David C. Partridge wrote:
Jim,
It might appear on the 2nd user market sooner, but the odds are you
won't be able to either repair it or calibrate it as the manufacturer
will have been the only supplier of either of these services, and no
service manuals will exist.
But is this any different than existing test equipment? I agree that
there will be some weird widget interface between the embedded PC and
the hardware, and that might be challenging to reverse engineer and
duplicate, but overall, I don't know that it's any different than doing
it for 20 year old gear.
Different processes, but fundamentally the same kind of problem.
What would be a bigger problem is availability of device drivers and
such, especially if the OS has some sort of inherent life limit built
into it (e.g. a digital rights management feature like Windows Genuine
Advantage.. can't connect to the server, and your scope stops working)
For the intended original market, having to connect to a server every 6
months or year when it's in for cal isn't a big deal. However, in the
recycled market, 10 years later,....
If it is still in support, the mfr will calibrate/fix it for you if
your pockets are deep enough (probably as much or more than you pay
for it). If (as is likely), it is out of support, then it will only
be good for re-cycling or land-fill :-(
Yes..
Hmmmm does anyone but us old fogies see anything wrong with a
business model where stuff can't be fixed and has a support lifetime
of 5 years or so ?????
I don't know that it's "can't be fixed" any more than any other old test
equipment. There's plenty of HP gear out there that has parts that
cannot be obtained any more, and folks who are motivated find
substitutes, etc.
It's certainly "uneconomic" to fix, in the sense that for someone who's
using the equipment in their business, there comes a point where it's
cheaper to buy/lease new gear rather than fix the old stuff. And, an
equipment mfr can make a legitimate decision to not design for infinite
repair life in exchange for lower original sales price. Yes, this sort
of shafts the hobby/tinkerer market, but it's the economic world we live in.
And not only the hobby market gets the problem. At JPL we've got
bunches of 8663 signal generators that are decades old, and for which
there's no equivalent modern replacement that has all the "features" of
the 8663. (that is, the new E8663 doesn't work anything like the old
8663 in terms of sweep behavior, phase modulation, or reference input
handling)
But, because those 8663s were real workhorses, and because we have
enough hangar queens to scavenge parts from, we kept them going for
long, long after their intended life span, and never invested in finding
a suitable new replacement (or, more properly, finding a new replacement
and working around its idiosyncracies, like we did with the 8663). Had
we had a regular "replace every N years" strategy (where N is 5 or 7 or
??) we wouldn't be lulled into complacency.
(note that a given space mission has a lifetime from "buy equipment" to
"end of mission" on the order of 7-8 years.. for something like Cassini,
it takes 7 years just to get to Saturn, after 3-4 years of development
of the hardware)
It's really a "test setup design philosophy issue".. how much do you
depend on idiosyncracies? Or can you design for a generic widget.
Even if you're working in the consumption of surplus, if you can "design
for the generic widget", then you shouldn't care that there's a planned
obsolescence thing going on. IN theory, all that obsolescence should
result in more surplus gear on the market at lower prices.
(assuming that the surplus market evolves...)
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
