Hi Peter,
I too am quite familiar with design and manufacturing, as
that fed me over most of my 45 year career as an EE. I have
designed and deployed many custom programmed devices. I know
exactly how easy, or hard, it is to program them. As a few
examples, all of my smartphones run highly customized versions
of Android. All of my routers run highly customized versions
of linux... As do all of my CNC controllers.
I also know that I get folks asking me how to program devices
using their jtag ports, and they never succeed, in spite of how
easy it seems to me.
This isn't like replacing an alternator, or doing a brake job
on a car!
Manufacturers that want to stay in business, need to get their
electronics built cheaply, and that often means China. China's
national sport is stealing IP from western companies, so, smart
companies keep their IP as far away from China as they can.
That usually involves building their circuit boards in China,
and programming the firmware/hardware at home.
If they were to let the right-to-repair crowd have the files that
were used to program their boards, they might as well just shutter
their businesses. China would quickly flood the market with
counterfeits... Made in the same factories as the originals.
[I believe that Siglent is an example of what happened when HP was
careless with their IP around a Chinese manufacturer they used
for a while.]
If prettied up documentation, schematics, and easily available
firmware were important to the market, the market would step in
and provide alternatives that provided those services.
Thus far, only a very tiny open source hardware movement exists,
and it makes no significant products.
In one case, over at the HP80 group, a small group of open source
hardware advocates produced an accessory board for HP8X computers.
Before they could fill all of the orders from the original group
of supporters, a Chinese supplier had already copied their work and
was selling on ebay for a fraction of their costs. Same thing happened
with the uSDX software defined ham radios... The list goes on and on...
-Chuck Harris
On Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:04:07 -0400 "Peter Gottlieb"
<hpnpilot@...> wrote:
I don't agree that programming a custom chip is difficult.? Chip
programmers are cheap and plentiful on the market and common with
hobbyists.
What may be uneconomical for a manufacturer might be very economical
in a repair situation.
Take two examples:
A manufacturer considers it uneconomical to repair a PCB, but they
have no stock of replacement boards.? This forces the customer to
purchase an entirely new instrument instead of repairing what might
be a simple fault.? This might be a win for the manufacturer but the
customer sees it as a costly loss.
An aerospace or military customer has approved test procedures which
involve very specific pieces of test equipment which are no longer
supported.? Changing the procedures would be enormously expensive due
to the approval process, far in excess of the cost of new equipment.
The manufacturing processes themselves may be easier than they seem.
For example replacing a BGA part on a modern PCB seems to be a
daunting maybe impossible task but with the right equipment and
skills even sidewalk vendors in some Chinese cities can do it
successfully right there in front of you in a few minutes.
Sure, I've repaired many pieces of equipment without any service info
but it can be hit or miss.? Most frequently, and for most people, the
difference between repairable and not is that of documentation.
Peter
