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Whites Had A Hybrid Detector?


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On 4/9/2021 at 9:50 AM, Steve Herschbach said:

The absolute fact is Whites had an Equinox type design way before Minelab, but stood pat on big box instead of going to the next very obvious step of miniaturizing it.

 

What White's produced was a reflection of what the owners wanted, not necessarily what the market wanted. The Whites loved the metal boxes and, to be fair, White's could build 'em like nobody's business, and all done in-house. I jokingly called it "metal box technology" and pushed hard for modern plastic designs that were smaller. At the time I was not envisioning something as small as the Equinox or Simplex but something more like the Apex. Just before I left they were developing the MX-Sport package. Again, large and heavy, and I opposed it strongly. But they also loved 8-AA batteries and insisted on it.

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The metal box design is actually great from a practical perspective. Certainly easier to make. But they were also very well balanced, easy control access, and did not roll over when set down.

New is not always better, and the risk with plastic is you end up with toys. But I am a forward thinking marketing type, and it is obvious to anyone that electronics get smaller and more powerful. Whites was trying to hold back a tide that is unstoppable. Yeah, that 20 something with the cell phone wants a detector that looks like a mailbox. Not. Apex is really sweet, just a tight little detector package. Garrett obviously has seen the light finally.

Just like it is inevitable that someday a wireless coil will be made that works well with a cell phone interface. There are some things you just know are going to happen, and while first efforts are dull, if XP is not working towards that future, somebody else is. Faster Bluetooth and more silicone in the phone will be enough someday to get something decent. May not be cutting edge, but could eat up the kids and entry level markets easy enough.

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On 4/8/2021 at 10:19 PM, Geotech said:

This was something I worked on at White's, here is a patent I filed on a more practical version of the technology:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9285496B1

I had it fully built and working with manual ground balance. It was deeper & quieter than a TDI. I was working on autotrack and discrimination and had both crudely functioning, and that's when I left White's. I saw no big technical hurdles left to overcome. Over the years I stayed in touch with people at White's but no one (to my knowledge) ever tried to pick up where I left off. Don't know why. I'd love to finish it but I don't own the patent.

We tried really hard to get this prototype back up and running for two years. However, due to the lack of proper documentation and engineering turnover it was very difficult. The knowledge didn’t get written down, passed down, or shared. It was all locked up in the brains of people who no longer worked at White’s! The biggest lesson I learned from that is when you have a project, document it. Without documentation it might as well not exist.
 

When the company’s engineering documentation consists of a shoe box full of pcb’s, paper notebooks and seven different “SMPI firmware v2 copy3.bin” files on a server it is really tough to put together. After a while we were able to get it to power on and detect a quarter about 4 inches off the coil. Was it the right coil? Again, referring to the hand drawn diagram on page 52 in a college ruled notebook... maybe?

The hybrid was the one branch of technology I pushed really hard for and the staff we had gave 100%. But the lack of documentation made it like putting together a box full of legos with no instructions. It was extremely frustrating.

But I think for every concept that makes it to market there are a bunch that end up in a similar engineering purgatory. It’s a shame the project wasn’t properly documented, it might have saved White’s! But I kinda doubt it. Having new tech would have helped the company along a few more years but the problems were much bigger than engineering not finishing projects.

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Sometimes it's easier to hash out ideas on paper and work out problems rather than document through a computer. I know I make countless doodles and scratch out my thoughts before eventually tossing them through my cad software. I can well imagine the impossibility of sorting what you have on hand and what may or may not be on paper to work from to get something as complex as a detector working.

Think it's possible to take what was patented and what bits you do know to rework the design into a functioning product? Quite often a 2nd take on a project works out better.

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I started getting paid for writing software in 1976.  I retired (completely) in early 2020, still writing software.  44 years later but one common complaint (and a legitimate one) remained -- poor or lacking documentation.

However, when working on a project, it's my experience (and consistent with what kac said) that hand recorded notes are standard operating procedure, and the finishing steps (if the product/development is successful enough to proceed) are when the documentation crystalizes.

Losing the lead engineer in the middle of a project is difficult to overcome no matter how good the documentation has been up to that point.  And if detailed documentation had been required during the development, the project likely wouldn't have been as far along as it was.  In these cases there is no simple/painless solution.

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