Intravee

This was pulled from an email I received today. So sad.

Edit... Pasting the email won't work from my iPhone.

Simon Allen, creator of the Intravee, passed away November 23, 2012

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"Hello,

I’m RichardP from the Intravee forum; I’ve been involved with the Intravee on a non-commercial basis since it was first available and I am a moderator on the forum.

As some of you may have noticed the Intravee web site and forum have been unavailable since the start of last week end. It is with great sadness that I must inform you that Simon Allen, the owner of Intravention Electronics and the designer of the Intravee, passed away suddenly on Friday 23rd November. Simon was a highly talented individual who will be greatly missed by anyone that knew him.

Intravention Electronics was run entirely by Simon, with a little help from a few enthusiastic volunteers, the entire computer infrastructure was based at his home and run and maintained by him. Although I do not yet know any details of what may happen in the future, as of Friday evening it would appear that the computers running the Intravention web site have been shut down. There is currently no access to the forum, web site, software library or support e-mail. I have only been able to e-mail you because I had a backup of the forum users with Customer, or higher, access permissions. The future of the Intravee product is, at best, unclear.

The Intravee hardware itself is generally very reliable indeed; the only hardware problem I am aware of is that it is possible to blow the internal fuse. I have a quantity of these fuses and can supply them if required. It may be technically possible to continue with Intravee production as the manufacturing facility has all the details, legally and financially it may be a different story.

The Intravee release firmware is reasonably bug free, but only supports the Professional Nav system to any significant degree. The pre-release V6.02 firmware is also generally quite stable; the very latest build 6.02-6940 is a significant upgrade to V6.01 with support for Business Radio, Business Nav and MID. I have copies of the various pre-release firmware builds and, again, can supply this on request.

It may be possible for me to do some limited development on the Intravee firmware, however this would have to be done in my spare time and so the scope would be quite limited. I have the source code and the knowledge of the Intravee, iBus and AI-Net to continue development – however, what I do not have is the ability to compile the source code to create the firmware file. Simon used a version of a compiler that he modified, it may not be possible to obtain or use this compiler.

I apologise for the unsolicited e-mail, but thought that there would be many users that would like to know the situation. If you would like to be removed from receiving any future e-mails please reply to this e-mail with “Remove” as the subject line, otherwise I will endeavour to keep you informed of any developments. In the meantime, if you have any questions or problems, please e-mail me directly.

Richard"

Very sad news indeed. Simon was a true innovator and gave so much to the community.

I was involved in the very early Beta testing of the Intravee with Richard and the other guys. Although Simon built Intravee originally for the CD Changer, others wanted to push the boundary, and add additional devices such as iPod or DAB. I fondly remember testing the iPod for the very first time using the Alpine iPod interface (this was long before the days of iPhones !). We were all just so excited that it worked !! Simon .. being Simon, was happy, but of course wanted to make it better. That was just the way he was. He always wanted to do the best he could.

very sad news. I too received the email from Richard.