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Shopping for tech toys? Engadget’s got a list for you.

Posted on December 4, 2019 - 5:00 am by

Because I’m at a “tweener stage” in life – my kids are too old for toys and there are as yet no grandkids on the scene – I was going to devote my holiday-related post to electronic items for the home. But a fancy electronic coffee scale and a souped up instant cooker were just not as fun or interesting to me as tech toys are. So I took a look through Engadget’s list for 2019, and here’s what I saw.

Bandai Tamagotchi On My kids were kids during the original Tamagotchi craze of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, so I remember the original version of this virtual pet game. And it was pretty primitive by current tech standards. Tamagotchi’s come a long way. The On is a Bluetooth enabled version that lets pet owners connect with their friends for virtual playdates.

Hasbro Star Wars Lightsaber Academy Kids who’d rather play Jedi than tend to a virtual pet may prefer this lightsaber, which “uses built-in sensors and a Bluetooth app to coach you on your form and then send feedback to an app.” Pick up another lightsaber and your kids can duel each other. Or duel with you.

Hasbro Monopoly Voice Banking Today’s kids don’t have the patience for long drawn out Monopoly games. They get bored by the board. So Hasbro has come out with a device for taking care of some of the more tedious aspects of the game. It handles all the scorekeeping and transactions and generally streamlining[es] the rules. The game’s a lot more enjoyable when you don’t have to worry about keeping track of your cash.”

Yeah, but some kid”’s still bound to toss the board over when they land on your hotel cluster and go bankrupt. (Not that I have any first hand knowledge of such behavior.)

LEGO Hidden Side Graveyard Mystery This one is an interesting combination of the real and virtual worlds. Hidden Side

“actually requires children to perform activities with their physical Lego sets in order to progress in the free, mobile AR game. Between an interesting supernatural investigation story and some creative set designs, there’s plenty to keep kids engaged.”

Without sounding too ghoulish, this one looks like fun.

LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer Well, this one model is incredibly detailed and challenging to put together. There are 4,700 pieces, and if  your kids don’t have the patience for a round of Monopoly, they’re probably not candidates for this gift. And at $700 it’s way out of range for most toy-buyers. But if you’ve got the time, the money, and the patience. And you’re a huge Star Wars fan…

Mattel Hot Wheels ID Smart Track Kit This one isn’t cheap either ($180), but Hot Wheels ID Smart Track provides the definitive answer to the eternal question of whose care is faster “thanks to its system of smart-track and NFC-enabled cars. It handily keeps tabs on how fast each vehicle goes and how far it’s traveled, which will satisfy data nerds while also giving kids a definitive answer as to who’s ruler of the road.” Plus it keeps the “stunt-driving” features that made Hot Wheels so great to begin with.

Mattel Pictionary Air Who would have thought that there’d be a way to tech up Pictionary? Not me. But Mattel came up with one, coming out with the Air version, “with players now using a special wand to draw their pictures in midair.” Pictures can appear on tablets or on a TV screen, which makes it easier for a larger group to play.

Nintendo Labo Toy-Con 04: VR Starter Kit: This lets kids put together a headset they can use with their Nintendo Switch so they can play the games they love in virtual-reality mode.

Playtime Engineering Blipblox: For younger kids – like my future grandkids – there’s the Blipbox that lets kiddos make a lot of noise. And more. “Once a child has moved beyond the phase where they randomly push buttons and turn knobs, they can learn to follow the signal-flow lines on the front to get a grasp of how synthesis works — and even eventually hook up an external keyboard to play it like any other instrument. “

Primo Toys Cubetto Playset Coding Toy: For future programmers, there’s the Cubetto, a programmable wooden robot. Kids do the programming by fitting color-coded blocks in the control board. They’re asked to program tasks which “will give them a hands-on, tactile introduction to loops, functions and algorithms” even before they know what a loop, function or algorithm is.

Skyrocket Pomsies Lumies Come with a built-in color sensor that lets kids “play hue-based games” with these little critters.

Spin Master Owleez They’re almost as cute as the Pomsies Lumies, and they have the advantage of being a drone. “Owleez’s head opens up to release a set of helicopter blades that allow the little plastic bird to fly short distances. It’s weird as hell but in that endearing way that will have kids carrying it everywhere.” So if you don’t mind cute little drones flying around your family room…

Tech Will Save Us Arcade Coder I don’t necessarily believe that “tech will save us” from everything, but learning to code is a good thing. And learning to code a video game of your own design is a fun thing.

In truth, with the exception of the $700 Star War model and the voice-banking edition of Monopoly, I pretty much like all the toys on the Engadget list. I will observe, though, that – as modern as most of these toys are, with their current technology, some of these brands are oldie and goodie enough to go back to my childhood, let alone the childhoods of my kids. Hot Wheels. Legos. Star Wars. Nintendo.

I just might take myself toy shopping.

Thankful

Posted on November 20, 2019 - 5:00 am by

As the new year approaches, it’s always interesting to look back on what’s happened throughout the year. It’s also a good time to reflect on what you’re thankful for. So I thought I’d take the opportunity of next week’s Thanksgiving holiday to reflect on both.

For Critical Link, it was another good year, as we continued to grow both in terms of our business and our technical expertise.  I’m not going to do a laundry list of new products released or exciting projects we worked on, but I did want to call out some of the recognitions and awards that came our way during 2019.

In August, we learned that, for the second year in a row, Critical Link was named to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5,000 fast-growing companies in America.

That fast growth is fueled by our technology expertise. Proof of that expertise? During Automate 2019, Critical Link received two prestigious awards at the Fifth Annual Vision Systems Design Innovators Awards program. In the Embedded Vision category, the MityCAM-C50000 was honored with a silver award, while the MitySOM-A10S-DSC came away with a bronze. One of the most exciting things about these awards is the judging criteria:

  • Originality 
  • Innovation 
  • Impact on designers, systems integrators, end users
  • Fulfilling a need in the market that hasn’t been addressed
  • Leveraging a novel technology

Pretty much sums up what Critical Link is all about!

In March, the Technology Alliance of Central New York (TACNY) chose us as the 2019 STEM Company of the Year. TACNY also recognized Critical Link’s principal engineer Mike Williamson as the Technologist of the Year – a well-deserved honor. In addition to Mike’s being instrumental in developing the Critical Link product roadmap, he’s earned a patent for “Two Dimensional Optical Imaging Methods for Systems for Particle Detection.” On the marketing side of the house, in May our Marketing Director, Amber Thousand, was honored by the CNY Sales & Marketing Executives with their Excellence Award. We’re tremendously proud of the achievements of both Mike and Amber.

Mike and Amber are excellent representatives of the caliber of our employees. And as always, we’re thankful for all of the folks who work here. We’re also thankful for our customers and partners, who make it possible for us to work on challenging and important projects.

We’re also grateful to be working in an area where technology is so important, where technical excellence is so valued. When we received the STEM Company of the Year award, our president John Fayos noted, “Central New York is home to some of the most impressive high-tech electronics companies in the country. It’s an honor to be recognized among such outstanding peers in this category.”

One of the standouts among those peers is our neighbor, JMA Wireless which is leading the charge into 5G, expanding its facilities and growing jobs in the Syracuse area. In recognition of the increasing importance of Syracuse in the overall tech ecosystem, Microsoft recently announced that they’ll be setting up a “Smart Cities Technology” hub here. This is part of Mayor Ben Walsh’s  plan. It’s only the third such hub that Microsoft has established, and the first in the Northeast. Good for Syracuse!  And good for all of us who call this vibrant area home.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Reliability. Don’t leave home without it… (Part 2)

Posted on November 6, 2019 - 6:00 am by
Apollo 17 Lunar Module

In my last post (October 23rd), I began summarizing an EE Times Special Project on growing concerns over technology reliability and safety. In that post, I looked at the sections of the report that focused on a couple of the recent well-publicized problem areas: hoverboards and Boeing 737s. If we just pay attention to the problems, it can be overwhelming. Fortunately, the report also provides some suggestions for addressing this critical issue.

George Leopold (principal author on the project report) writes about the “hard-learned lessons” that led NASA to become more reliability conscious. His focus is on the Apollo missions, noting the disastrous Apollo 1 launchpad fire (January 1967), which killed three astronauts. The fire was attributed to NASA having traded off safety and reliability in order to meet an aggressive schedule.

Among the causes was “Go Fever,” a group-think mentality that blinded otherwise brilliant aerospace engineers from seeing problems right in front of their noses.

The good that came out of Apollo 1 was a new commitment to safety. One of the prime areas was making sure that all components of the Apollo Saturn V rocket – which powered the first manned moon landing in July 1969 – were redundant, and in many instances had multiple redundancy. Safety and reliability also became imperatives of the design process. Finally, NASA engineers began doing more testing, always keeping in mind that three men had lost their lives on Apollo 1. No one wanted a repeat of that. 

Project Apollo rose from the ashes of a disaster, and great space-faring machines were built that took 24 humans to the moon.

The NASA example is, of course, interesting, especially given that we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. It would have been more interesting if this section of the report had included analysis of what went wrong with the Space Shuttle Challenger…

In his chapter of the report, Design for reliability: You have the tools, Martin Rowe gives us more technically detailed (and to me more absorbing) look at what engineers need to do to create reliable systems.

He’s a big proponent of bringing in reliability engineers early on:

Reliability engineers look for and analyze possible failure conditions (modes) to determine each failure’s severity and probability of occurrence. “Bring in reliability people at the start,” said Ken Rispoli, who recently retired as Sr. Principal Engineer at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. “They can point to problems that designers might overlook.”

It’s necessary to “define the failure”.

Failure analysis comes down to risk. How much risk of failure is acceptable depends on the product’s intended use cases and the consequences of the failure. If lives or large sums of money are at stake, then you need to minimize risk to the greatest extent possible. Risk also depends on the expected lifetime of a product.

When it comes to reliability planning and analysis, engineers have the following in their tool kit:

  • Stress analysis
  • Mean time between failure (MTBF)/mean time to failure (MTTF)
  • Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)/Failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA)
  • Worst-case analysis

Rowe goes into a bit of detail here, and provides some good examples. Make sure you check out his full article .

At Critical Link, where we’re typically working with applications that really matter, and we’re proud of our commitment to reliability and safety. It’s always good to be reminded about why reliability and safety are so important, and that there’s a lot we can do about it.

 

This is the second in a two-part series based on the EE Times/Aspensource Special Project on technology reliability and safety. You can find the first part here. 

Reliability. Don’t leave home without it… (Part 1)

Posted on October 23, 2019 - 6:00 am by

EE Times has a Special Project report out that addresses growing concerns over technology reliability and safety that is pretty sobering. The report, compiled and in good part written by George Leopold, includes a couple of case studies from either end of the technology spectrum: hoverboards and Boeing 737s, as well as some welcome suggestions for what to do about this critical issue.

Leopold begins by asking how we got ourselves into this situation:

Some point to lax regulation, others cite “cultural laziness” borne of buggy software releases that result in endless patches. Have engineering principles like built-in redundancy in mission-critical systems been compromised by market pressures?

It certainly looks that way, a variety of experts tell us.

The Hoverboard Crisis:  Junko Yoshida took an in depth look at the hoverboard crisis of 2015, when these new-to-market and wildly popular items began exploding due to lithium-ion battery issues that caused “thermal runaway.” Yoshida sees the problem – which resulted in a recall of half a million hoverboards by mid-2016 – as the result of a “perfect storm of market forces.”

  • A new product category with no industry behind it
  • An overnight market as interest took off (hoverboards became the “it” gift for the 2015 holidays)
  • New market entrants, pressured to design and build quickly (with no standards to draw on)

Interestingly, Underwriter Labs (UL) was in rapid response mode, and within months was able to rollout a hoverboard certification program. Within a year, UL had “issued a ‘consensus’ regional standard for hoverboard safety in the US and Canada. Once manufacturers started adopting the standard, the issues with hoverboards largely went away. (Not covered in Yoshida’s article, but an interesting side note: I read recently that there have been a number of recent instances of e-cigarette/vaping device batteries flaming out during flights. Some airlines have banned them in checked baggage.)

Boeing 737 Max Crashes: Then there were the Boeing 737 Max crashes that resulted in loss of life. These crashes were attributed to malfunctioning software. Again, the culprit was at least in part market pressure. But now the market pressures are swinging in the opposite direction, with many fliers now refusing to book flights on a 737 Max once they’re back in service.

And it’s not just market pressure that let shoddy code out the door. Some see the software development community as having gotten so used to shipping out patches each week that quality has become less important.

And it’s not just software failures causing problems. The FAA has also discovered a potential hardware issue “with the 737 Max flight control computer. The fault reportedly involves the random flipping of bits in the microprocessor, likely caused by radiation striking chip circuitry.” That’s not good.

Nearly 350 people were killed in the two Boeing 737 Max crashes. The upside is stronger regulatory oversight, and on other manufacturers – looking at Boeing’s hefty costs and hits to reputation – will start taking better care.

Let’s hope so. When it comes to reliability and safety, none of us want to leave home without it.

This is the first in a two-part series based on the EE Times/Aspensource Special Project on technology reliability and safety. The next post will focus on solutions.

Cutting down on food waste

Posted on October 9, 2019 - 5:00 am by

It’s something that I’m pretty sure we’ve all been guilty of. Our shopping carts are bigger than our stomachs, and as much as we think we’re going to use every last bit of what we put in those carts, we end up tossing rotting produce out of the fridge or moldy bread out of the breadbox. In my house, we’re pretty careful, but there are still times when we’re throwing things out. What a waste.

At the personal level, it’s a waste of money. But when you look at it in the aggregate, the costs really mount up. There are the financial costs:

About one-third of the food produced and packaged for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That equals 1.3 billion tons a year, worth nearly $680 billion. (Source: NY Times)

That’s bad news, especially when you consider that there are millions of people around the world who don’t get enough nourishing food. Other bad news? Wasted food negatively impacts climate change.

From 8 to 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are related to food lost during harvest and production or wasted by consumers, recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found. Landfills of rotting food emit methane, a gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. And to harvest and transport all that wasted food requires billions of acres of arable land, trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels. 

Maybe those smart refrigerators can help us on the home front, but there’s also a great deal of food waste that occurs in stores. Some stores, primarily in Europe, are using “food rescue” apps to connect shoppers to food – meat, produce, dairy – that’s about to expire, and offering them steep discounts on it.

There are also apps – and entire systems -being developed on a much larger scale. These let food producers keep an eye on their products every step of the way, from the farm or ranch to the refrigerator case in the grocery store. “Cold-chain monitoring solutions” that are part of the IoT do this, and could theoretically “save the more than 1.2 billion tons of food that due to spoilage never reaches the consumer annually.”

For example, with meat producers, it starts with healthy livestock. IoT sensors measure environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity. Animal movement, location, and health can be monitored. And the producer can take immediate action in unusual situations: relocate livestock, adjust for heat and humidity, even test for illness.

With sensors, AI, and cloud analytics, conditions can be monitored and acted on throughout the supply chain—from transport, to processing, to the cold case. (Source: Insight.Tech)

A monitoring app can “inspect” food throughout the supply chain, keeping tabs on (and analyzing) data such as temperature, humidity, and location. Alerts are triggered, and adjustments can be made – all in real time.

I occasionally have a bit of fun with apps that don’t really seem to solve any problem that matters. (A good example of this is my last posts, which was on smart diapers.) But there are so many other apps that can really change the world for the better. Helping cut down on food waste is one area where there’s the potential for a powerful and critical pay-off.

 

 

Diapers go high tech: yet another app in search of a reason for being

Posted on September 25, 2019 - 5:00 am by

My kids are all grown, so I’ve been out of the game for a good long while. And there are no grandkids on the immediate horizon, so it may be a while before I’m on diaper duty. But with three children, I did my share of diaper changing over the years – back in the days when it was the parents who were smart about what was going on, not the diapers themselves.

Smart diapers, you may well be asking yourself? Yes, smart diapers.

In July, Pampers announced Lumi:

…an all-in-one connected system that includes two activity sensors for diapers, a Logitech camera fashioned into a Wi-Fi baby monitor and an app that wraps everything together… Lumi builds on the company’s popular Swaddler line — the sensor keeps an eye on the blue wetness strip outside of the diaper to determine how soaked it is. Unfortunately, you’ll need to buy Lumi-optimized version of the diapers to use the sensor, as they have larger and more visible wetness strips.  (Source: Engadget)

The entire system pulls together pretty much everything you want to know about your baby once you’ve put them down for the night in their crib. The video monitor lets you take a peek at your little sleeper and monitor their sleep patterns; you can track the temperature and humidity of the nursery; and, of course, check those sensor-equipped diapers to see whether it’s time for a change.

Hmmmm.

The way we handled it back in the day was a) listen for the baby to cry; b) respond (or not, depending on what phase in “get your baby to sleep” you were in); c) figure out the old fashioned way whether your baby needed changing; d) change diaper as needed.  Call me old-fashioned, but this seemed to work out just fine.

I can’t help but think that this is yet another “application in search of a market” product.

As with many apps – even the ones that seem the most frivolous and unnecessary for the consumer market; as, for example, smart diapers – there are health and assistive-related situations where, the smarter the better. I’m not sure whether the Lumi can measure output, but for someone with an ill baby, being able to measure whether the baby is peeing too much or too little could be a critical piece of information to have. Other than that…

There’s no pricing available yet on the Lumi, but the guess is the system will cost in the $200’s. Plus you have to purchase special Lumi-ready diapers. (P&G says that the price of the Lumi diapers won’t be out of whack with the cost for regular, unsmart pampers.)

Pampers isn’t first to market with a smart diaper. Huggies has a variation of its own. (Huggies has a couple of advantages. The sensors work with any diaper, plus the sensors can detect just what sort of diaper-changing experience you’re in for. With the first version of Lumi, parents will have to rely on the tried and true sniff test.

Maybe I’ll change my tune, and when our first grandchild arrives, my wife and I will be out there buying a diaper system that’s more elaborate than a box of diapers, a Diaper Genie, and some baby wipes. But I mostly think that a smart diaper is not something that anyone needs.

There’s not only the cost, and the over-the-top-ness about it. Isn’t becoming aware that you’re wet one of the ways that your child learns how to manage their plumbing and figure out when they’ve got to go? After all, one of the raps on modern day diapers is that your toddlers get too comfortable in them. And I’d worry about the sensor. You have to attach it to the diaper, which means it’s detachable, which means that before you know it, your baby will figure out how to detach it. And we all know that there’s not that much distance between object in hand and object in mouth.

I love technology and the many ways in which smart tech can and does improve our lives in terms of health, safety, time-savings and convenience. But this doesn’t seem to be an especially useful application area. Not-so-smarty-pants diapers seem to work just fine

Fire technology since 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2019 - 5:00 am by

Hard to believe that, today, we’re observing the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Those of us who lived through it have indelible images of this day, and will always remember exactly where we were when we first heard the news. For most of us, our first impulse was to connect with loved ones, even if they were miles away from NYC, Washington DC or rural Pennsylvania. And we may well have connected using a mobile phone that seems primitive to what we have in our pockets these days. Some of us had a flip phone, but more than likely we didn’t. We could do some texting – remember hitting the 2 key three times to enter the letter “c” – but few phones had any Internet capabilities, and where those capabilities they were primitive. Camera phones did exist, but I didn’t know anyone who had one. (I barely knew they existed.) The iPhone, which ushered in the smartphone revolution as we know it, was still a few years in the future.

Overall, technology has changed radically since 2001, but on this day when we remember 9/11, I think it’s appropriate to take a look at the way that technology has changed for firefighters. Firefighters, after all, are among the heroes of 9/11. In New York City, 343 members of NYFD were killed in action. And among the most indelible images of the day are the ones of firefighters on the scene.

Here’s some of the technology changes since 9/11.

Just as smartphone technology has made the world a different place for all of us, so has it made a difference for firefighters.

Nowadays:

Fire departments are equipping their firefighters with smartphone apps that act as a pager, recording dispatch calls and providing current intelligence aimed to aid in incident response. Get real-time maps and route addresses to ensure a timely response with the tap of an icon….In the full-time setting, company officers and incident commanders can have all of the incident details right at their fingertips. There’s no more guessing which direction Engine 6 will be responding from; you can see their route right on your screen and have the ability to point out which water supply hydrant they should catch. (Source: Fire Rescue 1)

Firefighters are also using smartphones to update social media. Since so many people rely on Facebook and Twitter for their news, a fire department can now provide crucial details about road closings, evacuations, and other details to residents of impacted areas.

Some departments are using drones equipped with cameras and thermal imaging technology to get the lay of the land. Drones were used in last spring’s devastating fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, preventing that fire from being more devastating than it could have been. Robots will increasingly be deployed, saving firefighters from having to enter structures.

Breathing technology is also getting better. The importance of this is underscored by the fact that, in addition to the 343 firefighters who lost their lives on 9/11, thousands of first responders who worked the rescue and recovery efforts have died of cancer as the result of breathing in toxic air.

Fire masks are also being improved upon. Masks are part of the self-contained breathing apparatus that firefighters wear into a fire.

Handheld thermal imagers ­— devices that visualize hot spots — were new in 2001, but since then technology has made it possible to combine them with the mask on SCBAs.

The thermal imaging system works by detecting infrared heat, and then transmitting this information into the in-screen display. Points of extremely high heat — which could be likely to explode into fire — glow bright red on the screen, allowing users to know which areas to avoid.

The display is positioned below the user’s eyeline, allowing them to look down into it when they want to see thermal imaging, but otherwise does not impair their vision. (Source: GovTech)

As far as I’m concerned, they can’t bring the new technology on fast enough. I certainly hope that we never go through another 9/11, but if we do, it’s good to know that there will be better technology to deal with the cataclysm.

A little something for the dog days of summer

Posted on August 28, 2019 - 7:00 am by

As a car guy (and a tech guy), I often find myself blogging about topics related to automotive technology. And then sometimes I remember that I’m also a dog guy (and a tech guy), and I start noticing that there are an increasing number of apps related to pet care. When it comes to pet technology, I’m a bit old school. Dog, meet dog bowl. Flea collar, meet dog. Yet I still find the technology aimed at pet owners pretty interesting.

You’ve probably seen ads on TV for dog walking startups like Wag, which is part of the “on demand” economy that includes Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit, the app that Wag is most akin to. Unlike TaskRabbit, which connects consumers to individuals willing to run errands, take care of household tasks (like assembling IKEA furniture), and pet care, Wag is strictly for the dogs. What the dog walking apps have in common with other “on demand” apps is their use of smartphone and location technology.

Dogs, of course, aren’t always out walking. In my experience, they spend a lot of time lolling around the house and napping. But that’s apparently because they’re bored. To manage pet boredom, and maximize your dog’s intellectual potential and engagement, there are a number of smart toys on the market. Personally, we spent more time maximizing the intellectual potential of our kids than our dogs, but it’s good to see there are options that go beyond stuffing peanut butter and cheese into a Kong to give your pups something to do when you’re not around. 

Varram is a pet fitness robot. You can schedule activities for your dog, or control things in real time via smartphone app.  Your dog chases the robot around, and the robot can even toss treats. iFetch and iDig are a bit less techie than the Varram robot, but the iFetch lets you automate the admittedly boring task of tossing tennis balls to your dog. And iDig gives your dogs the opportunity to dig something other than your rugs.

There are also apps that let you automate your dog door, and apps to control what’s dispensed in the feeding bowls.

And to make sure that your dog is staying fit and healthy, there are any number of pet fitness trackers on the market. Some of them double as pet trackers, too. If you’re worried about tracing your dog if the tracker is removed or damaged, there’s always the subcutaneous chip. Beyond keeping tabs on activity levels/fitness, wearables can be used to monitor your pet’s health and also keep track of different behaviors – like more trips to the water bowl – that may signal a possible health issue before it becomes a real problem.

Speaking of pet health, while I did note that we focused on the intellectual development of our children and pretty much have always let our dogs be dogs, I failed to mention that one of my daughters is a veterinarian. Allie, who from early on was an equestrian, specializes in caring for horses. There’s plenty of equine-related tech out there, and larger animal tech will be a topic for another day. In the meantime, Allie has two dogs of her own, and next time I see her I’ll be asking her what if any tech apps and devices she’s using for them.

More on the tech behind the moon landing

Posted on August 14, 2019 - 5:00 am by

In observance of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I wrote a post on the technology that got our astronauts there. (Lots of technology behind the moon landing.) A week or so later, I saw another article in EE Times (this one by George Leopold) on the subject, with a slightly different take than what I covered. So here goes.

The thrust (sorry: couldn’t resist) of Leopold’s article is that:

The Soviets had bigger boosters that could loft larger payloads, but the American emphasis on weight reduction and its emerging and innovative electronics sector proved decisive in reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s. (Source: EE Times)

The American’s were able to get the weight down because of breakthroughs in the emerging field of semiconductors. At the heart of the development was the guidance computer built by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (what is now Draper Labs), which used integrated circuit logic devices from TI, Motorola Semiconductor, Westinghouse Electric and Fairchild, to do its magic. But these devices weren’t exactly sitting around on the shelf.

Once the production lines began cranking out product in 1962, the MIT engineers faced other supply chain issues. They described the problem this way:

“Maintaining a source of supply of quality integrated circuits could be difficult over the production life of the Apollo Computer. The semiconductor industry was dedicated to advancing the ‘state of the art’ and to accomplish this goal it was plagued with process changes, inadvertent and intentional. Such changes contributed to uncertainties in a semiconductor product’s functional stability, quality, reliability and production life. Considering the critical reliability and production life time requirements of the [guidance computer] in the Apollo System, an approach to IC procurement had to be developed which would insure a supply of quality components.”

This is a familiar tale of missed deadlines – “teething problems”, in Leopold’s words – but the problems worked themselves out. To achieve the timeliness reliability NASA required, they standardized “on a single logic component.” With the volume needed for the moon launch and landing, the prices for logic devices went down rapidly. In less than a year (December 1961 to October 1962) the unit cost for Fairchild devices fell from $120 to $10.

One of the drivers behind Apollo 11 was to post a space race win against the Russians. While they may have gotten the first man into space, we scored the first moon landing, and an important factor was our “superior electronic components and novel systems integration approaches.” While the Soviet space program may have had “otherwise superior rocketeers”, we beat them “in terms of development periods, quality, and general scientific-technical level.”

As early astronauts were fond of saying, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” The same was true of space technology: No electronics, no moon landing.

As we set a goal for the Mars landing, you can bet that our electronics will be once again at the fore!

How smart is your city?

Posted on July 31, 2019 - 6:00 am by

One of the most interesting and rapidly growing application areas for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the development of smart cities. Smart cities use sensors to collect data, and then use that data to make sure that their resources – lighting, power, traffic control, policing, etc. – are optimally deployed. Smart cities promise to increase efficiency, decrease costs, and improve urban quality of life. It’s also an area where we’re increasingly seeing Critical Link sensor technology being used.

Anyway, in my (reading) travels, I’ve been coming across more articles on smart cities, like the one from phys.org that focused on cities that are using smart technology “to tackle mundane but serious issues such as improving poor quality housing, safeguarding local food supplies and transitioning to renewable energy.” These aren’t the projects of a sci-fi imagination in which we’re all going to live like the Jetsons. Instead, they deal with nuts and bolts issue. Like the project in Mansfield England where the University of Nottingham is “planning to launch a ‘deep farm’ that could produce ten times as much food as farms above ground.”

In Ireland, the Technological University of Dublin and the Dublin City Council collaborated on developing a new campus in one of the city’s poorer districts. The campus uses renewable energy technology, storing it one site and sharing excess power onto the grid. One of the design goals was tightly integrated the university and the surrounding community, which includes non-technology-driven – but plenty smart – practices like enabling community members to eat side by side with students in the university canteen.

This article led me to another one, also on phys.org, in which the University of Glasgow revealed the results of its global study on smart cities. After sorting through a list of 5,550 cities worldwide with 100,000 inhabitants or more, they identified 27 cities as the world’s leading smart cities. London, Singapore, Barcelona, and Amsterdam led the pack, largely composed of major global cities. Boston was the first American city on the list, ranking fifth, followed by New York. Other U.S. cities on the list: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Portland. Toronto and Vancouver were the other North American cities that made the cut.

Overall, the research:

… found that the vast majority of those who made it on to the rankings table were predominantly capital cities or cities listed as “world cities.” As such, the findings reveal that ‘smart city’ development is closely linked to a city’s global outreach and engagement.

And the research also showed that the majority of the 27 who made the rankings had already garnered a global reputation as “standard bearers of smart city innovation.”

This, of course, got me wondering just how Critical Link (and my) hometown of Syracuse stacks up. Pretty well, as it turns out!

Last winter, Syracuse was awarded a grant that will result in its serving as the state’s flagship smart city when it comes to power.

A network of intelligent streetlights in Syracuse, N.Y. will help the city advance sustainability efforts, while providing a foundation for a wider deployment of ongoing smart city projects.

The upstate New York city will soon begin phasing out its 17,500 conventional streetlights for LED models, capable of communicating across a network, allowing for a more efficient control over the lights, as well as providing feedback related to operations or maintenance issues  

In time, the streetlights will support more than just illumination. Like many cities, Syracuse plans to use the poles to deploy other sensors and systems with an ability to collect, process and transmit data from the streets back to city hall. The sensors can be used to count objects like cars and pedestrians. (Source: )

The data Syracuse will be looking at via sensors mounted on their new LED streetlights: “traffic counts, climate, air quality and other measures.”

Syracuse is also exploring applications that relate to water mains, road conditions, flooding, and vacant houses.

All part of the Syracuse Surge, an initiative aimed at making sure our city thrives in the new, smart economy.

Overall, it looks like we stack up pretty well, even if Syracuse didn’t make the cut of the top 27 smartest cities in the world.

So, how smart is your city?

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