SoftGPS, was: Re: Richard Stallmans standpoint about openmoko
plists at prometheus.org.yu
Fri Apr 20 09:40:18 CEST 2007
On Friday 20 April 2007 09:16, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> I would suspect: size, matching interfaces, availability, cost of
> additional components?
When I worked on similar things, cost and updates were the two main reasons.
Sizewise often there wasn't such a big difference, cost was very important.
You can save much more by spreading cost of SW development over a large
number of units, HW savings by large order discounts are much smaller. The
other reason was you can update the firmware often, if you expect
interoperability issues, standard changes, or simply improvements. Having
separate flash chips or update methods is really a pain, a central software
repository is much cleaner. In the case of GPS the improvement factor is
actually a very plausible reason (or at least would be if we had info on the
raw data) - you can always think up ways to increase precision with neat
tricks if you have access to the raw data. Imagine something like
the .RAW/.CRW files in digicams. They contain proprietary data, but have more
information than your distilled jpeg file, so if you think up a way which
extracts this information better, you will end up with a higher quality
More information about the community