junkcollector

Nanowatts are -60 dBm or what you would expect to receive on your cellphone when you have decent but not great signal. Many radios operate down to the -110 dBm/MHz PSD or lower ranges for high performance stuff. So you could use hits those power levels with energy harvesting on radio waves but only if you were in the right location, on the right band, and it would possibly cause problems for the systems that are trying to use those signals for their intended purposes.

Going to be a bit pedantic here but you absolutely can have 0 Voltage. Voltage is the potential energy created by a difference in charge between 2 points. If you have a mass with sufficient free mobile charge, when you inject additional charge into it, it will rearrange the charge within itself to cancel out in injected charge resulting in 0 Volts of potential. This is the principal that a ground connection works on and why you don't have voltage inside of metal conductors, just on the surface.

You shouldn't remove it because it was a retweet, you should have removed it because it clearly meant the opposite of what you were implying it meant. Plenty often people get lampooned for statements that are later divorced from content but you are taking a single word and divorcing it from the content of the sentence it's in.

It's probably the politics that led to the roughly 50% rise in cost of living across the state in the last decade.

There is little comfort to be had when you're losing your home and car because someone tells you that at least the homeless shelters and public transit are much better now.

They hate you, because they see you as a giant economic jackboot stepping on the face of the poor forever.

Conceptually, pattern matching isn't wrong. It's the implementation, presentation, and gross exaggeration of efficacy that is the real problem. DNA matching is still often pseudoscience voodoo the way it is used in courts for many of the same reasons that tooling marking is. Just look at Massachusetts, where they are having to retry 10's of thousands of cases because tests were botched by an malicious technician and then passed off in courts as foolproof even when the prosecution knew them to be suspect.

I think you misunderstand. When maintenance is being done on the machine itself, yes you are going to do a lock-out tag-out routine. On the flipside, if you remote push the update and it contains for instance, a register read error on the rate controller that shifts the bits by 1, the operator's first notice us going to be when he loads it up and the ensuing chatter violently throws the work piece.

Or something dumber, maybe they pushed a temp variable to the wrong type of memory (say flash eeprom) that updates every cycle of the control loop, and then did a push to an entire line of manufacturing equipment. Congratulations, all of those are going to brick in an hour or so when the memory hits it's maximum write cycle lifetime and you'll have to get new boards shipped in while your entire line is down.

Remote pushing needs to be handled very carefully when controlling real world equipment.

To touch on this a bit. To be a good controls guy that does PLC programming you need to have some mechanical background to understand the equipment you are controlling, you need to know enough electrical to do the wiring and parse what your sensors are telling you and you need to be a fair shake at programming/comm protocols/logic. Oh, and most control loop implementations are actually sets of differential equations with DSP inputs so having a knowledge in that stuff helps a lot when you get into the precision stuff.

If you go look at the current postings for these roles you'll find that the average salary is between $15-$25/hr, you'll be on call 24/7, and you have to work physically demanding jobs in relatively harsh environments. I've seen a few outfits that don't even offer to pay their employees for commuting time between sites, only for when they are actually sitting down and working on the boards.

I would argue that air gaps are critical in ICS networks and PLCs because it is an extreme safety risk to push a potentially bad update from offsite without clearing the operator. The major issue will be pushing back against cost pressure from management.

This is already turning into a major problem with IOT devices from supposedly reputable companies i.e. home thermostats that let pipes burst because of a bad or incorrectly pushed update. Now consider if that bad update could instead kill someone.

Neuralink is certainly on my radar as a company to watch but I thought it was more in an invite only Ph.D heavy theory stage than a hire and build board stage. The idea to use an acoustic radio for transmission in a mostly water media is very clever even if I worry about the safety margins of the power density involved with transmitting that much data.

Can you provide any technical detail about what is unique or novel about what your company does? Neither the wired article nor your company webpage has any useful information on what might differentiate you from the countless EMG devices out and hobbyist setups there.

TI makes some MEMS devices for automotive applications, but I don't know of anything in automotive with the type of complexity involved in a DLP. Their mixed signal integrated controls are pretty nuts but not mechanical.

The reason I'm not to worried about reliability is more or less as follows. The fact that TI makes other automotive parts is important because they know exactly what kind of environment these parts will be subjected to, they know how they will be handled when they are assembled from the chips TI ships into automotive boards, and what corners will be cut when those boards are sold and turned into assemblies which are sold and turned into cars. They have plenty of experience in determining what kind of reliability intervals will be required. TI built their first DLPs back in the 80s. They made their first commercial ones in the mid 90's. They probably never turned a profit on DLP until the mid 2000's which is about when they first demonstrated working prototype DLP headlights. They then spent 10 years refining them before taking them to market. TI isn't Facebook, they don't move fast and break things, they are an old school technology company that moves slow and reliable. If they get a reputation for poor reliability they stand to lose decades of investment and future revenue and they know it.

Another thing a lot of people probably don't know is that every TI part that fails in an automotive application gets returned to TI where a team of engineers meticulously dismantle it until they determine the exact cause of failure. They are legally obligated to do this from contracts with auto manufacturers but the net results for TI has been the development of one of the worlds most sophisticated semi-conductor reverse engineering capabilities.

I got a demo of this technology close to about 10 years ago from TI. Their "killer app" in the lab was a pairing of the DLP with their DSPs to track rain while driving and reduce illumination of rain drops such that glare to the driver was substantially reduced. It was in a lab, but it worked surprisingly well.

Another thing that many people don't realize is that TI makes a huge number of automotive parts currently with extremely tight reliability controls in place for customers like Toyota, as well as established supply chains from silicon to road via companies like Temic automotive.

Personally, I hope TI continues to develop DLP into new markets. The tech is really cool, their miniaturized projectors using laser sources for embedding into smartphones is another demo I saw that would be really interesting if it ever hits market.

There is also the fact that the renewal vote happens on an election cycle. If the republicans hold the house, the tax cuts will be renewed. If the democrats take control, they will be forced to expire the cuts since they are planning to campaign heavily on the tax bills as bad for the public. This means that if the GOP loses control, the following year taxes will go up on most voters and help reinforce the GOP narrative of the Democrats as the party of taxation.

I used FEKO for some time and it had the best interface for doing optimization out of the EM solvers in my opinion. The development team out of South Africa was also excellent in the brief times I got to work with them directly. Unfortunately after the company was acquired the new monetization scheme didn't work out with my office and we largely switched to CST.

Most discussions centered on environmental concerns boil down to accepting a massive quality of life reduction for most of the world's population. It is usually colored by someone who thinks it wouldn't impact themselves much and that the world would be better if more people just lived like them i.e. in dense urban environments. This argument at least is not predicated on the need to kill a bunch of people such as you commonly hear in biotech or agriculture discussions.

From a purely signal point of view, if you have a good characterization of the drone sound (your training set) and of the noise, then the appropriate filter would be something along the lines of a weiner type which statistically maximizes the SNR. Preventing your microphone from saturating when measuring the wind is very important as well, and a good use of a wind blocker or muffler.

If your microphone saturates its input that will distort the spectrum of the signal you are measuring.

I can personally attest that every place on that list is pretty damn nice except for Grand Rapids which is to damn cold! They all have low cost of living and a solid tech scene as well.

Summing multiple measurements will grow the noise at the rate of the sum of the squares (also called the 2 norm) because noise is hopefully uncorrelated. The signal, because it is correlated, will sum simply so that with enough measurements your SNR will increase. These measurements can be done in space or time.

I would say, before you dive into multi-fractal stochastic calculus, maybe take a step back and work on some fundamentals that have been used to solved this problem before. Look up Kalman filtering, Doppler filters, correlations, and microphone directivity.

The problem you are trying to solve here can be classically expressed as X'=Ax+Bu; Y = Cx + Du + Ev. Where Ax models the noise generating dynamics of the the drone, Bu models the control of the drone (typically random from your perspective), C,D,E model how the noise reaches and is processed by your microphone, and v is a random source simulating the wind.

I think that malanj's point is that the article is disingenuous because it compares the Green Array chip to an MSP430 product under a set of operational conditions specifically designed to maximize the MSP430 power consumption while excluding the many advantages of the MSP430 has in features. The summary of the whitepaper even start with the line, "there are apples and oranges in this comparison."

A voltage controlled varactor can be made from 2 non-complimentary mosfets with a common body bias. The differential amplifier can be done with as little as 3 additional fets, but probably more on the order or 7-10 for performance reasons. So you're looking at programmable on chip integrators for around 10 mosfets a piece. Of course, you'd use a technology size larger than what is used for digital logic because the analog toolchain would be more sensitive to problems like channel noise, gate tunneling, etc. You would not want to use a differentiator because they tend to amplify noise in an unstable and uncontrollable fashion and are not required for functional completeness (the analog equivalent of Turing completeness).

Edit: IQ analog processing is extremely common in the high performance RF field but tends to be static and not reprogrammable. FPAA's exist on market but are extremely expensive for what you get. The general purpose analog computer was initially developed by Shannon (yes that Shannon) back in the 40s.

I've dealt with it in the state fire code for Massachusetts and Maryland. I believe it is also in the New York and New Jersey code books. I'm unsure of other states but, it is a relatively recent adoption in all of the aforementioned states and I expect that it will be common in nearly all states soon.

If it seems to be a bit much just be glad you aren't in Massachusetts where they are currently trying to get arc flash rated 110V breakers added as a requirement to the electric code.

Fire code requires that fire alarms be networked to alert people in all rooms in the event of a fire. Older un-networked units are grandfathers until you begin replacement. Wifi networking is allowed by the code, but for obvious reasons, the inspector has to verify that it works and is set up correctly which requires running wifi.

Personally I would not purchase a home that was configured with nest or other home automation equipment for several reasons.

1) It's a huge security risk. When you buy a home the first thing you do is change the locks because you don't know who the previous owner may have once loaned keys out to. Now you have a bunch of computers in your house giving remote access that may or may not be giving other people access and you can't tell.

2) Most consumer home automation systems have incredibly bad failure states. Those wirelessly networked alarms? When you cheap Chinese wifi router catches fire from a faulty power supply the failure mode is that you die. That's a pretty big oversight. Remember when NEST pushed an untested software update remotely and caused dozens of houses in the Northern Midwest to lose heat in the middle of winter and then be destroyed by broken pipes?

3) Vendor lock in. I don't want the previous owner to lock me into a line of products. Period. I'm sure everyone here remembers when Phillips decided that their smart light sockets would embrace DRM and only accept Phillips brand LED bulbs. They backed down but it is bound to come up again. Not to mention simple incompatibility between competing products and stacks.

4) It's just a damn pain to use most of the time for gain that can be measured almost entirely in novelty factor.

Given how undiversified Facebook's revenue is; I wonder if they would have a short violent death or a long drawn out one when market share slips.

A sufficiently large radio system built on Mars or at its solar LaGrange point could provide the shielding effect that is normally the responsibility of the magnetosphere. It was studied for feasibility by NASA and found possible with current technology. Of course, possible doesn't imply practical and the natural formation of Martian atmosphere if we did that would be on geologic timescales.

The internet like several large systems people depend on were created by major institutions for major institutions and any attack on them would weaken the institution doing the attacking. Bitcoin however, was created mainly to circumvent major institutions, so they have no vested interest in protecting it unless there exists 3rd party grassroots pressure to do so.

When a proper developer builds a home or sub-division in Houston, they bring in fill dirt and do compactions until the houses rest on small hills. You get frequent flooding (about once a year) but it rarely reaches the house before the flood prevention systems have a chance to divert and control it. The problem here is two-fold, as discussed in the article, these people built there homes INSIDE the flood diversion systems and never did due diligence on their home purchase to find out that they were in homes literally designed to be flooded and unscrupulous developers who improperly built or ignored the creation of new flood control when up-building developments that made previously safe areas at risk like the HP plant that flooded. Of course this implies that the city code/design/inspectors/etc. were not doing their jobs as well.

These mosquitoes have undergone induced sterilization. By definition their evolution is completely controlled.

Perhaps it started as a joke and mistakenly became a business, like the fellow who got elected in Australia?

Wave would have made a nice additional to that suite. I miss Google Wave.

I've built 3 projects that relied on Google services/APIs; none of them exist anymore. I will never build another Google based product as long as I live.