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I don't do RCGoofs, but I can't fathom they are much of a marketing force.

I as a customer had notice a change in FrSky around the time of the introduction of the Horus line of radio.

Like I've said many time. FrSky warts and all is my radio brand of choice (if I actually have a brand preference).

My issue is that FrSky hasn't shown any improvement with the warts, the validation of products (hardware or software) prior to release, configuration control is all but nonexistent, and the documentation is atrocious. None of this points directly to the X20 but appears to be hampering the X20 product line.

Well as to solid hobby engineering firms, the pre Mr.Parks Multiplex introduced the game changing Profi 3030 and 4000mc with little rewrite. At the end I think they were up to v2.0!

Yes I have an agenda, I want Frsky to improve their in house engineering particularly if they want my dollars. In the last 6 or so years I've seem little if any improvements in the engineering process at FrSky.
 
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Hey Wayne! It's been a long time with the pandemic and everything...

Frsky is at it's heart a Chinese corporation, not better nor worse, just different. Leaving politics, pandemics, & everything else out of the conversation, the Chinese culture has been shaped over the past 2 decades or a full generation. They have been steady as a full-on manufacturing hub, constantly setting up to make widgets for the entire world.
We are only witnessing the after effects. They have pushed the boundary between product development & the manufacture of a finished product. Usually they have the guidance & restraint of a foreign corp. for which the product is being mfg. but in the case of Frsky there is no such guidance. My hope is that Frsky & Chinese culture learn to understand the value of a finished product & spend more money & time to complete a product, however, with that will come a price increase & the glamour of cheap Chinese products will fade. How attractive will Chinese products be at that point? It's a razor sharp edge they're on & at some point they'll have to capitulate one way or another.

Steve
 
Steve,

Well said.

The Chinese have shown they can do fully polished products from firms like DJI. But like you said, the price goes up to reach these levels. I'm told we will soon see a flood of Chinese appliances in the US market that will be under their Chinese brand names. I know I have seen a bunch of low end scooters here in the Bay area..
 
I have my new X20S and I like it so far. The firmware Release 1.0.10 is good and I haven't found much I can't do compared to my X10S Express radio with Opentx. Much of the operation using Ethos is along the lines of OTX but in many cases similar but different but easier. All the sound and image files used on OTX platforms can be used without conversion in the Ethos radios. I have installed it in a new foamy for testing before becoming more committed.

So far all is good.
 
Now that Mike Shellim has ported over his fantastic OpenTX F3X templets to run on Ethos there is little to keep one from not trying it out.
Now there is little if anything that the Taranis X9E can't do as a try radio. But as the X20 looks to be a hybrid radio tray/hand held in might contribute to my RC-factor (Resistance to Change).

I'll have to start trolling the Aloft customer return shelves for returned X20/X20S.
 
Wormwood said:
Hey Wayne! It's been a long time with the pandemic and everything...

Frsky is at it's heart a Chinese corporation, not better nor worse, just different. Leaving politics, pandemics, & everything else out of the conversation, the Chinese culture has been shaped over the past 2 decades or a full generation. They have been steady as a full-on manufacturing hub, constantly setting up to make widgets for the entire world.
We are only witnessing the after effects. They have pushed the boundary between product development & the manufacture of a finished product. Usually they have the guidance & restraint of a foreign corp. for which the product is being mfg. but in the case of Frsky there is no such guidance. My hope is that Frsky & Chinese culture learn to understand the value of a finished product & spend more money & time to complete a product, however, with that will come a price increase & the glamour of cheap Chinese products will fade. How attractive will Chinese products be at that point? It's a razor sharp edge they're on & at some point they'll have to capitulate one way or another.

Steve
Click to expand...
Hi Steve,
what you have stared is undeniably true.

The good thing about the Chinese (is it?) is that they learn and adapt incredibly fast. The bad thing is - its costing them.

Right now, there is little difference between the cost of a factory assembly worker (just to use a common example) in southern or eastern China and a factory worker in Eastern Europe. Believe me the reason why the Eastern Europeans charge more for their products is because they can due to better quality. Its not a manufacturing cost issue.
Another problem in China is employee volatility. The bosses tend to treat workers as "units" so they act like units. Whenever they see that another company is offering even slightly higher wages; they will top tools and leave the company they are with immediately.

There is a well-established doctrine now that Chinese stuff is cheap, cheap, cheap but if you look back - especially if you are an old Phart like me, you will remember the distain in which we held the quality of Japanese products in the '60's and early '70s. After that the "badge of shame" was the ubiquitous but no longer applicable "Made in Taiwan".

I think its safe to say that both of these earlier stigmas for Japanese and Taiwan products are long gone. Fact is for the most part it did become almost impossible to manufacture quality products in both those places so China had taken over. But they are being killed by their own success. The standard of living around the eastern/southern manufacturing areas in China has rapidly increased and naturally with it labour costs. Now even Chinese factory owners are moving out of China to neighbouring countries such as Vietnam to find lower cost labour. But thats a short term solution at best. Its been tried by the Japanese and now the Taiwanese - but now most of them already have, or are moving back to their own countries in almost exodus volumes. Another big problem for the "lodgers" is the draconian company employment laws that like the "packman" game have been gradually chomping away at the viability of even being in China. These laws make it almost impossible to fire people even if they have done something diabolical. The key point is - they don't apply to Chinese owned concerns - only to the foreign guys.

By no means stupid, the foreign companies have realised that its better to try to find better manufacturing methods and QC at home than it is to only concentrate on low cost labour to compete.

So whats the likely outcome?

Soon, the Chinese - if they want to compete and believe me they do, will have to go back home and have a long think about improving their quality of finished products, and to do that they will have to shed five millenniums of dogma and will soon have to put a value on the workers and not treat them as work units. If they don't do this, they will never get the care needed to produce real quality. Its often been said, and its really true - the Chinese are the most cruel to their own people.
Meanwhile, these guys with pockets suddenly full of money are really afraid of this waning competitiveness possibility, and no doubt learning from many decades of Maoist isolation policy, they are investing in everything and everywhere outside China so as to hedge the bets.

Cheers,

Doc.
 
Wayne said:
Well, Ethos has been out for several months now, and .10 is the next release. Not all numbers have been public release levels. Some were skipped during beta release of that variant.

But in general, yes, we are seeing a lot of attention given to Ethos and they are not only altering things a bit as needed, but are e very actively adding new features. If you visit github you will see a lot of things listed, but the majority of them are feature requests from the public, not bugs.

I understand that many of us are used to seeing very few (if any) updates from a manufacturer. For example I had an HP printer repair dubai that never did fully work, they never fixed the darn software, they just replaced the model and dropped support. Some companies will release one or maybe 2 revisions in the lifespan of a product.

We have all seen very popular brands in this hobby release big complex radios that either lack functionality, or require work arounds to get a function to work. Think they are all guilty of this. Some had big bugs, yet you may wait a year or more for a fix.

I guess my point is that I am happy to see a lot of development in Ethos, but agree, I would prefer they launched with a more polished version.

There are some things I would like to see added that I think will make Ethos even more polished and "EZ'r" to use.. :)
Click to expand...
Alright.
 
THANK YOU!

Well done. Mike's templets and writings opened up a lot of power in the Taranis (OpenTX) and the Multiplex Profi 4000. I'm sure these will add a lot to the usefulness of Ethos!
 
I have a simple rule - don't watch videos that have graphics like that one. Is it a bad rule?
 
It's an excellent rule, I use it myself. However, for some reason I was curious about this one and clicked on it... and it turned out to be pretty good!
 
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