

Yes it is Matt. I'm sure you will be hearing from their lawyers soon if
they can finish up the licensing deal for the peanuts.