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This is not surprising. It's a calculated risk to make a product just good enough. Development resources invested in retail wireless gear is minimal. I've wo

This is not surprising. It's a calculated risk to make a product just good enough. Development resources invested in retail wireless gear is minimal. I've worked on firmware for high-confidence industrial wireless gear used in mines. Most of them fall over under load, run obsolete+unpatched code and/or reboot randomly. Retail customers will tend to just put up with it and not return the product before the merchant's return grace period. It's a totally different attitude when the intended market is enterprise: it's assumed that if a product causes a failure, the vendor is going to receive escalating, unpleasant phone calls until it's resolved.

DanBC 13y ago
Mining is a dangerous industry with its own specialist regulators and standards bodies. Equipment failure that can kill people should be taken more seriously than equipment failure that leads to less serious consequences. The thought of wireless gear in mines is pretty scary! I used to build / test equipment for a sub-contractor of Joy Mining and communication between the devices was carried by inch thick cables with nikel-plated machined steel connector shells. Pit props at the cutting face can be active devices that walk forward as the face is cut, and the coordinate that forward movement. Designing user interfaces is tricky, and designing a UI that should prevent death or huge financial costs if misused is probably hard.
- midas007 13y ago
  There is. Mostly 460 and 900 MHz packet modems that only speak UDP. It's for telemetry data and data between trucks. As of 2000, there were working prototypes of both an anti-collision system and fully autonomous driving / grading.
midas007 13y ago
s/Most of them/Most of the retail ones/ Not the industrial ones. They're unit tested ad-nauseum, subjected to crush and environmental testing. You can run over the units with fully-loaded haul truck, the cases are cast steel. They also retail for $10k USD a piece.

DanBC 13y ago

Mining is a dangerous industry with its own specialist regulators and standards bodies. Equipment failure that can kill people should be taken more seriously than equipment failure that leads to less serious consequences. The thought of wireless gear in mines is pretty scary! I used to build / test equipment for a sub-contractor of Joy Mining and communication between the devices was carried by inch thick cables with nikel-plated machined steel connector shells. Pit props at the cutting face can be active devices that walk forward as the face is cut, and the coordinate that forward movement. Designing user interfaces is tricky, and designing a UI that should prevent death or huge financial costs if misused is probably hard.

midas007 13y ago
There is. Mostly 460 and 900 MHz packet modems that only speak UDP. It's for telemetry data and data between trucks. As of 2000, there were working prototypes of both an anti-collision system and fully autonomous driving / grading.

midas007 13y ago

s/Most of them/Most of the retail ones/ Not the industrial ones. They're unit tested ad-nauseum, subjected to crush and environmental testing. You can run over the units with fully-loaded haul truck, the cases are cast steel. They also retail for $10k USD a piece.