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Laptop passive cooling idea
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 04:58:43 GMT, (Larry W4CSC)
tempted fate with
Glen, have you ever considered adding SeaTalk, Fastnet and the other
proprietary data stream capabilities to your data logger?
I've looked into Seatalk a little bit. I haven't found any official
documentation for ST, so all this is based on what amounts to hearsay.
Getting ST to and from a serial port requires circuitry, as the
signals are inverted from RS-232 norms. Given the circuitry, the ST
protocol still looks rather messy to handle. For instance, you have
to implement collision processing. I think it might be smarter to
implement the ST interface as a dedicated outboard processor, but you
could almost certainly handle it by taking direct control of the
serialport away from Windows. Finally, handling the ST datagrams in
the same program with NMEA would ,again, be messy but possible.
So given a market, it looks doable. This is where I see the problems.
Bear in mind that marketing is statistical, so there are always
exceptions.
First, in my discussions with people that have ST stuff, I've come
away feeling that they are pretty happy in their single vendor world.
If RayMarine made the program, they might buy it. Otherwise, not.
Second, there are ST==NMEA bidirectional convertors available for
$159. Not too bad, all things considered. That seriously undercuts
any value I could offer with native ST support.
The most difficult issue probably isn't even technical. Speaking from
the perspective of almost 30 years in the hardware and software
business, proprietary protocols are proprietary for a reason, and that
reason is rarely technical. It's generally much more to do with
revenue protection by locking customers into your gear. The problem
is, if you let other people play in your sandbox, that advantage can
evaporate. I could really see RayMarine deciding to go after people
using their protocol without permission, which would never be given.
If they did, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on. That was settled way
back in the dawn of time when Compaq and IBM went to the mat over
reverse-engineering the original IBM PC. I don't really think this is
a likely scenario, but I'd need a pretty good reason for assuming that
liability. Now that I've posted this, I couldn't even claim
ignorance.
All that said, it's an interesting problem. I'll probably look into
it again next year, after I finish some enhancements the paying
customers have asked for.
Well, I seem to have answered a simple question with a lecture.
Sorry about that...
__________________________________________________ __________
Glen "Wiley" Wilson usenet1 SPAMNIX at worldwidewiley dot com
To reply, lose the capitals and do the obvious.
Take a look at cpRepeater, my NMEA data integrator, repeater, and
logger at http://www.worldwidewiley.com/
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