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.
If you have any conductive bar or wire of sufficient size you can safely touch both ends (and measure zero volts across them. If you stretch those conductors over miles and miles of distance, it gets harder to reference the end to both grounds at the same time. And getting a good ground can be hard. There are numerous stories of "stray voltage" making cattle jumpy, etc.
Of course if you coil up that conductor and pass a magnet by it you're going to get shocked ;)
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.
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.
The operator should never be in harms way period. If they are working on equipment it should be physically locked out, say a valve would have a 6" diameter pin through the mechanism and a padlock on it so the pin can't be removed except by the operator, and electrical equipment is powered off and the breaker is locked in the off position. If they put themselves in harms way they will eventually be fired for unsafe work.
bad updates are bad updates. they are incompetence on the part of the programmer. but the worst they should be able to cause is minor equipment malfunction or the physical system has been poorly designed.
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.
My experience is limited controlling turbines, generators, pumps, valves, hydraulics, and dams using Schneider, Allen Bradley, and Unitronics PLCs. No motion controllers. no conveyor belts, no factories, no robots, no VFDs.
I have made a total of at least 7,500 remote updates over maybe 25 different control systems. In fact we basically get it working well enough the operators can handle day to day stuff and then go remote after that, because who wants to stay away from home at some dirty industrial site eating crappy food. The exception to that is backup power for hospitals, no remote access there and it is a simple enough system we can test all the different scenarios and then walk away.
Generally the last thing I put before an output in a PLC is some rate limiting. If it is a discrete output it won't be allowed to operate more than once every 5s for example. If it is an analog output it is limited to achieve the maximum desired actuator velocity or acceleration. This is a good catch all to avoid damaging equipment. I watched somebody learn this the hard way as a DC motor starter exploded when it was told to start and stop the motor 10 times a second.
Certainly I have made errors. A bad one was I forgot to limit a position so that it could not be less than 0. The position was subtracted from some other number. Substracting a negative number is adding! That was a nasty positive feedback loop that resulted in fast oscillations in the position of a 1m diameter pressure reducing valve. However that was during on site commissioning not remote.
Certainly for major changes I will require a shutdown and co-ordinate with the operators, but it is a judgement call on my part as to what I can program and test at the office and unleash on remote equipment vs. what needs to be tested on the actual equipment. Most testing on the equipment is required to determine the equipment characteristic.
A large amount of this sounds like just awareness, authorization and authentication issues with updates. The plant should be aware and know what changes are being made. As well as be able to roll them back.
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.
While a lot of people on the team have PhDs, I definitely would not describe Neuralink as "PhD heavy theory stage"! The overwhelming emphasis is on building things that work and testing them against reality as quickly as possible. Anyone capable of doing that regardless of credentials is welcome here. To get a better sense of what I mean, check out the interview advice thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuralink/comments/70gehm/neuralink...
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.
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.
> Another thing that many people don't realize is that TI makes a huge number of automotive parts currently with extremely tight reliability controls...
Any idea how many of those leverage MEMS tech at the scale and complexity of DLP?
DLP complexity + high vibration platform + operating temperature extremes on both ends of the gamut doesn't strike me as reliable by any stretch of imagination.
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.
