Tom Anderson wrote:
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Mr Thant wrote:

On Aug 24, 1:53 pm, John B wrote:

I'm missing the 'non-trivial' element, here...

A bus ticket machine is a fairly simple off-the-shelf gadget. You're
proposing bolting on a relatively huge amount of new electronics for
very little gain, plus the additional costs of maintaining it and
payingt for bandwidth and so on. From a technological point of view
you're right, it is trivial, but logistically and economically, no it
isn't.

Okay, hands up anyone here who's an electronic engineer.

I'm a programmer, so I have a good idea of what "trivial" means in terms
of even that aspect of the project.

So we're all more or less talking out of our collective hats, then?

Perhaps you are, if you say so. I'm not.

A mate of mine designed a system for trucks that monitors their
position, speed, and brake use, and radios it back to base for tracking
and maintenance management type stuff. It's a box with a GPS chipset, a
GPRS chipset, some analogue-to-digital converters, and a
microcontroller. I wouldn't say it was trivial, at all, but it was also
not the kind of impossibility you make out. [1]

I don't think anyone has said what John has proposed is *impossible,*
only that it is not *trivial* either. What you describe is in the same
category.

You're right that it would add a fairly marginal amount of utility. But
buses are going to have computers with GPRS (and GPS) soon enough
anyway, for iBus, this kind of management-oriented telemetry, etc.
Adding an interface to the Oyster mainframe at that point would be a
matter of a ribbon cable and a few dozen thousand lines of code.

*Now* you're talking out of your hat.

It would be nice to collect online top-up at any Tube station rather
than having to nominate one. Or to allow collection without having to
wait overnight. Either of these things would be a walk in the park
compared to a GPRS-based system on the buses. Yet they are not done.

It's not as easy as you think. As Richard J. points out IT projects are
notorious for missing budgets and deadlines. I think no small part of
this is due to overly optimistic assumptions at the outset.
--
Michael Hoffman