Just finished reading a weeks worth of emails on an account i dont use much. In them is a email from a kind of one off job client, its annoyed me a bit but wanted some thoughts on it.
A while back in the summer a neighbor I know by sight but not very well, approached me. At first i thought he wanted me to cut and bale a field for him, which i thought was a bit odd as this guy would rather let the field go over than pay someone to cut,turn and bale.
By the end of the conversation i had worked out this wasnt what he was after, apparently he knew someone who knew someone who had heard from someone else, that i looked after the old schools wind turbines (the ones i took out). Apparently he had been told i knew things about wires (his words), and he had a problem with some 'special wires' (again his words).
To cut the strange and long conversation down, turns out every time he tries to cut and bale a particular field, the tractor cuts out and shows an error light. he had taken it to the local agri repair place, but they had said it was a dead tractor because the black box needed replacing, the place where they apparently keep 'special wires' on a tractor
. The local place dosnt do 'special wires'.
So i finally got to the bit where he mentions that Gordons (the agri place, but not the large well known Gordons agricultural )had told him that the black box had a connector to the special wires, and some people have a box that talks to this black box and the special wires. So i thought ODBC 2! And sure enough he was after someone who could plug in and read the systems control and distribution panel (label on black box!).
Obviously a wind turbine and tractor are very similar, so he thought he would ask me, he was also aware i cut hay in the summer for some the locals. So despite putting two and two together and getting 17, he came to ask for my help.
I took the tractor for a spin and sure enough at certain points it would cut out in the field and show the system failure light. Now the tractor is a kind of Chinese copy of a ClASS brand tractor. except its a real cheap badly implemented one. I got a OBDC2 reader i made from a 8051 dev kit from sil labs, it works well and is portable. I plug it in and try again, i get 17 errors come up, most of them really strange.
But the one that was causing issues was the oil level flag, as soon as the tractor was side on into a slope it would trigger a sudden oil drop alarm and close the tractor down. So nice easy fix was to reprogram the controller so it would wait 30 seconds rather than the 5 second option it was on, i then made it read the oil pressure sensor, if both were low then it would shut down.
He paid me £10 for these 12 hours of work!!
Couple of days later he came back to me, various light on the dash kept coming on and could i plug my machine in, i did so and again most the errors were silly, but the system has a thing where it shuts down if you get more than X (you can set the number) errors in Y time frame. I explained the junk he had brought was just being annoying.
I explained that according to the special wires, if the windscreen washer level drops suddenly (like on an incline), that could count as 3 errors. i said it might be an idea to get one of my little boxs and a small colour screen to read them. Add in a system reset switch and he could decide if there was a problem or simply reset the box.
I designed it and built it, he paid me £30 including the parts.
Over the next few months i sold several of these to local people, based roughly on the same thing, all it does it show on a screen a readable form output from the ODBC from the management system, that way the farmer can decide if there is a real problem that needs attention now, or if he can finish what he is doing and fix it later.
yes they could buy a reader, but most wouldnt, most just want a screen to show the info. So i made a few of these up local people and sold them for £170 each.
Now i got this email, they original guy is telling me i owe him money!! he says he is entitled for a cut of what i sell as the design belongs to him!! he paid for the work so he owns it!! Blah Blah Blah
my immediate reaction is go and enjoy yourself in private. But the way its worded sounds like he has asked someone about it, to be honest in a situation like this, i have no idea if he has any rights to it or not, i should point out that there is custom code on the chip that i wrote. It does use a standard ODBC2 driver etc, but i did the stuff that outputs it to a small screen, and does some resets etc from a couple of switches i installed.
So who in this situation owns the rights to this?? surely its me?
A while back in the summer a neighbor I know by sight but not very well, approached me. At first i thought he wanted me to cut and bale a field for him, which i thought was a bit odd as this guy would rather let the field go over than pay someone to cut,turn and bale.
By the end of the conversation i had worked out this wasnt what he was after, apparently he knew someone who knew someone who had heard from someone else, that i looked after the old schools wind turbines (the ones i took out). Apparently he had been told i knew things about wires (his words), and he had a problem with some 'special wires' (again his words).
To cut the strange and long conversation down, turns out every time he tries to cut and bale a particular field, the tractor cuts out and shows an error light. he had taken it to the local agri repair place, but they had said it was a dead tractor because the black box needed replacing, the place where they apparently keep 'special wires' on a tractor
. The local place dosnt do 'special wires'.So i finally got to the bit where he mentions that Gordons (the agri place, but not the large well known Gordons agricultural )had told him that the black box had a connector to the special wires, and some people have a box that talks to this black box and the special wires. So i thought ODBC 2! And sure enough he was after someone who could plug in and read the systems control and distribution panel (label on black box!).
Obviously a wind turbine and tractor are very similar
, so he thought he would ask me, he was also aware i cut hay in the summer for some the locals. So despite putting two and two together and getting 17, he came to ask for my help. I took the tractor for a spin and sure enough at certain points it would cut out in the field and show the system failure light. Now the tractor is a kind of Chinese copy of a ClASS brand tractor. except its a real cheap badly implemented one. I got a OBDC2 reader i made from a 8051 dev kit from sil labs, it works well and is portable. I plug it in and try again, i get 17 errors come up, most of them really strange.
But the one that was causing issues was the oil level flag, as soon as the tractor was side on into a slope it would trigger a sudden oil drop alarm and close the tractor down. So nice easy fix was to reprogram the controller so it would wait 30 seconds rather than the 5 second option it was on, i then made it read the oil pressure sensor, if both were low then it would shut down.
He paid me £10 for these 12 hours of work!!
Couple of days later he came back to me, various light on the dash kept coming on and could i plug my machine in, i did so and again most the errors were silly, but the system has a thing where it shuts down if you get more than X (you can set the number) errors in Y time frame. I explained the junk he had brought was just being annoying.
I explained that according to the special wires, if the windscreen washer level drops suddenly (like on an incline), that could count as 3 errors. i said it might be an idea to get one of my little boxs and a small colour screen to read them. Add in a system reset switch and he could decide if there was a problem or simply reset the box.
I designed it and built it, he paid me £30 including the parts.
Over the next few months i sold several of these to local people, based roughly on the same thing, all it does it show on a screen a readable form output from the ODBC from the management system, that way the farmer can decide if there is a real problem that needs attention now, or if he can finish what he is doing and fix it later.
yes they could buy a reader, but most wouldnt, most just want a screen to show the info. So i made a few of these up local people and sold them for £170 each.
Now i got this email, they original guy is telling me i owe him money!! he says he is entitled for a cut of what i sell as the design belongs to him!! he paid for the work so he owns it!! Blah Blah Blah
my immediate reaction is go and enjoy yourself in private. But the way its worded sounds like he has asked someone about it, to be honest in a situation like this, i have no idea if he has any rights to it or not, i should point out that there is custom code on the chip that i wrote. It does use a standard ODBC2 driver etc, but i did the stuff that outputs it to a small screen, and does some resets etc from a couple of switches i installed.
So who in this situation owns the rights to this?? surely its me?
