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Jun 26, 2015 · During testing, Etak boiled the system down into two variants: the 700, which shipped with a 7-inch screen, and the 450, which shipped with a 4.5-inch screen. They called the product the Etak ...
Justin Novak from the U.S. Army's DEVCOM Aviation & Missile Center has designed a rail system that allows the attachment of day/night sights to the FIM-92 Stinger missile, enhancing the capabilities of a short-range air defense team. The rail system is part and parcel of the Enhanced Target Acquisition Kit (ETAK), which allows a standard ...
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What is an Etak navigation system?
Is Navteq the same as etak?
What does Etak do?
When did Etak start?
- Origin of Etak
- The Car Navigation System
- The First Heads-Up Display
- Map Matching
- Hardware
- Calibrating The System
- The Building A Business
In 1983, I was working at SRI and ocean navigating professionally. I’d use my vacation time, and take occasional leave-without-pay from SRI to navigate in offshore races. One of these projects was to navigate on an ocean racer that Nolan Bushnell was building in order to win the Transpac, the Los Angeles to Honolulu sailing race. Nolan Bushnell cre...
Hardware Challenges
The ETAK Navigator was a huge technical undertaking because many of the fundamental bits and pieces that we needed didn’t exist. In those days, computer power and memory were very expensive, graphic displays were too expensive, and the data storage devices that we needed for the maps didn’t exist. A good deal of work was thus needed to overcome these limitations. We also had to design and build our own differential wheel sensors. We ended up building variable reluctance sensors used in conjun...
Map Topology and Data Storage
The need to store map data efficiently on a tape triggered us to develop one of the key technologies that ETAK had: the extremely efficient hierarchical storage of map data. This efficient storage system was essential for maps stored on tape, but when we used this topologically structured map storage structure on a disk drive on a conventional computer, the ETAK map retrieval and geocoding software was able to retrieve map data and geocode addresses many times faster than the other existing a...
Our plan was to sell the ETAK car navigation system as an after-market product for use in automobiles. We used a CRT-based, vector display mounted in the front of the car. It was a heading-up display in the sense that the map was automatically rotated to orient it so that the direction in which the car was heading was always at the top of the displ...
Another valuable patent was map matching, removing the uncertainty and error in position through cross correlation between the measured movement of the car and the roads themselves. Interestingly, even when GPS later became available and it was easy to know where you were within several meters, people continued to use map matching because the syste...
The hardware components of the system consisted of a processor, which was about the size of a shoebox and was typically kept in the trunk of the vehicle; that contained the 8088 and 128kb of memory. There was the tape drive, which was mounted in the passenger compartment of the car because you needed to change tapes. Three tapes would cover the who...
We had a very powerful algorithm to calibrate the compass. The calibration ritual basically was as follows: install everything in the car; drive the car to an intersection; tell the system where it was; drive to some other intersection and tell it where it was; and then you’d drive the car in a few circles. The system would use the circles to calib...
The business part of ETAK was frustrating because we were very far ahead of our time. Back then if you told somebody that you’ve developed a vehicle navigation system, they had no idea what you were talking about except for possibly a vague recollection of a James Bond movie. At the time, nobody understood the product that we were selling. Telling ...
Jun 29, 2018 · Etak’s first product, the Navigator, came in two flavors. Model 450 had a small 4.5″ vector display and retailed for $1,395, while the Model 700 sported a spacious 7″ screen and a $200 ...
Enhanced Target Acquisition Kit, or ETAK, leveraged existing equipment, government manufacturing capabilities, and commercial hardware to rapidly produce an inexpensive prototype. The Prototyping and Experimentation Branch leveraged the Air and Missile Defense Prototyping Framework to integrate
May 27, 2012 · The Etak machine cost about $1,500 in the late 1980s, Landes said. Etak, which was sold many times since the late 1980s, is now part of the Dutch navigation company TomTom.
Etak. Etak, Inc. was an independent US-based vendor of automotive navigation system equipment, digital maps, and mapping software. It was founded in 1983. [1] Competitor Navteq was founded in 1985. [2] Its original headquarters were in Sunnyvale, but the company later moved to 1430 O'Brien Drive ( View on OpenStreetMap) in Menlo Park, California.
