>Dear Rainier, >Thank you for your quick response to my questions. >Other than the XM weather.....and the pocketFMS Flightplanner add >ons [both of which sound VERY good to me] is there anything else out >on your distant view for the Odessey unit? > I don't want buy a unit that I LOVE the screen size of...but yet > the hardware behind the screen become obsolete in a few years. Your > website mentions a faster processor in the present Odessey...can > you tell me- faster than what? We do not want to have anybody loose their investment within a reasonable amount of time, yet we need to follow technology as and when it becomes available or else our systems will be outdated quickly. For this reason our EFIS systems are modular. In particular, a small PCB contains the processor and all memory subsystems as well as anything that has to do with driving screens. The rest of the system remains standard and no changes are expected there over the lifetime of the unit (although even there the system is highly modular). When a new processor board becomes available for Odyssey (which we estimate in about 12 months) it is a simply matter of plugging in a new board if you want to upgrade your system. The next generation Odyssey CPU is planned to have a processor that is about twice as fast but more importantly it will feature a dedicated 3D graphics engine which will allow texture mapping as well as display of images from an external video camera (for example rear views or infrared cameras). >I am about two years from finishing my Cozy MarkIV airplane and my last >question is...why should I buy sooner than later? Do I risk missing >out on a better product from you guys[maybe same screen size but >smaller/less buttons or thinner-depthwise?] that is out on the >horizon from MGL in a year? We don't know. We are 100% customer driven and make what people want. Our main drive for the next year is towards smaller units, in particular the Voyager and a unit about the size of Enigma but with the capabilities of Odyssey. Odyssey is expected to remain a mainstream software development platform for quite some time to come. Of course, to install new software which tends to be available every 4 weeks or so is a simple task that takes only a few seconds and is always free. Voyager and all related instruments are just smaller versions of Odyssey and run exactly the same hardware and software. >Also, I was very discouraged at Blue Mountain Avionics release of >their G3 generation with bugs. I love BMA's ideas and design. I >have a couple of Canard flyer friends who have glitches in their >latest BMA G4 units although they are a bit better. The Company gave >many claims of features and abilities that have gremlins >occasionally that the Manuf is trying to solve by working through >software updates. They are a good company and I am sure will work >it out. But, can I expect this debugging after product launch >as the "norm"?...or are you guys different? We have bugs. We never ship anything that we know has bugs but sometimes they only show if an instrument is used in a particular way that we did not take into account. Owing largely to the huge amount of flexibility in the system if is completely impossible to test everything in every possible combination. Looking back at Enigma, luckily any issues that where found have been very minor and once known, they tend to be fixed within hours and corrected software (which by then offers additional features anyway) is posted on our website. Odyssey will remain in Beta status until about April. Currently the ARINC side of things are quite untested as we simply do not own or have access to all the goodies you can plug in. So we are reliant on the ARINC specifications which can be difficult to interpret (they are mostly badly written, despite the high cost of purchasing these documents). I fully expect there to be some issues related to ARINC - the moment we know about them we can fix them. For this reason Odyssey includes a nice ARINC bus analyser so people that plug in unusual things can send us the labels received for analysis. There are also some very interesting things we are doing to the autopilot interfaces - these will, as is the nature of these things, need hands on development to get the many unusual ideas to work well in practise with as many autopilot systems as possible. The rest of the system (including "standard" autopilot interface) is derived mostly from Enigma so I don't expect anything bad there - it's well proven and stable. Odyssey, like Enigma is a community driven development so things should stabilize quickly as far as the more advanced features go. I am aware of BMA's troubles also here in South Africa. This is quite sad since there is no real reason why this should be so. There is nothing wrong with adding experimental features that are known not to work 100% (as long as the non-working parts will not affect anything else in the system). As long as the user is aware of this and invited to give feedback if these features are used. Odyssey, like the rest of our stuff is experimental and for experimental aviation. This is why it can offer features that are either unavailable in other systems or would come at a high cost. >This is my last hurdle in putting glass panels in my plane. When a >bazillion years ago, radio switched from tubes to transistors, my >Dad trumpeted the news....but the transistors never had glitches. I >really am not to excited about the idea of "back-up" steam gauges in >my cockpit. I am ready to go with the new technology of 'glass'. So >that is my last concern. >Thanks very much for your time. >Dennis Passey Well, I don't have any steam gages in mine, just two Enigmas. Backup is good. Todays EFIS systems are quite state of the art which means they are very complex. It is very easy for something to go wrong, even if it's nobodies fault. It takes just one transistor out of the estimated 4 billion that make up an Odyssey to go faulty and if this happens to be a critical component - the system may just crash or malfunction in other ways. Having said that, with more than 15.000 instruments in the field, I can say that failures are rare. But they do happen. Rainier