It will be fine
Well-Known Member
It depends on what all they are planning. Gps and engine diagnostics is nothing. Seatbelt and bulkhead door sensors won't take very long either.
Improvements to our trucks
- Thread starter 59 Dano
- Start date
59 Dano
I just want to make friends!
If there's a need to do so.
59 Dano
I just want to make friends!
"Out of service," in Express-speak, means that a MX pulled it out of the lineup and into his work area to do his work. The ones I've spoken to said they were told that it would take around an hour per truck. Or maybe more once you figure in all the paperwork and bad estimations they usually get.
SmithBarney
Well-Known Member
Unfortunately there are lots of "hungry" desperate for any kind of work people out there.. luckily there are plenty of Ground contractors as we know willing to hire just about anyone.
overflowed
Well-Known Member
I'll tell you a story. I once had a turn signal switch not work. Told the mechanics. We had a contracting mechanic that wanted to be hired on to fedex. He was just a mobile mechanic off craigslist. he changed that thing in 5 minutes. I heard the head mechanic bitch him out saying that should at least take an hour.
Oldfart
Well-Known Member
The mechanic pulled the steering wheel, replaced the switch and put the wheel back on in 5 minutes? I would have to see it to believe it.
overflowed
Well-Known Member
I was impressed too. One of the type of people you feel should be deported , go figure.
Code 82 Approved
Titanium Plus+ Level Member with benefits!
We run Fleetmatics, have our logs. Then chew on one of mine.
Operational needs
Virescit Vulnere Virtus
They'll probably be the last ones to find out even though they'll be tasked with installing it.
Purplepackage
Well-Known Member
Certain areas and districts will get it first, I'll bet 5 years after its rolled out there will still be stations without it.
Big stations are always first most of the time
Operational needs
Virescit Vulnere Virtus
I keep forgetting to ask our mechanics. I'm at one of the largest stations.
Fred's Myth
Nonhyphenated American
Are they coming in the same era as the new 'cellphone' powerpads? Will they be serviced by the same incompetent vehicle maintenance techs that can't keep a Sprinter on the road? It took 4 years for DRA to finally be implemented at my station, before they found out the engineer tasked with that implementation was a complete incompetent. Is this a contract with the lowest bidder again? If form follows function, this will be another typical FEDEX clusterf..k.
Purplepackage
Well-Known Member
I was told by a District Director that the cellphone powerpads are going to be used mainly by FO drivers. He said they are developing a slimmer more durable power pad for the full time guys
Star B
White Lightening
And I was told by our SM that it was for International stations.
Who knows? All I know is that the standard powerpad needs new guts and some updated software. Even just new guts would help.
It will be fine
Well-Known Member
The people at walgreens were using what I assume will be the new scanner today. They had to scan the boxes they gave me. It was strange and slow, they had to reboot the scanner.
SmithBarney
Well-Known Member
What FedEx needs to do but won't(because it costs $) is design a ppad, and software that doesn't run on top of the windows operating system. It needs to be something that runs as it's own stand alone. Many of the issues our PPADs have are because of the software running behind it.
Star B
White Lightening
Really? Windows MobileOS is quite slim as it is. Our main problems with our ppad software is from our software, not the underlying.
Let's put it this way... when I started and I had a YUUGE bulk, I never had to wait an hour for the scanner to unfreeze when I had to mark a few damaged. After the GPS update.. started freezing when I had to do one of those scans after scanning 200 pieces.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel with a proprietary OS for FX. Off the shelf hardware and software work just fine, as long as there are competent coders writing the application. Our problem is the competent coders. We don't have them!
SmithBarney
Well-Known Member
I agree it's the coders that can make it better, but most of the problems we have has to do with i/o for example the scanner, anything more than 1 piece sometimes can cause the connection between scanner/mobile os/app and back to go haywire. building an stand alone app that accesses hardware without a "middle man/mobileOS" cleans up the process...
Still running ontop of the MobileOS which IIRC hasn't been updated since 2010, its starting to show its age, and while is stable on it's own most of the "bugs" we experience on our side have to do with the OS stumbling behind the scenes
Star B
White Lightening
Yes, aging hardware and more requirements. It's also running out of local storage according to the engineer... but then that's what you get when you load the entire stations manifest (every single package assigned to the station) on a unit. The bigger the station, the bigger the problems, I bet.
What do you mean? The "barcode scanner" aka imager is a Zebra imager that just takes a picture the 1D/2D barcode and spits the data back to the application once it gets a good decode. The only "laser" in the powerpads is the box and the crosshairs. The red that is splashed all over the scan area? Those are just LEDs like in your alarm clock just to light up the area and create contrast to help the imager pick up the contrast. You could throw bright white LEDs in place and make it flash white and it would probably still work. Intermec makes a nice Windows7mobile unit with white LEDs and a red crosshair to help with aiming.
I've found that the application has just become unresponsive at times... if I were to guess it's because it's not multi-threaded (sign of the age of the app) and it can't properly handle the GPS logging, scanning requests and dealing with the batch queue at the same time.
EDIT: Maybe the unresponsiveness is what you are talking about. Well, here's a possible explanation of it: When the barcode scanner gets a good read, it needs to hear back from the application whether or not to allow another imager activation. It may be set in software to only allow one successful barcode scan per imager activation. If the software is frozen due to the previously mentioned threading issue, you scan the barcode, the imager decodes it and sends it to the software and waits for the software to respond. Because the software is frozen, it can't get the OK to do another scan, so it appears that the scanner is busted but when it is the software that is holding up the show.
What do you mean? The "barcode scanner" aka imager is a Zebra imager that just takes a picture the 1D/2D barcode and spits the data back to the application once it gets a good decode. The only "laser" in the powerpads is the box and the crosshairs. The red that is splashed all over the scan area? Those are just LEDs like in your alarm clock just to light up the area and create contrast to help the imager pick up the contrast. You could throw bright white LEDs in place and make it flash white and it would probably still work. Intermec makes a nice Windows7mobile unit with white LEDs and a red crosshair to help with aiming.
I've found that the application has just become unresponsive at times... if I were to guess it's because it's not multi-threaded (sign of the age of the app) and it can't properly handle the GPS logging, scanning requests and dealing with the batch queue at the same time.
EDIT: Maybe the unresponsiveness is what you are talking about. Well, here's a possible explanation of it: When the barcode scanner gets a good read, it needs to hear back from the application whether or not to allow another imager activation. It may be set in software to only allow one successful barcode scan per imager activation. If the software is frozen due to the previously mentioned threading issue, you scan the barcode, the imager decodes it and sends it to the software and waits for the software to respond. Because the software is frozen, it can't get the OK to do another scan, so it appears that the scanner is busted but when it is the software that is holding up the show.
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