Permobil F5, sip & puff and a ton of frustration

[shollen]

Hi, everyone.

I'm a C-1 quad with no functional sparing and I've been using sip & puff wheelchairs since 1985. I started out in E&J chairs and then 20'ish years ago bought a Permobil C500. The electronics were nothing to write home about but I harped until they agreed to help me tweak the programming. We spent most of a Friday in the parking in front of their place but finally got the thing handling satisfactorily. I was pretty good at the sip & puff thing and over the years learned to make the chair work for me very well. About five years later I bought another C500 because there's no way I'm lying in bed as my chair gets fixed. I put a lot of miles on my chairs but it's mostly walking my giant schnauzer, running around the country on vacation or at Virginia football/basketball/baseball games. I don't sit around much but don't put my chairs through a whole lot of rough stuff, and I take care of my equipment so my pair of Permobils has been very durable.

The main electronics module in my oldest chair died about six months ago and I was told I either had to buy a new module or ship the module back to the factory that they had found lying around the shop and installed in my chair. The issue was that the module was not programmed to for the ability to use "Latch Mode," and according to the techs at National Seating and Mobility that could only be changed by the manufacturer. I didn't quite believe that but my chairs were pushing two decades of service and were just wearing out all around, so I decided to get a couple new ones.

Few months later I had $41,000-worth of brand new F5. I had to change a bunch of stuff before I could even get in the chair, like add a top strap and have a machine shop alter the left armrest so I could take it off. I use a Buch board to get in and out of the chair and the armrests on the F5 aren't removable so I got that fixed. Three guys came out a coupla weeks later to help me program the chair, as it was sluggish, inaccurate and not responsive at all. So we got into it, and to make a long story short, Curtiss-Wright had removed the ability to slow a chair down from the sip & puff software when in Cruise mode. You could speed up, but you couldn't slow down again. Your only option was to come to a complete stop.

I went ballistic. Not only did that make zero sense, it was utterly stupid. What possible reason could CW have for taking away such a basic and necessary element of movement from people who are so extremely limited in their movement options in the first place? I mean, it may seem like a small thing to most folks but this change is crippling to people who are already severely crippled. Their answer to the problem is "step mode," a "feature" that lets you speed up or slow down in five steps. The problem with that is that you get 20% of your total speed with each step and the only way to get slower on the bottom end is to reduce the top end speed of the chair. You get 20% regardless, so you have a choice of either a chair you can handle a little more decently in close quarters but runs at a max speed 2-3 mph slower or you keep your top speed. What kind of a choice is that?

They have an answer for that too, and the answer is "profiles," one with slow steps for indoors and one that gives you top speed. But I have to ask, have you ever heard of a more kludgy hack of an excuse of a solution for ANYTHING than that? How do you think the bright people who create these designs would change their tune if the decisions they made for those of us with no choice but to use their equipment meant they had to operate under the same stupid rules they impose on us when they want to move? I bet they'd think twice if they spent three minutes walking around and had to stop every they changed speeds or spend ten minutes scrolling through menus to change their mobility profile every time they go in or out the front door? I haven't had an opportunity to try it out yet, but I can easily foresee that this change to the electronics is going to make it nigh impossible for me to operate in a crowd. When I'm in the crush after a ball game I speed up and slow down constantly and without thinking, often at a fraction of one MPH.

After a little investigation the stupidity of this design decision became a lot easier to understand. Curtiss-Wright is an international conglomerate that makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. (I didn't waste my time digging but that's what their website suggests.) They sure as heck didn't buy wheelchair electronics to go into the wheelchair electronics business. The only thing I can figure is that the wheelchair electronics had some technology in it that they wanted so they bought it and are letting the rest rot. I'd say it was sad if it wasn't so infuriating. The old E&J sip & puff electronics were lightyears ahead of the crap they hacked onto Permobil two decades ago and now they've nerfed it even more. 32 years and sip & puff wheelchair electronics has done nothing but spiral in a steady decline.

I have a lot more to say about the F5 and wheelchair design as it relates to my experience so far with the chair but some of that belongs in other topics and this is way too long already for anyone to read. If anybody has made it this far, I would like to ask: Does anyone know if deceleration in cruise mode is something I can reprogram or has it been coded out of the software all together?

Thanks moocho.

-Shan

[Burgerman]

Were you using the R-Net Omni as your input device?

If so then I suspect that its possible to program a lot of the things you are talking about.

I for one only use 1 profile for everything. The rest are all disabled. At least with a joystick, and CORRECT programming thats all anyone ever needs from a crawl to flat out.

I never looked into the omni programming but will take a look in a minute.
Are you with a dealer or a guy that does know what he is doing from PG Drives? And with OEM programmer or the dumb end user dealer version?

[shollen]

Yes, Omni display. Sorry.

No. The guy/s I'm dealing with don't know their ass from a hole in the ground and I told them so when they were here last time. I followed up a couple of weeks later raking them over the coals and telling them they owe me the courtesy of at least looking at the manual, which states right at the top of the programming chapter that the most important thing is getting the turn and other acceleration/decelerations and stuff right before you even think about starting on the Omni, but they weren't interested in that. They said my chair was too old for them to get the settings off of so they could program my new chair similarly, and while I'm pretty sure it's true that they can't just transfer it directly, if they knew what they were doing and were inclined to do their fricking jobs, the could and would look at the old settings to get at least a ballpark on what they were doing. But I digress.

I'm a coder myself so I know a little bit about what I'm dealing with and am in the process of learning as much as I can about Omni and PGDT programming. I don't know about the programmer. They didn't bring one with them last time. I will ask.

Thank you for your quick reply. I appreciate your knowledge, ability and desire to help more than I can say.

-Shan

[Burgerman]

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... VJmW0PVQJ2


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... gm5J74iz5u

Read very carefully! https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... KETLEydbkc

[shollen]

Thanks! I've read the first two. The third is a great reference. I see some stuff in there that I definitely want to change. It will be interesting to see how some of this stuff is set out of the factory. A few of the settings could possibly get me deceleration in cruise mode but I'm not hopeful. The crap they gave me about latch mode only being settable at the factory is just that. CRAP.

[Burgerman]

Well thats because the OEM level programmers we have are actually Original Equipment Manufacturer tools. But the dealer, or even a permobil tech that comes to you may well not be able or even allowed to change it. But yep, crap!