Equinox, Vanquish, Xterra Pro (manticore) Coil Hacks?

[afreakofnature]

With the release of the Xterra pro showing that all these coils are only limited to a chip and not the coil itself, it should be possible to hack the chip or override the chip with another.

When I was younger this was easily done in gaming systems to make copied DVDs work to play copied games.

Anyone know if this might be getting “worked” on for the coils?  Small market though, maybe not worth the time of an ambitious electrical engineer unless they were an avid detectorist.

@phrunt I’m winking at you ??

You seem to have the “know how” or the “contacts”, plus all the coils?

[phrunt]

The problem with this is modifying the chip is where it becomes super illegal and Minelab would likely go after you, this is why for example I think X-coils has decided using the existing chip with adapters and not having chips cloned and selling coils with a chip in them already is the right path for them.  The GPZ chips can be cloned, but it's just not a legal thing to do.  China of course have businesses dedicated to cloning chips, you send them one, they clone it and send them back to you, you test it all out and then you can bulk order chips.  It's not even all that expensive to do.  I know a guy that had a chip cloned for some equipment he was repairing and couldn't source the part, $186 USD to get the initial one done, he only needed one but they're cheaper after the first one as the works been done.

Most DOS games it was quite simple, some were as simple as using a Hex editor and changing a few things, the easiest ones were completely text based protections and they asked questions out of manuals what's the 5th word on Page 9 of the 3rd Paragraph etc, so easy to defeat and you could just take the lazy way and make every answer blank by removing the answers and you could just press enter to go past the question, times have changed though and it's a lot more difficult now ?

It was obvious all along the coils were all the same I thought, they were sharing the same multi-IQ in different variations some with more features some with less but essentially the same. 

I think the best path is for everyone to show their displeasure at Minelab locking down coils, even contacting them expressing your displeasure and hopefully encourage change.  People who buy an Equinox should not be restricted from using the cheaper Vanquish coils, nor the X-terra coils.  You pay the premium for the better detector, you should then be able to buy the alternative coils for it from other models.  The X-Terra using Equinox coils is a real kick in the face to every Equinox owner when their Equinox can't use X-Terra coils. 

Their reasoning may well just be they want to be able to charge Equinox users more for the Equinox coils, as the Vanquish and X-Terra coils are cheaper, being for cheaper detectors.  The coils cost no more to make, are essentially no different but they would never get away with charging Equinox coil prices to a Vanquish 340 owner.  Coils would start costing near the price of their detector that came with a coil, even more than it.  I'm not looking forward to seeing the price of the Manticore coils, no doubt they'll be more CTX coil pricing I guess.

 

 

[PimentoUK]

Quote:"all these coils are only limited to a chip and not the coil itself"

A Chip ?

In the Equinox, there's a circuit board full of components, including at least two chips, and plenty of transistors/diodes/R's&C's etc.

The 'security/identification/anti-copying' part of the electronics is just a part of it. The main bulk of the electronics is a low-noise pre-amplifier circuit with differential output, to boost the signal levels befor sending it down the cable.

There's no compelling reason why new XTerra coils will have too much in common with the other machines. The upper freq limit of the XTerra is 15kHz, the coils may not be capable of running higher, for example. Vanquish/Eqx coils have a transmit-coil made from 'pseudo-Litz' wire ( hundreds of strands of fine-gauge enamelled wire ), to get good high-frequency performance. The New XTerra may just have a single strand wire, for cheapness.
The Vanquish and Equinox do have a lot in common, though the Vanquish looks to have a simpler pre-amp, probably not such a low-noise design as the Eqx. The security etc etc chip may be the same basic part ( a serial-access memory device ), but will no doubt be programmed-up to identify as 'Vanquish Only' instead of 'Equinox Only' , to stop people hacking V coils onto the Eqx ( of all the 'hacks' , this one is the most plausible ).
The Mandingo's coil is almost certain to have an inertial sensor ( accelerometer or rate gyro ) inside it, much like the CTX coil. This then more-or-less means a microcontroller chip too, for serial data communication. It's a different animal entirely, so there's no way a Vanquish/Eqx coil will work on the Mandingo.

[phrunt]

9 minutes ago, PimentoUK said:

Quote:"all these coils are only limited to a chip and not the coil itself"

A Chip ?

In the Equinox, there's a circuit board full of components, including at least two chips, and plenty of transistors/diodes/R's&C's etc.
 

The Ukranians some time ago made aftermarket coils for the Equinox, they removed the chip out of a coil and made an adapter, very similar to how X-coils do it for the GPZ, then then made their own coils that ran using the adapter, they appeared to work very well, it never took off as the difficulty involved in the process, not really a product you can market having to remove a chip from a coil to do it. 

[PimentoUK]

Yes, I'm familiar with the Ukranian work. They simply took the entire circuit-board from a working Eqx coil, put it in a box, and put a new 'plain' coil on a long cable onto it.

There are smarter ways of making a new Eqx coil, but they're not exactly commercially viable, just suitable for the dedicated enthusiasts. The exception is the new Sunray probe for the Eqx. This takes advantage of the fact the original Eqx coil is always still attached, even when the Sunray is the 'working' coil. Hence the security side of things behaves as normal.

Geotech1 forum has some chat on the subject of Eqx coils.

The original post is about swapping coils about between different machines ( really - putting cheap coils onto expensive machines ) , rather than making new 'cheap' coils for any of the machines.

[PimentoUK]

It's possible the new XTerra doesn't have a security etc chip inside it at all. That would explain why it can accept V / Eqx coils - it simply doesn't read the chip.
And fitting an XTerra coil onto a Vanquish/Eqx won't work because there's no chip to identify it, so it will just result in a CD error and switch-off.