Benefits Of Simultaneous Multi-frequency - Or Smoke And Mirrors?

[Geotech]

It's always a challenge to take over someone else's code. And the V3 code is probably one of the largest and most complex detector programs ever written. To make things worse, the processor is obsolete so, at a minimum, it needs to be ported to a new processor. To make things downright miserable, the V3 had some particular problems that would need fixing, some in software but also in the circuit design. The people who designed the circuitry and wrote the code know where the rocks are. Garrett will have to figure it out, could take a while. Probably faster to start with the Ace Apex.

[UT Dave]

I've been managing software engineers for a couple of decades.

First thing any dev wants to do with any legacy codebase is re-write it.  Often, with good reason.  It sounds like the technical debt of the V3 code is just too much to overcome without a complete re-write.  Which, usually doesn't make financial sense just on the code side.  Toss in the hardware obsolescence, and yeah, I can't see any business saying "oh heck yeah, let's take that old stuff and re-do it all".

Just not how tech works.

- Dave

[mh9162013]

26 minutes ago, UT Dave said:

I've been managing software engineers for a couple of decades.

First thing any dev wants to do with any legacy codebase is re-write it.  Often, with good reason.  It sounds like the technical debt of the V3 code is just too much to overcome without a complete re-write.  Which, usually doesn't make financial sense just on the code side.  Toss in the hardware obsolescence, and yeah, I can't see any business saying "oh heck yeah, let's take that old stuff and re-do it all".

Just not how tech works.

- Dave

Oh, I get that. But remaking the wheel is a lot easier than reinventing the wheel.

So taking the V3i's hardware and software, then updating it to take advantage of modern tech would, presumably, be a lot easier than starting from scratch.

However, it seems like w/e advantages that V3i had are not big enough to warrant such an investment. Assuming this is true (and I believe it is, based on what you, Geotech and others have said), it must mean that w/e tech the Apex is based off of shows greater potential than w/e tech the V3i used.

So that tells us a lot right there. It also might hint at what's next from Minelab. Specifically, we probably won't see an FBS3 machine and instead will see an MIQ2 machine or something completely different that none of us have seen yet. I'm gonna lean towards an MIQ2 machine, though.