[volt-nuts] "*WAY* too expensive for even Keysight to redesign"

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

--------
In message <DB3PR05MB171EDDFB1237019D474778B95DA0 at DB3PR05MB171.eurprd05.prod.ou
tlook.com>, Alan Ambrose writes:

>>Come on, we all know how this will end... a raspberry-pi like
>>processor running a virtual machine emulating the original processor
>>(running the same firmware) and taking care of everything digital,
>>and the analog asics doing what they do best.... HP48 style.
>
>Daniel, that made me laugh :). Begs a question though - even if
>Agilent or whoever they are called today don't have the smart
>personnel or the market incentive to do a good job of bringing the
>whole thing up-to-date, they could add a better display, better
>connectivity, more stats, smaller packaging, more modern components
>etc and leave the clever analogue stuff alone. Sooner or later,
>someone is going to want to move the start of the art forward from
>the late 1980's.

In the HP3458A the cleverness is not just in the analogue stuff.
There is no way you could do something like that without stepping
over HP's software copyright.

You can probably get away with a FOSS project, provided you do it
in a way where people extract the necessary bits from their own
meter (using GPIB), but there is no way you can (legally) do it as
a commercial project.

That said, there are *so* many interesting things you could do with
that meter with improved software...

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.