@Weng said:
Instead, I got a $20 cheapo alternative, which actually consists of two parts in one unit - a shit GPS receiver with an antiquated chipset (that wasn't even any good when it was new) and a serial to USB bridge chip.And this is why I'm now nonproductive and awaiting delivery of a third workstation (this time with XP) and approval for a third VS2008 license (which is a damn lot more expensive than a $60 GPS board and $10 antenna) - and at least the GPS board could be reused in producing another prototype hardware kit later on in the process.
Ah, management and their false economies...
One of our smaller legacy projects (single cheap 8-bit micro) has been picked up by a colleague with an EE background and some basic C/assembler programming experience. We already knew that the not-quite-C compiler was a POS; new versions nearly every week, a fully tested release build broke after a compiler update, etc. This thing had been on the shelf long enough that the latest debugger version (necessary for other reasons) no longer fully supported the last known-good compiler version. The poor guy spent weeks trying to get a stable debug environment, including several days of my time; it's still not right, but it sort-of works. To-day, he added an innocuous one-line 32-bit multiply. An unrelated area of the application broke, but only in the debug build !!
Estimated engineering cost so far about £5000 with probably more to come, and no confidence in the build. Cost of the latest version of the POS compiler (which stands a chance of working with the debugger) about £400, or of a good compiler about £1500. Oh, and we never get enough time to test anything properly.
</rant>
(Can anybody guess which micro, debugger and 'compiler' we're using ?)