If your engineering team had to wait for a product failure to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot, what on earth else are they missing?
(It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available. You may have noticed that there's been a pandemic going on for the last year or so, and that's hurt the availability of many electronic components, among other things.)
> It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't available
Fun fact: they don't make (commercially available) GPUs, NICs, pretty much any PC components rated below 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either pay out the nose for some serious engineering, or you just roll the dice. We rolled, and it turned out fine. That won't always be the case.
What Spacex is doing is smart, not sloppy.
Who is “we”?
It's made it 2 winters and dozens of missions so far.
The customer is NOAA and they really don't have oodles of cash to spend on this thing, so it's mostly commodity hardware. Initially we designed this whole crazy insulated case to keep it from getting too cold, but the aircraft engineers nixed it due to fire hazards. The airframe isn't airtight so it gets most of the brunt of the diurnal swing.
So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying for my resilience to motion sickness.
Stressful AF. So worth it.
Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device that utilized active cooling (as in would get colder than ambient not just fans or whatnot)?
Can't have the servers freezing when turned off.
edit: ahh, now I see it's because you're factually incorrect. It's only 1/3rd of humans that live within 100km of oceanic coasts.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-o...
Radiation doesn't help either, as sibling commented - it creates ions making the initial breakdown easier, though it shouldn't make a difference for a continuous flow that involves innumerable ions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIqK45nxcTo
He even explained it with balls and magnets!
Update: -40F is -40C, oops, my bad, I don’t understand Fahrenheit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also your example is a poor one. Engineering a systems solution for 0F is far easier than engineering for outdoors in the sun. Heat removal is a primary consideration and a 0F environment makes that far easier. In 0F your issue isn’t the cold, it’s the lack of humidity - again, something everyone who has more than two years in HW knows.
Umm, yes?
I see people here hate the idea of startups or engineers being responsible for any kind of reliable service even though lives depend on it, and as this "SV spirit" infiltrates more of our life even coffee machines don't work without an internet connection, a subscribtion and software update.
Completely prosperous
I think that's the idea...
[1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...
SpaceX, paradoxically, has easier time experimenting and partially failing, because they mostly haul machines. Every Tesla car, OTOH, has a human pilot.
The automotive screens didn’t exist in the size they needed and they weren’t at a stage in their company where they could design their own.
They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they were determined to bring into the world given the technical constraints of the age. I’d say overall it paid off.
IMO it wasn’t arrogance.
I don't like their handling of it from a warranty perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial decision was actually the wrong one.
Deliberately going forward with something in spite of knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.
Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically forced to admit the display issue because it was so pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.
Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that we just never found out about? What else might have gone wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from former employees about working conditions, too.
People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting their desire to have that image in their head untarnished means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans who live up to fanaticism.
Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of people who are insistent every issue is an unforgivable catastrophe are ridiculous.
The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal cycling with that particular part model as well. These things happen.
the second issue is that the severity of failure is not always taken into account. In your example of the Prius radio, there are several important differences IMO. The radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace it with something aftermarket and everything will be fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be missing, including climate control and the reversing camera. Additionally these units consistently failed early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.
A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from the NHTSA. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-fai...
But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I can't place the car into park or reverse. With the shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure hope that's the case.
The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done, ever. So many people are going to end up with completely shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the airbags deployed while they're turning and have their arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about the stalks, though.
Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.
Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C they needed to do at least a review of environmental constraints and operational ceilings, and the most rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily get to 80C.
But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's still not something to champion.
1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and regulations
2) Give business advice on (1)
An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it was a significant and potentially catastrophic engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over potential consumer safety risks as well as over the expertise of the component manufacturers.
The result is that these engineering disciplines have practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they are typically highly embarrassing and costly.
There is also the whole separate aspect of professional licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers are expected to hold their work to certain standards regardless of the business needs of the company they work for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this category, but it certainly looks like designing a product below the standard expected for that product. (what most people would call shoddy engineering).
In software we often get away with this, because we can put in the work later on, and also because people often have insanely low expectations of how well software will work.
I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We definitely didn’t use to ship software we knew would break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and delivering updates was hard.
The internet has been good for many many things. Software reliability hasn’t been one of them.
No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or a smaller LCD that wouldn’t.
This is just one of many decisions traced directly to Elon that fly in the face of established best practices. Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional misnaming of “autopilot”, and the resulting body count of the wide consumer release of its “beta” software.
So yes, it is arrogance.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...
> Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace injuries, because he didn’t like yellow stripes and beeping forklifts
I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together, Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous regardless of tape and beeping.
> Another complaint said the failure disabled safety monitors associated with Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot. [1]
It looks like losing access to the touchscreen does actually effect safety components, and driver's abilities to use them. (Though I'm not clear on to what extent - driver's might just need to crack out the manual to see how else to defog, for example.)
[0] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/06/tesla-investigated...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/u-s-probes-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/06/starl...
> Officially, SpaceX has said that "Dishy McFlatface" is certified to operate from 22° below zero up to 104° Fahrenheit. Temperatures reached about 120° yesterday in Martin's town of Topock,
> the Starlink app provided an error message saying, "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error message said.
Maybe not the greatest behavior, but clearly they already accounted for this.
This often leads to some of the most spectacular failures, and unforseen issues.
Or someone fucked up
They're beta, so it could be that the thermistor was placed poorly in a redesign, that they intended 122°C instead of °F, that they shipped with a dummy value used in an older fw during testing, etc.
All in all, a little embarrassing but not that significant, assuming this is certifiably not a scam.
If they planned to shut it down at 122C (which is indeed close to melting the solder) but by mistake made it shut down at 122F (not that much for most electronics), it would be a completely understandable blooper. It doesn't mean that the hardware isn't capable of operating at 122F.
> the Bombardier CRJ aircraft used on some shorter routes have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/20/533662790...
In the case of Starlink's dish, it's not clear which temperature they mean.
The temperature limit for takeoff performance has nothing to do with the maximum temperature for electronics or other components. It's about air density decreasing which reduces the engine thrust as well as the maximum lift from the wings. So the warmer it gets the lower the maximum weight you can take off with and the higher the speed required before lift-off. At some point that's not safe anymore so the manufacturers only publish verified performance data up to a maximum temperature. You can't legally fly above that.
About a year or so after the article I linked above was published, Bombardier obtained ISA+40C certification for the CRJ700 and CRJ900 from both the FAA and TC. For the flights in and out of Phoenix, AZ, this meant that those aircraft have since been able to legally fly in temps of up to 123.8F. I don’t know the details of the certification upgrade, but my understanding is that there were no changes to either the aircraft or weight restrictions.
I don’t personally know anyone at Bombardier to know exactly why they didn’t certify the aircraft for ISA+40C to begin with, but given that there were apparently no changes to either the aircraft or the weight restrictions, this seemed very much a case of “your engineering team had to wait ... to realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get hot”.
We use ISA differences (the +40 you wrote) in flight performance calculations specifically. Not in any "aircraft too warm / cold" kind of limits, since those would be absolute numbers not relative to ISA.