3 ms·
I was located in Sydney Australia, trying to fix a literally showstopper bug in the signal processing of the bank of Land Mobile Radio base stations that were b
by femto 4y ago
I was located in Sydney Australia, trying to fix a literally showstopper bug in the signal processing of the bank of Land Mobile Radio base stations that were being used to coordinate the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. Less than 24 hours to go before the final dress rehearsal, and the production company was preparing to spend megabucks to pull all the radios out and replace them with a different manufacturer's, unless the bug was fixed in the next few hours.
I ended up hacking the radio firmware to bypass the signal processing and stream the raw received samples from London to Sydney. I hacked a radio in Sydney to feed the London samples into its signal processing, then streamed the resulting samples back to the transmitter in London. I now had an LMR base station running in real-time over the Internet, with the radio hardware in London and the signal processing in Sydney. I was able to attach a JTAG hardware debugger to the DSP in the radio running the signal processing and find the bug. From there we did a firmware release and uploaded new firmware into the radios in London. Our radios stayed in and handled the stage management for the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics.
Edit:
The customer must have been happy with the outcome, as they ended up using our radios for the Sochi Winter Olympics two years later.
- dilawar 4y agoThanks for reminding that classic engineering is still alive.
- Shinmon 4y agoWhat bugs me the most is that when you talk about engineering or even search for anything engineering-related all that ever shows up is software engineering. It's become much harder to find information about more classical engineering subjects.
- paphillips 4y agoNoyce! This is 21st century if I ever saw it, and I tip my hat to thee.
- matthewmcg 4y agoI know you’re probably intending to say “nice” with an accent. But given the context I can’t help but also think of Bob Noyce, an engineer’s engineer. See https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12149389/robert-noyce-tom-wolfe/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12149389/robert-noyce...
- panxyh 4y agoYou don't think it's safer to assume that this was an intended pun? Bob Noyce is pretty well heard of here. Neverheless, very Noyce of you to link the article.
- paphillips 4y agoIt was intended as both actually: a sloppy imitation Australian accent, as well as a nod to Mr. Noyce. There are very few occasions where the two intersect so nicely.