Open Metal Detector Project Charter

[Aziz]

Oh boys!,

it's obviously more serious. They can't answer anymore.
Who was the evil? Greedlab?
Ready for the "Total Thermo-Nuclear War & Melt-Down"(c)(r)(tm)?
^sif

[Davor]

You can herd sheep, but you can't herd cats. A free spirit is also free from any kind of herd.

On a second thought, there is a way of joining like minds on a project of some kind: the tribes. Unlike the poorly marketed spaghetti western view of the tribe as a strictly hierarchical structure with a chief and his subjects (crazy drunken warriors), a real tribe is a completely flat structure with free fluctuation of members and no hierarchy whatsoever. Hwoever is unfamiliar with this type of organisation should read Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn.
Tribes are a real deal.

[Aziz]

Hey Davor,

I see, you aren't a member of the group anymore. (Or I can't remember you were a member. Were you?)
Anyway. You're "trying" so say something flourish. Seriously.
So what's happened to the guys?
^sif

[Aziz]

Can someone leak me the NDA or the contract?
^sif

[Davor]

Beats me.

[Lima41]

Oh boys!,

it's obviously more serious. They can't answer anymore.
Who was the evil? Greedlab?
Ready for the "Total Thermo-Nuclear War & Melt-Down"(c)(r)(tm)?
^sif

[scrungy_doolittle]

Don Lancaster is a good friend of mine. And he is directly spot on. That being said, you *can* practice a a patent. Under US law, you can make a patented product for your own use, you can't sell it or give it away. Minelab would certainly be in the wrong, unless perhaps someone is selling a kit that infringes, then yes they could sue.
Patents can be challenged and invalidated if you can find prior art.

[scrungy_doolittle]

logic analyzer hands down. but then I am an embedded firmware engineer, so I depend on my logic analyzer every single day.

Would you buy one before an oscilloscope though Philip? I know which one I would rather have if I could only have one.

[Davor]

Don Lancaster is a good friend of mine.

He is a great inspiration of mine. Please say hello on my behalf. If I remember correctly, he also played with some magnetometers several years ago. So in fact he is one of us

[Carl-NC]

Don Lancaster is a good friend of mine. And he is directly spot on. That being said, you *can* practice a a patent. Under US law, you can make a patented product for your own use, you can't sell it or give it away.

Be careful, it is actually illegal to make a patented product for your own use. It is legally accepted use to build a patented product for the purposes of evaluating the claims of the patent. That is, I could build a ML detector covered by patent for the purpose of evaluating the patent, but not for the purpose of generally hunting for gold.

Patents can be challenged and invalidated if you can find prior art.

And even without prior art, though exceedingly difficult and expensive.

[scrungy_doolittle]

He is a great inspiration of mine. Please say hello on my behalf. If I remember correctly, he also played with some magnetometers several years ago. So in fact he is one of us

I think every one of us who are interested at all in electronics, owe a lot to Don.
http://www.tinaja.com/ here is his web site.

Davor, unfortunately it would be a very expensive call for you, but Don always answers his phone. We go back to 1985 when I was selling postscript lasers, and having to write everything in postscript because
windows did not have any drivers for it. I got to playing with the old Kroy color process, and found that by simply passing a mylar sheet through the laminator or copier, on top of the toner, it would come out gloss black. Don has called that process Bakerizing ever since. (now I guess ya'll know my last name .

[Tim]

I see this thread has come to a bitter end. The Yay-sayers attack the Nay-sayers and vice-versa. Progress stalls. A bit like politics. A bit like bloody-minded Seppo-style litigation.
The stagnation and reversal of good intention and honest people. The only winners being the designers of self-interest. Politicians and lawyers.
This alone is reason to snub any corporate and/or state control altogether. The designers of pilfery and possession should be banished.
Knowledge IS NOT something that should be suppressed under ANY law. That is the inhibition of human learning.
Any judge who would convict someone for sharing knowledge should be dis-barred.
Recognition of rights for commercial use does not need to include the skinning alive of hobbyists. Indeed this corporate stance provokes and promotes a divide within detectorists, as shown here. If a million Chinese technicians can't figure out the GPX5000, then what chance do a few hobbyists have?
Another fine example of corporate greed and politics in cohoots to brainwash and bleed the lemmings. We do not need Patent laws. They do. Perpetual, paranoid malcontents.

[detectormods]

There is too much money to be made from metal detectors, especially the prospecting detectors. For too long so many just gave away extremely valuable information, only to find it sucked up big companies, changed slightly and patented.
The engineers and owners of various companies peruse the web trying to find the next good idea that they can take away and patent.
Even you you point out flaws in coil design expect a new lot of coils to be out on the market, it is much better to shut up and quietly work on your own stuff and patent it.

PS...The Chinese make very good copies of the 4500, not the crappy vlf version but an identical unit part for part correct, They even managed to reverse engineer the Hitachi micro code or come up with their own version that does the same. They are a little bit more noisy than a genuine one but maybe they just use crappy 4051 chips.

[Davor]

detectormods, I think you are wrong in two details:
1) metal detectors are by all means a niche market, and there is not too much money running about. High prices per unit may give you such impression, but opposite is true. If there was lots of money in it, detectors would be cheap as chips, and you'd buy one occasionally even at a green grocers shop.
2) patenting your idea is the only way you can get legally separated from your idea, also your money and everything dear, so it is not such a bright idea after all. Copyright is a better and inherently free alternative that does a much better job.

The only reason everyone is frightened of the Chinese is because their prices are so much lower than the "genuine stuff" which is also made in China, in the same sweatshops, and by the same workers. In many ways it is the same as the free spirited girls are scorned by their virgin peers - for devaluing what posh girls consider their birthright.

Now, just put an amateur that gets lucky and produces a better AND cheaper detector than a top shelf one. Heinlein puts it this way in his "Stranger in a Strange Land":
"Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing enormously too much power for its size. So everybody kills it on sight."

[detectormods]

Look at Minelab's financials...There is bucket loads of money in Gold detectors, the market is way bigger than you contemplate.