Fixing small plastic... things

On 2010 Dec 7, at 2:39 AM, Christian Corti wrote: No, I haven't. The objective is to make a precise gate-level simulation of the calculator, both for understanding and which can be used to track down faults in a broken instance of the real thing. Patents generally don't provide the level of accuracy for that objective, so it generally doesn't occur to me to look to patents for these purposes. Looking at the first you mention, 3523282, it is *very* detailed in it's 216 pages. But therein we run into the other problem with some technical patents: they take things to the other extreme. The schematic of something is presented (is it really the schematic of the EC-130?), spread across more than 100 pages with apparently precise - but largely unhelpful - labels for the interconnections. The prose description, filling another 100 pages, is like bad comments in code: it again appears to describe precisely what is happening, but at a very low level and in a very obfuscated manner. Very little elucidation of the intent, to obtain a higher level understanding of what is going on, is provided. Technical patents like this were not intended for the dissemination of information or to assist in understanding. They exist so the patent holder, who already knows what is buried in there, when they hear of an infringement, can point to page 546187484109, paragraph 9086(j)(g)(4)(n)(8) and say "See, right there, you stole my idea." It appears there may be some tidbits of useful information in there and I wouldn't ignore it, but on the whole, to understand this patent, one has to reverse engineer it. I'd rather work from an original unit, and know what I had in the outcome. On the other hand, it could be an interesting (but laborious) exercise to piece together a simulation something out of it in the end that actually worked.