3 ms·

> We rolled, and it turned out fine. Who is “we”?

• kortex 5y ago
  Company I worked for. We built an aerial multispectral imaging system for monitoring seals, polar bears, and other mammal populations. It's 3 high power rugged PCs, semi-affixed in a shock mount case in the tail of a Twin Otter. There's no hangars available at the airbases in e.g. Kotzebue, Deadhorse, Utqiagvik, so it sits on the tarmac and experiences some intense temperature swings. It's made it 2 winters and dozens of missions so far. The customer is NOAA and they really don't have oodles of cash to spend on this thing, so it's mostly commodity hardware. Initially we designed this whole crazy insulated case to keep it from getting too cold, but the aircraft engineers nixed it due to fire hazards. The airframe isn't airtight so it gets most of the brunt of the diurnal swing.
  • nr2x 5y ago
    Sounds like a fun job!
    • kortex 5y ago
      It was brilliant fun and also the most stressful period of my life, due to it being a bit far out of our core competencies at the time, delays in getting the camera hardware we had to interface with, limited staffing, and a comedy of other errors. Also the PM gets insanely airsick. As a result of all that, I got to go up to Kotzebue, AK with the PM to do the integration testing. So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying for my resilience to motion sickness. Stressful AF. So worth it.