3 ms·
A professor of mine who worked on the project as a PhD student once told us about the project: According to him they had to use the heavily armored version of
by dubbel 8y ago
A professor of mine who worked on the project as a PhD student once told us about the project:
According to him they had to use the heavily armored version of the car, intended to protect presidents, and strip out all the amour, because only this car platform could carry the enormous weight of the computers at the time.
- RealityVoid 8y agoThe first version was basically a bus loaded with 486's .
- stephengillie 8y agoThey must have needed huge batteries - or could the bus engine power a large enough inverter to power all the 486s?
- owenversteeg 8y agoMy guess would be a big gas generator in the back of the bus.
- gsich 8y agowhy an inverter? I don't think DC-AC-DC is more efficient then DC-DC.
- stephengillie 8y agoThe bus alternator produces up to 80 amps at 20 volts - while the computer needs 12, 5, and 3.3 volts, in the 1-20 amp range. Using a common inverter and a common power supply is the cheapest way to convert the voltage.
- chrisdhoover 8y agoBus altenator is 24VDC? Plus charging voltage so a 27.6v output?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- weinzierl 8y agoThen it couldn‘t possibly have been in the 1980s. The 80486 didn‘t exist back then. The 80386 exists since the mid 80s but would have been very expensive.
- Animats 8y agoThe original CMU Navlab was like that. Three racks of Sun workstation in the back of a van, and a generator to provide power.[1] By the early 1990s, they had one that more or less worked, a Pontiac Firebird with self-driving comparable to Tesla's today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab