Marine electronics - unreasonably expensive?

AngusMcDoon said:
The OS of choice for complex marine devices is Linux now, although of course the applications are closed. I wonder if OpenCPN would be allowed to be put on commercial hardware.

What's going on in that picture?
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Do you have any evidence of that? I've never seen mention of the GPL or any links to source code on Garmin or Standard Horizon in the kit, on the site or in the manuals. It's more usual to use something like NetBSD for things like this but I'm happy to be proved wrong!
 
Just as a comparison in the marine industry, I received a quote from Kongsberg to supply a new DGPS receiver card for one of our dynamic positioning computers (a HP 8200 pc).
The cost of the card is approx £9,000.
Cost of the an HP8200 computer fitted out with dynamic positioning software and hardware is about £24,000
 
Perhaps we are spoiled by cheap consumer electronics. Being an IT geek I have considered to build my own DIY system as an alternative to commercial multi function displays. The cost of key components like a waterproof monitor put me off. In practical terms I can have a complete and good second hand Raymarine MFD for less than the cost of the monitor alone and without the hassle to write the software to integrate all the systems.
 
>but the reason for that is simple - lack of economy of scale.

Bear in mind it's a global market including yachts, powerboats and ships. The bottom line is anything bought in a chandler is more expensive than it should be even electrical tape.
 
JumbleDuck said:
It's licensed under GPL v2, so I don't think it would be a problem as long as the source code was made suitably available (clause 3, iirc).
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Well you can run closed source software on Linux, for example Android devices and Amazon Kindle. I was wondering though what examples Angus had in mind. I know some consumer devices I have had, such as routers, run on Wind River BSD, which is an aerospace certified embedded version of BSD Unix. In this case the OS is revealed as it has a browser/ftp interface. If it runs Linux it would have to say in the docs with a link to the source code of course.
 
JumbleDuck said:
It's licensed under GPL v2, so I don't think it would be a problem as long as the source code was made suitably available (clause 3, iirc).
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GPL is a nasty license - really restricts use to non-commercial applications. (LGPL is a bit better). The Open source community has pretty much moved away from it and prefers Apache-style licensing.
 
It is certainly not the retailer who is making the money, on marine electronics the margins are tiny.
We simply do not bother now with marine equipment and advise any prospective customer to either buy on line or go round to our excellent local chandlery, half the profit will go if the customer gets his credit card out...and most do of course.:)
 
AngusMcDoon said:
There is always the Nasa budget choice, but I doubt many go on brand new boats.
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It is always interesting to me how people equate more expensive with being better.

About 5 years ago i tried this out, selling the same electronic item online, on the same web shop, but with one item being 40% more.

The higher priced item outsold the lower price item by 2 to 1.

Perception is the master of reality.
 
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