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Yea that's incredibly bad if that's what that guy did.. in general for EE designs, the schematic/layouts are not that hard to deduce how you would do it if you
by xt00 10y ago
Yea that's incredibly bad if that's what that guy did.. in general for EE designs, the schematic/layouts are not that hard to deduce how you would do it if you are in contact with the company that makes the LIDAR device (the unique and difficult part -- basically just need to ask them, like "yo, how roughly should I interface with this thing and whats your recommendation on a number of the components.. and can you give me a reference schematic.."). So copying stuff means that the guy actually probably was clueless as to how it actually worked and planned to just hand it off to somebody else who did understand it -- so definitely super bad...
- smilekzs 10y agoThere however could be custom-ordered parts on the BOM, documentation of which might be under NDA.
- xt00 10y agoYes good point. That would be super obvious that they stole it then.. "yea, could I order the BA33525 part that you custom built for somebody else.. yea I know its undocumented, but I know you have it somehow...."
- daurnimator 10y agoYou do that sort of thing all the time though with electronics: I'll open it up, and find some undocumented chip variant and see if I can source it elsewhere, I'll also search+email around to see if I can find a datasheet anywhere. If it's not printed on the chip you'll probably be able to get it out of JTAG.
- CPLX 10y agoSure, when you have physical access to the device, which wouldn't seem to apply at all here.
- guelo 10y agoFrom the medium post "downloaded additional highly confidential information pertaining to our custom-built LiDAR including supplier lists, manufacturing details and statements of work with highly technical information."
- mevile 10y agoIt seems criminal. I remember an engineer from goldman sachs went to prison for doing something similar.
- tyingq 10y agoIt also seems like the least interesting thing to steal. The hard part is probably the software and access to real world driving data. It is like holding up a bank and walking out with just the coins. The risk reward profile is terrible.
- Fricken 10y agoLevandowski allegedly downloaded 14,000 files. The lidar circuit designs, while arguably trivial, are what Waymo can prove have been appropriated.
- Qworg 10y agoDiscovery will likely find more things, no?
- philsnow 10y agoI thought waymo's lidar sensors were much, much cheaper than other sensors: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-in-lidar-technology-cuts-costs-by-90-percent/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-i... We're talking about reducing a ~$25000 part to ~$2500.
- Qworg 10y agoA factor of 10 and at least 3-4 years of engineering work? Yeah, that's no small potatoes.
- tyingq 10y agoThat was a result, though, of Google collaborating with Velodyne. I suspect Velodyne would have reduced pricing to everyone as a result. And Google's not the only entity working towards less expensive LiDAR. There's Delphi/Quanergy, etc. Just seems like a huge risk to save maybe $10k per vehicle (assuming price drops for everyone) for some relatively short time period.
- LargeCompanies 10y agoHe is a great fit as an Uber executive... another greedy pig! This one broke many laws and needs to go to jail!
- danielweber 10y agoMany many years ago, I was at a software company, and a competitor popped up making very similar software. They made a presentation of their software at a conference, and had a slide showing a screenshot. Our typos were clearly visible. Fun times, fun times. We got a few people fired, but that was about it.
- curun1r 10y agoI used to work at a small company that made a SaaS product for a niche HR function. One of our largest customers, a bank whose ATMs you likely see every day if you're in the US, decided to drop our service in favor of a solution built in-house. We were disappointed, but had to let them go. Then, about 2 years after they'd canceled, our support department got a strange email from a user that was having problems. At first, the support rep didn't understand the issue and asked the user for screenshots of the problem. Sure enough, the screen shots looked exactly like our old product, which had been decommissioned over a year prior. It even had our support email address and phone number on it. It turns out the version of the software they developed in-house started by scraping our site, renaming all the .html files to .aspx and then making the dynamic parts be data driven. When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago> When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number. This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them
- mariusmg 10y ago>can't live without them Really?
- Fricken 10y agoLevandowski does have some specialized technical knowledge of Lidar, he started up 510 systems, a company focused on making Lidar for robots, which was quietly bought up by Google in 2011. http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...