hybrid 1043 Report post Posted November 26, 2012 Sad news, Hello, I’m RichardP from the Intravee forum; I’ve been involved with the Intravee on a non-commercial basis since it was first available and I am a moderator on the forum. As some of you may have noticed the Intravee web site and forum have been unavailable since the start of last week end. It is with great sadness that I must inform you that Simon Allen, the owner of Intravention Electronics and the designer of the Intravee, passed away suddenly on Friday 23rd November. Simon was a highly talented individual who will be greatly missed by anyone that knew him. Intravention Electronics was run entirely by Simon, with a little help from a few enthusiastic volunteers, the entire computer infrastructure was based at his home and run and maintained by him. Although I do not yet know any details of what may happen in the future, as of Friday evening it would appear that the computers running the Intravention web site have been shut down. There is currently no access to the forum, web site, software library or support e-mail. I have only been able to e-mail you because I had a backup of the forum users with Customer, or higher, access permissions. The future of the Intravee product is, at best, unclear. The Intravee hardware itself is generally very reliable indeed; the only hardware problem I am aware of is that it is possible to blow the internal fuse. I have a quantity of these fuses and can supply them if required. It may be technically possible to continue with Intravee production as the manufacturing facility has all the details, legally and financially it may be a different story. The Intravee release firmware is reasonably bug free, but only supports the Professional Nav system to any significant degree. The pre-release V6.02 firmware is also generally quite stable; the very latest build 6.02-6940 is a significant upgrade to V6.01 with support for Business Radio, Business Nav and MID. I have copies of the various pre-release firmware builds and, again, can supply this on request. It may be possible for me to do some limited development on the Intravee firmware, however this would have to be done in my spare time and so the scope would be quite limited. I have the source code and the knowledge of the Intravee, iBus and AI-Net to continue development – however, what I do not have is the ability to compile the source code to create the firmware file. Simon used a version of a compiler that he modified, it may not be possible to obtain or use this compiler. I apologise for the unsolicited e-mail, but thought that there would be many users that would like to know the situation. If you would like to be removed from receiving any future e-mails please reply to this e-mail with “Remove†as the subject line, otherwise I will endeavour to keep you informed of any developments. In the meantime, if you have any questions or problems, please e-mail me directly. Richard Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
hybrid 1043 Report post Posted December 3, 2012 more I have leant that Simon died of a massive heart attack that must have killed him almost instantly. Simon was not married but leaves his mother and brother. He was in his late 40’s. After some serious digging around in my backups and archives, the future of the Intravee firmware development and support now looks much more secure. I have managed to recompile the firmware and load it onto my Intravee to confirm that it functions in the same way as the last version that was built on Simons computers. Leigh at ToysInYourCar has asked me to convey his continued interest in selling the product, that he still has stock and that he has a supply of the Intravee fuses as well as my self. My next focus will be on trying to organise a web site that can be used for hosting files and providing first line support information, hopefully a forum and support e-mail address too. At this stage I do not know if the Intravee forum information can be saved, this was hosted on Simon’s computers which have been turned off. Even with access to the computers I suspect that they will require passwords to access the data. Simon was very security conscious, his brother said it took them several days to access Simon’s room as he had a numeric key pad lock on the door! I have some rather old forum backup files, the last being from late 2010, so some of the information may be retrievable from those. Sending firmware images and the Intravee documentation by e-mail is not sustainable, the documentation files in particular are too large to e-mail in any volume. Leigh owns the domain name www.intravee.com which currently redirects to the Intravee page on the ToysInYourCar web site. This would be the preferred domain name to host a new site. In the short term Darren and Rob from www.bmw5.co.uk have agreed to host some files for people to download, you can find the thread at http://forum.bmw5.co.uk/topic/75485-the-intravee-thread/ Attached to the thread you will find the latest firmware, V6.02-6941, the downloader program, user guide, supported devices and PXA Supplement documentation. Many thanks to Darren and Rob for their help and support. I’ll also use this thread to keep people updated and save some e-mail bandwidth. There currently appears to be no reason why production of the Intravee hardware should not continue, although no details have even been discussed yet alone finalised. Although I have not yet talked to the factory where they are made, they should have all the components and information required for production. Simon set them up so they would normally have no reason to bother him! That’s all for now, try to keep an eye on the www.bwm5.co.uk thread for future developments. Richard Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
