6 ms·

Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so

Until you did a high G manuever or was cruising at 45k feet and get hit with a solar flare then your arduino would be rendered useless or at least introduce so many errors the watchdog hw would shutdown your newly acquired paperweight.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.
- dralley 3y ago
  It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    This is standard in a huge range of off-the-shelf consumer products, such as automotive electronics. They also are expected to operate under a huge temperature range, high humidity, etc... Military hardware isn't magic unobtanium that exists in some parallel plane with unique physical conditions. The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering. PS: It turns out I had misread the L3Harris info page. That spec isn't for the existing F-35 computers that are now about 20 years old, but for the TR-3 upgrade which will start rolling out in mid-2024!!! These new "flying supercomputers" will be 16x faster than before. This is equivalent to upgrading from a 1994 Intel Pentium to an Apple Watch Series 1 from 2015. L3Harris is delivering just 1,000 units of these multi-kilowatt monstrosities for a low-low price of $300 million.
    - freetanga 3y ago
      Let me guess… do you work at Boeing?
    - relativ575 3y ago
      > The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering. Say who? what were the competing solutions and how did F-35 go with the selection?
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        The competing solutions were offered only by other bloated MIC corporations with similar habits of feeding from the government pork barrel. I've been on both sides of this tendering process, and it's absurd how horrifically inefficient it makes things. Small, agile, and capable vendors are literally excluded from the process and can't even begin to meet the criteria for acceptance. But... that's the point. It's not about cost-efficiency or product quality, but about keeping a few well-connected companies happy. Try to look at things from the perspective of someone like Elon Musk, or a leader you admire from any FAANG or successful modern company. Now tell them with a straight face that you're going to keep using computer hardware from the 1990s for 20+ years without an upgrade because... the paperwork is too hard. You'd be laughed at, and then booted from the organisation for gross incompetence. In the military, that's normal way things are done. Imagine running Facebook, Google, or Amazon on 20 year old hardware. Picture that for a second. Or if you want space-rated flight hardware, imagine SpaceX using something from the 1990s for Falcon 9 rockets because of red-tape. You're rationalising nonsense. You're trying to tell me that it's good and proper that America and its allies are going to war with planes that have flight hardware that is equivalent to what I wear on my wrist to tell me the time, but uses 100,000x the power, takes up 500x the volume, and costs 1,000x as much.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Things like this are done for good reasons. It's fair to say, the engineering minds at work here have reasons. Reasons that would survive this armchair whataboutism.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    There is no evidence of these "good reasons". In fact, there are many new articles bemoaning cost overruns, delays, poor performance, and more. From what I've experienced first-hand with government tender processes, engineering considerations are a distant third on the priority list at best. That's how you end up with the SLS using rocket engines from the Shuttle that cost more than an entire Falcon 9 rocket. Except that the the SLS uses 5 of these single-use engines, but the Falcon 9 is reusable dozens of times. There really are situations that are this absurd, and the military industrial complex is notorious for them. I would argue that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why F-35 jets are using hardware 100-1,000x worse in ever metric. Also please demonstrate why it uses bizarre non-standard CPUs instead of CotS hardware as seen in civilian avionics, SpaceX rockets, automotive ECUs, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      The evidence is 1000 operational planes
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        1,000 operational planes with cost overruns and persistent issues decades into the program — most of which are related to the avionics and their associated software! The F-35 planes are a success despite the avionics, not because of them. The upgrade to Apple Watch levels of computing has notably been delayed by a year into mid-2024! How is that a successful demonstration of computer engineering?
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        Every single engineering effort of this level and complexity humankind has undertaken in the last 20 years have faced the same challenges. Space shuttle, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, planes, trains, on and on.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Ordinary consumer electronics can tolerate far higher G forces than the human pilot can. A standard technique is to simply liberally coat the electronics in epoxy resin, but that's only really needed for things like the guidance electronics in artillery shells. E.g.: Here's a drone reaching nearly 13 Gs, which would incapacitate or even injure a human: https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l https://imgur.com/SHbDK2l One recent change is that modern electronics uses mostly surface-mount components, which are not easily dislodged by g forces. Older electronics used large discrete components with wire legs (capacitors, inductors, etc...), which had a tendency to bend back and forth and eventually break off. However, tender requirements aren't changed just because technology has moved on. The paperwork must be completed as specified! The vendors must show that their new technology that doesn't have these problems includes solutions for problems only present in old technology! Etc... This results in 20-30 year old technology being used in new warplanes rolling off the production line today. But rest assured, it's being done properly, with all the correct paperwork filled out! Everything in order. Meanwhile, for the price of one of the two cooling fans on that monstrosity, I could buy half a dozen embedded processors made with silicon-on-insulator technology, which is also rad-hard, and have a 5-way system with majority voting and a hot spare... still running off a battery and cooled passively.

dralley 3y ago
It's not just about g-forces, it's about high temperatures, heating/cooling cycles, vibrations, humidity, EMP resistance, etc. etc. It's cool that your drone can do 13 G's, but the more realistic scenario is doing 5-6 Gs over and over and over and over and over again, sitting out in the sun for weeks, sitting on the deck of a carrier in the tropics, getting launched off a carrier, getting shaken around and exposed to salty air, sitting a few feet from a high power radar - you get the point. Also, god forbid, but these things are designed to drop nukes, so that has to be taken into consideration as well.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  This is standard in a huge range of off-the-shelf consumer products, such as automotive electronics. They also are expected to operate under a huge temperature range, high humidity, etc... Military hardware isn't magic unobtanium that exists in some parallel plane with unique physical conditions. The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering. PS: It turns out I had misread the L3Harris info page. That spec isn't for the existing F-35 computers that are now about 20 years old, but for the TR-3 upgrade which will start rolling out in mid-2024!!! These new "flying supercomputers" will be 16x faster than before. This is equivalent to upgrading from a 1994 Intel Pentium to an Apple Watch Series 1 from 2015. L3Harris is delivering just 1,000 units of these multi-kilowatt monstrosities for a low-low price of $300 million.
  - freetanga 3y ago
    Let me guess… do you work at Boeing?
  - relativ575 3y ago
    > The choices being made for the F-35 have much more to do with government tender processes, military red tape, corruption, and general government incompetence than physics or engineering. Say who? what were the competing solutions and how did F-35 go with the selection?
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      The competing solutions were offered only by other bloated MIC corporations with similar habits of feeding from the government pork barrel. I've been on both sides of this tendering process, and it's absurd how horrifically inefficient it makes things. Small, agile, and capable vendors are literally excluded from the process and can't even begin to meet the criteria for acceptance. But... that's the point. It's not about cost-efficiency or product quality, but about keeping a few well-connected companies happy. Try to look at things from the perspective of someone like Elon Musk, or a leader you admire from any FAANG or successful modern company. Now tell them with a straight face that you're going to keep using computer hardware from the 1990s for 20+ years without an upgrade because... the paperwork is too hard. You'd be laughed at, and then booted from the organisation for gross incompetence. In the military, that's normal way things are done. Imagine running Facebook, Google, or Amazon on 20 year old hardware. Picture that for a second. Or if you want space-rated flight hardware, imagine SpaceX using something from the 1990s for Falcon 9 rockets because of red-tape. You're rationalising nonsense. You're trying to tell me that it's good and proper that America and its allies are going to war with planes that have flight hardware that is equivalent to what I wear on my wrist to tell me the time, but uses 100,000x the power, takes up 500x the volume, and costs 1,000x as much.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Things like this are done for good reasons. It's fair to say, the engineering minds at work here have reasons. Reasons that would survive this armchair whataboutism.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  There is no evidence of these "good reasons". In fact, there are many new articles bemoaning cost overruns, delays, poor performance, and more. From what I've experienced first-hand with government tender processes, engineering considerations are a distant third on the priority list at best. That's how you end up with the SLS using rocket engines from the Shuttle that cost more than an entire Falcon 9 rocket. Except that the the SLS uses 5 of these single-use engines, but the Falcon 9 is reusable dozens of times. There really are situations that are this absurd, and the military industrial complex is notorious for them. I would argue that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why F-35 jets are using hardware 100-1,000x worse in ever metric. Also please demonstrate why it uses bizarre non-standard CPUs instead of CotS hardware as seen in civilian avionics, SpaceX rockets, automotive ECUs, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    The evidence is 1000 operational planes
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      1,000 operational planes with cost overruns and persistent issues decades into the program — most of which are related to the avionics and their associated software! The F-35 planes are a success despite the avionics, not because of them. The upgrade to Apple Watch levels of computing has notably been delayed by a year into mid-2024! How is that a successful demonstration of computer engineering?
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        Every single engineering effort of this level and complexity humankind has undertaken in the last 20 years have faced the same challenges. Space shuttle, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers, planes, trains, on and on.