I've been reviewing my posts in this thread and realized that I may be sounding petulant and childish. It occurs to me that a review of my interactions with Technologic over the past couple years might be illustrative as to my frame of mind...Obviously, we cannot know the actual actions taken by Technologic in response to our issues. The actions attributed are based on shared feelings by those in my company, based on the tone of email and phone conversations with the people involved.On my very first request for info/help (about adding ncurses support to a TS-7250 with the TS-7KV video board), I was told to learn about apt-get and use it to install the necessary ncurses components. Sadly, the TS-7250 system, as delivered, didn't include apt-get. That lead to wasted time on my part. The TS-7250/TS-7KV we were delivered booted first into an 80x30, then switched to an 80x40 text mode. However, only the t op 2/3 of the display were actually accessible by text applications. Remote terminals worked great with whatever size they were given, but the local terminal wasn't working. After much work on our part to diagnose the problems with the TS-7KV, Technologic did eventually look at their TS-7KV module and find, then fix, a bug in it. We also bought our TS-7250's with the RTC option and discovered that access to the RTC was disabled when the TS-7KV was attached. Again, it took a few weeks to convince Technologic that the problem wasn't caused by our software. When they looked at their code, they once again found and fixed a bug, then delivered a new kernel. When we started using a TS-7800, the board would hang every time the software tried to reboot it. This eventually took some months to get fixed, including sending both of our TS-7800 board back to Technologic for physical repair -- twice. Hopefully, t h e necessary fix has been incorporated into the currently shipping boards... When we asked about timers with higher resolution that 10ms, we were told to look at ts7800ctl.c which is the apparently the entire documentation for how to use most of the 'special' features included on the board (like sleep and watchdog timers, toggling the red LED, how long the board has been running, etc.). Unfortunately, when we used their test program to try out the features we were interested in using, they didn't work and/or hung the board completely (odometer and WDT, respectively). Eventually we learned that the odometer apparently doesn't work (but they do not appear to know why yet, and their fix for it didn't fix anything) and the WDT had a bug related to the reboot bug, which has been fixed. With the WDT fix and the revised version of the ts7800ctl source, we asked if the programmer(s) who wrote the examples knew that the clock only had a 10ms reso l ution, because they freely mixed calls to usleep() with hard-coded values of 100, 1, and 1500000. I was essentially told that everyone knows about the clock resolution and just puts in whatever random numbers they want because no one cares, apparently. <irony>That was a real confidence builder in their programmers.</irony> We discovered that when using the RS-485 port feature on the TS-7800, the port would assert a singal incorrectly when the board's power was cycled and/or it was rebooted (I'm not positive which at the moment). The signal disrupted other communication on the RS-485 network, causing all of the devices to go through a protocol reset. Eventually, Technologic managed to find and fix this problem. The last thing I remember didn't involve me directly, so I may have a detail or two wrong, but... The guy designing tour PC-104 board that will be attached to the TS-7800 found out that one of the power pins on th e TS-7800's implementation of the bus didn't work as documented in the PC-104 spec. Rather than bug them at this point, he redesigned our board to get power from another pin, which did work as documented. In the midst of these things, Technologic did answere some question relatively clearly and quickly (although often the initial answer was along the lines of, "We'll look into it for $150/hr with a four hour minimum".) There were definitely a few things we thought were Technologic problems that turned out to be our misunderstandings. But often we were confused by the initial response to our questions and got lost looking at the wrong things. Or we were confuzed by trying to use the documentation which is lacking clear organization in several areas (for example, how easy is it to discover the correct (i.e. non-standard) names for Technologic's serial ports on their TS-7250 and/or TS-7800? Sure, it is "documented" but try searching for it -- assuming you have even realized (or remembered, if you tried reading the documentation earlier) that they changed the name of a standard device. Technologic has been good about fixing things, but it often seems to happen only after we spend from days to weeks documention our testing of the problems to prove that they exist. And since we've discovered and helped them fix (and tested those fixes for them) a fair number of bugs, you'd think that, perhaps, we might not so many responses in the class of We have many other customers who are not complaining. You must be the problem. Goodbye.Which is now my most recent help request was ended. What really, really, gets me is that the sole reason that my boss selected the TS-7250 and TS-7800 boards was that they were the necessary form factor with the edge connectors in the best position! We had ZERO experience with the ARM architecture and could have been fin i shed with the software (and new hardware) components a long time ago with almost any x86 based board. Now you know my story and perhaps you can empathize with my point of view. Either way, I'm outta here for a while. __._,_.___
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