Boardmaker 2 - dongle required

Hear, Hear. I have also wasted too much time on malfunctions due to dongles. They break or interfere with other previously working software.

After all these years, there is no excuse for these abominations. I don't want to have to deal with them. Down with the companies that use them.

If I can't find a non-dongle subsititute, I'll figure a way around it, or write my own code to solve the problem.

Die, dongles.

Mike Monett

Hi Joerg,

He must have been some engineer. He looked at it while putting it together, and never gave a thought of what might happen if unknown forces happened to apply unwanted forces in an undesired direction. No foresight, and no protection. Typical of those who put up with dongles. They deserve every problem that occurs.

Get him to get his pilot's license and fly back and forth across the US for a couple of years. That will cure his optimism:)

I put over 750 hours in my bird, and never bent it or wrinkled it in any way. Here's the only incident that happened - note it was not my fault:)

Actually, we were doing a run to check out repairs to the nav system. It had previously failed near Reno, so we took off from San Jose and climbed to 25,000 feet enroute to Reno.

On arrival, the equipment checked out fine, so we were just about ready to turn the heading bug on the autopilot 180 degrees, when there was a loud bang and the prop stopped turning. That is not good. First off, you start to lose pressurization. At 25kft, you may have 30 seconds of consciousness. But you have a whole bunch of other problems following in split-second intervals.

My copilot and flight instuctor, Barbara Mock, said "What did you do now??"

I said "Never mind. It's your plane - YOU fly it." (Note this is the official language required by the FAA when a terrified owner/primary pilot relinquishes command to a mere mortal employee who happens to be able to fly rings around him in an emergency.)

So she got on the horn and told ATC we had an engine failure and were going down. Meanwhile, I got the flight manual and madly scrambled through the emergency procedures to find the instructions for engine failure.

Found it! Step 1 - Turn the Emergency Boost Pump to Maximum.

Step 2. NOTE - Do Not Do Step 1 above 18,000 feet. It will flood the engine. Use Minimum Boost instead.

Too late. I flooded the engine. We are now doomed. Over the mountains at midnight, with no engine and full fuel. We will end up in a flaming ball of crumpled aluminum.

But Wait - the navigation system. It knows where the nearest airpoirt is.

Punch the emergency button. The nearest airport is about 4nm away. Direction is straight down through the clouds. We happen to be directly over the Reno, Nevada airport. Very convenient, but we don't know the thickness of the cloud layer. Deadstick at night in IFR has a very low success rate.

The commercial airlines grumble when ATC kicks them to holding patterns over the desert. I turn every light on in the plane. We break through the clouds. Reno tower spots us and says "60 Victor, We have you in sight. You are cleared to land. Runway of your choice."

This means we can land anywhere. On a runway. On a taxiway. In the parking lot. Anywhere we can get this thing down.

She pulls a perfect three-point deadstick landing on the main runway. It is too long and we cannot coast to the taxiway. So we stop and get out.

Then it hits you. Up to now, you are far too busy with procedures and switches to have time for fear.

With your feet on solid ground, your legs turn to rubber and you can barely walk.

We accept a ride from the airport police and check in at the nearest hotel. They will tow the plane to a safe spot and tie it down. We are done for the night.

So die dongles. There is nothing you can do to match that.

Mike Monett

Hello David,

Check the contacts of your dongle. If it contains a cheap connector without gold-plated pins or the one in the PC is cheap they can oxydize or wear out.

As far as dongles are concerned I have always refused to buy any SW that requires a dongle. If they don't trust me I don't trust them ;-)

BTW, sometimes it does help to bypass anyone else and bring an issue like this before the CEO of the manufacturer. Should be the last resort but sometimes that gets things moving.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Mike,

Here is the weirdest way one of these died at a client. There was a jack-of-all-trades engineer. Consequently he had licensed copies of CAD, compilers, debuggers, mechanical CAD and what not on his PC. That required about half a dozen dongles, all neatly stacked on top of each other but facing horizontal. One night the janitors must have pushed the PC a bit and.... ka-crunch.

Regards, Joerg

Ah memories, I have hacked code like this years ago to remove the requirement of having the stupid dongle. I would make sure the contacts between dongle and system and tight, short of that you are at their mercy. I can't believe the company would not simply swap out the old for a new one!

If you are anywhere near Derbyshire, you can borrow mine for a bit. It's only the original BM though, without schematic integration or power plane support. I never upgraded it because of Tsien's predatory upgrades policy- practically full price. I only keep it in case I have to support some very old designs that I can't be bothered translating.

Easy PC can import BM designs, and if you decide to upgrade, I think you would probably find it worthwhile, after all, 10 years is a long time in PCB design.

Paul Burke

At one time I had a half-dozen dongles on my laptop. I simply got a

Hmmmm....

Seems like they are saying you bought it now it your baby.

With that I would have no problems putting a logic probe on the parallel port bus and creating a device that would mimic the response from the dingle.

I would try replacing or cleaning the connectors first as is a usual culprit, however some MVRAM products do get forgetful after a while short while 5-10 years. programmed obsolescence? You could build it right into your old dongle if you wnat to avoid obsolescence issues.

I'm sure there are "dongle buster" hacks all over google if you care to look.

Like you said you're not trying to steal, your only trying to keep something you paid for working.

Would someone be kind enough to post a link to this dongle.

Pictures would be nice.

donald

Hello Mike,

Wow, that sure must have been a white knuckle ride. Some day I'll start training for the license. Kind of have to since we live right next to the Cameron Park runway which you probably know when you fly in the Sierra.

So far my experience with airplanes has been to leave them in mid flight and then pop my parachute. Often I jumped last and opened right away so I got a nice 20 minute or so scenic glide to earth. Oh, and then there was a flight across the Atlantic that became a bit white knuckle. About an hour or so before the Belgian coast, poof, one of the engines quit and that meant there was only one more left. But that one held until Frankfurt. They cleared the whole Frankfurt airspace for us and there were all the ambulances and fire engines they could muster waiting for us.

Regards, Joerg

google "dongle crack" and there are a couple of firms that will copy a dongle sig for you, for money I think.... googleing for dongle buster seems to bring up "warez" sites which I avoid like the plague

martin

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 22:24:49 -0400, Mike Monett wrote: ...

... OK, I'm a sick f*ck. In the middle of this gripping story, my homunculus says, "Only Four Nanometers? You're already practically on top of it!" ;-)

Thanks, Rich [Where's my parachute! -- R]

You're a jumper! Kewl! I haven't jumped in way too many years - too broke. For some reason, I never seem to get past about the 10-second mark, and some circumstance happens, and the next opportunity to go jumping, I have to go back on the damn boring static line again. I get jealous of people who have the bucks to hire a tandem jump, but from the humpers[typo retained for ironic humour] I've met, I don't know if I'd want any of them to jump me tandem. (;-)) I also have four hours in a Cessna 150 and approx. an hour in the Republic Airlines DC-9 simulator, albeit it's not logged, since it was after hours.

I fantasize that one day, I'll be in some transoceanic flight, and the stew will say, "Does anybody here know how to fly an airplane?" Or maybe only a transcontinental flight. Or maybe a puddle-jumper.

There are no speed limits in the air. ;-P

Eat! F*ck! Skydive! Rich (Or, as was pointedly pointed out to me once, "eat, f*ck, static line." Sigh.)