Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | My Coworker noticed that these versions have been released and downloaded them. He installed the new version in a 332 which was in a tractor at the shop for installation of a strip-till setup.
This 332 was operating with Omnistar. He said that the Convergence time seemed much improved.
We lost power in town yesterday due to a transformer failure so I drove home over the noon hour to install Version 3.05 in my own personal EZ-Guide 500.
I rotated the 500 on the RAM mount in preparation for inserting the Jumpdrive which contained the firmware update. I then turned on the power switch which powers the EZ-Guide 500 and my Nav II for the autopilot system.
The 500 did not seem to come to life. I noticed that the external keypad was lighted and the LED on the Nav II was blinking as expected. Upon closer inspection I could see that the 500 had actually come to life but it was very difficult to read the screen.
I could see it well enough to proceed with the update which went as expected. This did not change the screen situation.
I returned to work with the 500 and I plugged it in to battery power there. Again it was very difficult to read the screen.
Another Coworker came by and found the problem. The power cable connector at the back of the 500 was not fully seated. Apparently the power to run the unit is a different pin (there are 5) than the pin for the lighting. I had started the connector and tightened the collar but the connector had enough friction that it was not fully mated. The screen then came to life as expected.
Since we still didn't have power in town, most of us took the afternoon off. I went home and reinstalled the 500 in the tractor making sure that I got all the connectors fully mated. This took care of the screen problem. Apparently the connector had been mated enough to work properly in the tractor but became partially disconnected when I rotated the 500 to insert the Jumpdrive.
I got the usual warning messages about autopilot which was followed by a new message indicating that my autopilot needs a firmware update to work with the 500. My Coworker said that he had not noticed any new firmware updates for the Nav II.
Fortunately I do not need to use the tractor/autopilot at this time. I will need to investigate this apparent mismatch between the Nav II and the 500's firmware versions.
I also updated my 332 which feeds an autopilot in a different tractor. The update procedure went as expected in that tractor. In that tractor an Insight is used for the display. Since the Insight was not in the tractor at this time and the tractor was tucked back in the shed, I was not able to do any testing.
Back to the EZ-Guide 500. I did look at the DGPS screen to see if external GPS and other choices are now available. It appears that several choices have been added. Although I don't plan on using any of the new choices I looked at them anyway.
When I picked the choice for an external correction source (which is apparently desired by our friends "down under"), a message appeared indicating that I would need to use a different steering setup other than autopilot. I probably misunderstood the message but this would seem to be a serious limitation if using an external correction source would prevent one from using autopilot.
Edited by tedbear 8/31/2008 09:10
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EZ-Guide 500 3.05 Firmware released
