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Re: GEEZ! Stuff

To: dg50@daimlerchrysler.com
Subject: Re: GEEZ! Stuff
From: Byron Short <bshort@AFSinc.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 1999 11:33:05 -0700
I think our posts on this will begin shrinking in size again...let's see 
how this one turns out.  :-)

Dennis typed:
> So look at it this way - the best case price of entry for GEEZ!+palm (used?) 
>is
> $550. The "reasonable" case is about $650-$750, and the worst case is as much 
>as
> you can spend - but then you're looking for more than just GEEZ! features, so
> it's hard to use the cost of the titanium and carbon fibre Palm against GEEZ!.
> ;)

New Palm III's are about $160, added to our $395 makes $555.  You do 
need the HotSync cable, another $15 mail order, so our total with Palm 
is $570.  However, about half our customers use GEEZ! without the Palm 
recording straight to PC.  It's a preference thing, and either method is 
perfectly viable.  This drops the cost to $395.  

So I see it as $395 to $570 compared to $750 for a discounted Edelbrock. 
 Either way you slice it, this is quite a bit less than the Edelbrock, 
but more importantly, I believe for the typical autocrosser, it does 
more.

> Well, that's not entirely true. When GEEZ! first appeared, I contacted Byron
> about the possibility of doing a Linux port. He declined. When I had an
> opportunity to use GEEZ! (this was before the Palm version was out) I both
> e-mailed and called to discuss my observations about the product. When I
> discovered the Edelbrock unit, I e-mailed again to make Byron aware of the
> unit's existence, and to discuss the possibility of a version of GEEZ! that
> worked with the Edelbrock data files. He wasn't interested. I did ask for the
> mapping algorythms, but I wasn't seriously expecting to get them.

Dennis, I offered to write you a conversion program that would convert 
your Edelbrock data to a GCD (G-Cube Data) format so that you could use 
it seemlessly with GEEZ!.  This is the fastest and easiest way to 
integrate the Edelbrock data into GEEZ.  

> On advice from some other posters, plus a hunch of my own, I went out and got
> readings from the unit at 1G values (by flipping it on the appropriate sides)
> and discovered that the unit is not correctly calibrated in 3 of the 4 axis. 
>It
> was, however, repeatable (flip it from 0 to 1G 20 times, and you always got 
>the
> same number)
> 
> So I called Edelbrock, and they're going to add a calibration routine to their
> software (it currently only has a "zero acceleromters" feature)

Yikes!  We could build our little Edelbrock -> GCD translator program to 
properly compensate for the calibration and pitch and roll as well.  
Again, I'd be glad to do this at no charge to Dennis or any other 
Edelbrock customers. 

Curious that they would build in pitch and roll adjustments, but skip 
basics like calibration on their device...

> Fair enough? We all friends again?

Yeah man!  :-)

--Byron


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