Re: Nokia set-top box: example of *dreadful* embedded design

From: Paul Carpenter (paul$_at_pcserv.demon.co.uk)
Date: 01/20/05 

Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:31:42 +0000 (GMT)

On Thursday, in article <V9qdnZmOg8mCGHLcRVn-ig@nildram.net>
     steve@NOSPAMTAfivetrees.com "Steve at fivetrees" wrote:
>I don't know quite why it is that set-top boxes are so poorly designed as a
>breed. I've had cable units, satellite units, and (now) freeview
>(terrestrial digital) set-top boxes - almost without exception [1], they've
>been flaky as hell.

Reduced parts and bad design partitioning.

>I have a Nokia Mediamaster 221T freeview unit which is an extreme example.
>It's always been flaky, but since upgrading the firmware recently, it's
>become virtually unusable - it's been known to freeze (requiring a full
>power cycle) 4 or 5 times within 5 minutes. I've had discussions with Nokia
>about it via email, culminating in a phone conversation with a "support
>agent" just now - she tells me I live in a poor signal area (which is kinda
>true), and that a poor signal can cause the unit to freeze - a statement
>which I take as a stunning admission of failure on the part of the Nokia
>designers.

I have seen ADSL routers gow AWOL from the network because they are having
problems with the ADSL line. Example of which was one ISP forgot to tell
me that they use VC encapsulation not LLC, so the unit goes busy sorting
out the line. Eventually reconfigure the unit and it works continuously.

>[1] One exception: my daughter bought a no-name freeview box for ?30 or so
>from a local dealer, expecting little from it - and it's been superb. It's
>not frozen once, and the picture is fine (theoretically poor signal
>notwithstanding). I bought the Nokia unit for about ?130 (over a year ago,
>sadly) because I thought Nokia knew what they were doing. Hah.
>
>I can't think of any other product where poor signal could be used as an
>excuse for system freezes. What *is* going on? Presumably the RTOS is using
>up all its cycles trying to derive a clean signal, to the extent that the
>unit crashes. How can this possibly be justified?

Basically some companies have the attitude "It can ALL be done in software"
and by that they mean ONE CPU doing all the work, so they have reduced
parts count and cost. Don't even get me on the poor software design for
upgrading firmware in some network devices, that cannot cope with
saving config onto PC and restoring config after upgrade. The number that
don't have default values for NEW features and ONLY update the configurtion
items that exist in the old version is unbelievable.

A classic case of this was a router that on firmware upgrade added the
ability to set router time from a PC or manually after the firmware upgrade,
but obviously when restoring a configuration assumed it was from a same
version of firmware so time values all became UNDEFINED!!! Poor software
checks and methods, which to my mind is typical of bad desktop application
programmers doing embedded work with an embedded version of the desktop OS.

>Steve
>(an ex-loyal Nokia customer)
>http://www.fivetrees.com 

-- 
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
<http://www.pcserviceselectronics.co.uk/>    PC Services
<http://www.gnuh8.org.uk/>              GNU H8 & mailing list info
<http://www.badweb.org.uk/>             For those web sites you hate

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