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Minelab Vanquish 440/540 Internal Photos, Etc.


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1 hour ago, phrunt said:

In terms of detector performance I'd say very likely no, I'm sure that's already overkill and the software will be written based on that CPU, I'd imagine they use it more for the fact it's easy to integrate Bluetooth and USB with it, it's designed to easily integrate both chipsets

It's not exactly clear if Vanquish uses the same CPU or not, but if it does, than I strongly disagree with this statement. No one would use a highly redundant part in a low-ish cost, high volume product.

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Lots of other detectors process signals differently. Equinox, and I'm guessing Vanquish, is similar to Xterra. It performs quadrature demodulation and post demod filtering in a digital form. Xterra demodulates and postfilters only one pair of I and Q for receiver and one pair for transmitter, where equinox has to do at least as much for each frequency it processas. On top of that Xterra has a samplig frequency somewhere above 40kHz, where equinox needs to have it at least twice higher (remember highest frequency of 40kHz), which immideatly at least doubles amount of calculations done in processing for each frequency.

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4 hours ago, RobNC said:

I wonder why they didn't tap into a higher core unit with higher operating range. "For a few dollars more" Come to think of it, if they spent $5 more dollars per processor then they would raise consumer price by $100.

It doesn't really work that way.  They spec'd out a CPU that will meet the requirements of their application and this fit the need and budget.  What it tells us beyond a doubt though is that if a 200Mhz single core/single thread budget 32 bit CPU can drive the likes of the Equinox and it's derivatives, that CPU technology isn't the bottleneck or hunderence of pushing detector technology to the next level.  I've been testing a "budget" firewall at my job that uses an 8 core, 64 bit 1.5Mhz Cortex ARM CPU. It costs about the same as an EQ800 and is pretty impressive for what it is.  It can do SSL inspection on par with units costing tens of thousands of dollars. 

Imagine what you could push a detector to do if realizing higher end more complex CPUs.  Density measurement of metal?  GPR in a handheld detector?  3D imaging?  Nokta is already doing this, but it still requires a separate box in addition to the handheld detector.  CPU power is cheap these days, but this tells us that the microprocessor isn't the weakest link on advancing detector technology, it's analysis techniques, software development, and tricky old physics. 

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3 hours ago, phrunt said:

Rendered in real time..... you missed the vital part of it. A 16mhz 8bit processor can do it, not a 200+mhz 32bit Anyway, I'm not going to argue... really last time I'm speaking in this thread.

Look, you completely missed what i was saying before.

I worked a bit with ultrasound like signals, and all that signal processing stuff is quite similar to what is used in cases like Xterra and Equinox. Same dds-demod-multirate filter etc. So in our case one channel (I or Q) with DDS, demodulator and post demod mutltirate filter was consuming around 50 operations per sample with 32 bit integers. Actually some accumulators were wider than 32 bits, but not that important. Assuming that equinox processing is similar, works with four frequencies, has sampling frequency of 100kHz for simplicity, we are getting 80 millions of these calculations per second. It is already a significant portion of what M7 core can do at 200MHz.

You keeps assuming that all it does is scans buttons and lights up segments on display, which is completely wrong.

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6 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

You got that right! :laugh:

Whilst processing power was being disputed.......my detecting pal found another 18k whooper with a fat emerald yesterday with his Tesoro Compadre!!!!!🤔🤔🤔 Hasn’t had it valued yet but it’s a tad over 16grams.   Not sure what that converts to in mHz????

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