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Fun bits: * Software upgrade your wind farm to remove bad responses/oscillations * Software upgrade on trains removed ability for drivers to reboot them (&

Fun bits: * Software upgrade your wind farm to remove bad responses/oscillations * Software upgrade on trains removed ability for drivers to reboot them (& they intend to keep it that way?!) so hand to send techs with laptops * Upgrades needed to improve loss-of-mains detection in small generators.

mrob 7y ago
>Software upgrade on trains removed ability for drivers to reboot them (& they intend to keep it that way?!) From section 5.2.1: "The train manufacturer, Siemens, are developing a patch which will allow the drivers to recover the trains themselves without the need for a reboot or technician to attend site."
- cat199 7y ago
  sounds like '737 max' engineering again. sigh.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Finally an explanation of what a train driver actually does - they are there to reboot the automation if necessary. But what have they been doing up until now? Train driving is a very well paid job, over twice as much as a bus driver, for a fraction of the work... they don’t even steer it!
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Lots of responsibility in driving a train. That's usually going to be dozens, and for some trains regularly hundreds of passengers, or in freight hundreds or thousands of tonnes of freight. It's psych-profiled, companies which employ drivers will be looking for "compliance" (a psychological tendency to obey rules even if you don't understand why) so that the driver obeys all the safety rules. It's also a fairly complicated machine, not as complicated as a jet liner but far more complicated to operate than a bus, so that reduces your pool of candidates further, in most cases they'll be looking for someone with some mechanical aptitude to understand how it works. They need communication skills, the driver needs to work with their signallers, and potentially also company dispatch, and on trains without separate customer service personnel they need to talk directly to passengers. For example yesterday I was on a train which was delayed by trespassers. The driver will have needed to use "proceed with caution" rules, where they drive the train slowly enough that they can always stop it within the distance they can clearly see, obeying any signals, and then call their signaller back each time a signal cancels that authority, to get a new authority overriding each signal. Then, clear of the problem but much delayed, they needed to handle the fact that their dispatch turned their train into an Express to get it back where it should be, so they need to make announcements to passengers about where passengers should disembark to get a different train that's still going to their destination. Mainline train drivers make similar money to me (or at least similar to what I made five years ago) but I can't say I feel like they don't earn it. Like me their job is pretty easy when things go right, but not so much when things go wrong. Lots of people couldn't do it, and more wouldn't.
  - fanf2 7y ago
    Here is a very informative twitter thread from a train driver explaining what is involved in learning a route https://twitter.com/chris_thedriver/status/1163792887387164672 https://twitter.com/chris_thedriver/status/11637928873871646...
repolfx 7y ago
Also, 10 minute reboot time. And I thought Windows Update was bad! I've been on trains when they were obviously rebooting due to some sort of fault. It takes forever. What is the train doing during this time, exactly? Does every sub-computer on board boot serially or something?
- londons_explore 7y ago
  There are normally a lot of self-tests involved in a reboot. Every actuator will be energised, de-energised, moved end to end to test limit switches, etc. It's mostly done serially because some things would be disrupted by other things, and figuring out a dependancy tree is tricky. Quite a lot of stuff is auto-configured in bootup. For example, it might spend 10 seconds trying to ping a debug console to see if it should enter debug mode. Or 30 seconds with IP addresses configured to the 'lab' setup before switching over to the production networking config when the lab settings won't let it connect to anything.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Good explanation, thanks.

mrob 7y ago

>Software upgrade on trains removed ability for drivers to reboot them (& they intend to keep it that way?!) From section 5.2.1: "The train manufacturer, Siemens, are developing a patch which will allow the drivers to recover the trains themselves without the need for a reboot or technician to attend site."

cat199 7y ago
sounds like '737 max' engineering again. sigh.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Finally an explanation of what a train driver actually does - they are there to reboot the automation if necessary. But what have they been doing up until now? Train driving is a very well paid job, over twice as much as a bus driver, for a fraction of the work... they don’t even steer it!
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Lots of responsibility in driving a train. That's usually going to be dozens, and for some trains regularly hundreds of passengers, or in freight hundreds or thousands of tonnes of freight. It's psych-profiled, companies which employ drivers will be looking for "compliance" (a psychological tendency to obey rules even if you don't understand why) so that the driver obeys all the safety rules. It's also a fairly complicated machine, not as complicated as a jet liner but far more complicated to operate than a bus, so that reduces your pool of candidates further, in most cases they'll be looking for someone with some mechanical aptitude to understand how it works. They need communication skills, the driver needs to work with their signallers, and potentially also company dispatch, and on trains without separate customer service personnel they need to talk directly to passengers. For example yesterday I was on a train which was delayed by trespassers. The driver will have needed to use "proceed with caution" rules, where they drive the train slowly enough that they can always stop it within the distance they can clearly see, obeying any signals, and then call their signaller back each time a signal cancels that authority, to get a new authority overriding each signal. Then, clear of the problem but much delayed, they needed to handle the fact that their dispatch turned their train into an Express to get it back where it should be, so they need to make announcements to passengers about where passengers should disembark to get a different train that's still going to their destination. Mainline train drivers make similar money to me (or at least similar to what I made five years ago) but I can't say I feel like they don't earn it. Like me their job is pretty easy when things go right, but not so much when things go wrong. Lots of people couldn't do it, and more wouldn't.
- fanf2 7y ago
  Here is a very informative twitter thread from a train driver explaining what is involved in learning a route https://twitter.com/chris_thedriver/status/1163792887387164672 https://twitter.com/chris_thedriver/status/11637928873871646...

repolfx 7y ago

Also, 10 minute reboot time. And I thought Windows Update was bad! I've been on trains when they were obviously rebooting due to some sort of fault. It takes forever. What is the train doing during this time, exactly? Does every sub-computer on board boot serially or something?

londons_explore 7y ago
There are normally a lot of self-tests involved in a reboot. Every actuator will be energised, de-energised, moved end to end to test limit switches, etc. It's mostly done serially because some things would be disrupted by other things, and figuring out a dependancy tree is tricky. Quite a lot of stuff is auto-configured in bootup. For example, it might spend 10 seconds trying to ping a debug console to see if it should enter debug mode. Or 30 seconds with IP addresses configured to the 'lab' setup before switching over to the production networking config when the lab settings won't let it connect to anything.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Good explanation, thanks.