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| Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? |
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| langwadt:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 21, 2021, 07:54:03 pm ---The thing I remember most from my electronics hobby in the 80s-90s was how much harder it was to find parts. There wasn't much nearby besides Radio Shack and they almost never had all the parts I needed to build anything. I think DigiKey was around, but I didn't know about it and would have had to get my parents to call them up and order stuff. --- End quote --- yeh, when I was a kid there was one electronic store here and they they (he) usually didn't have the parts you wanted, when he closed there was none. Now 20 years later there are several online hobby stores that delivers overnight and has a huge selection of electronic parts, kits, and lots of mechanical stuff as well, in addition to the huge selection of internal stores with a bit of patience |
| ledtester:
If you're interested in how things were done in the last century, you might spend some time browsing through the Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits series compiled by Rudolf Graf. One of the circuits in Vol. 1 is the "Computalarm" which has a rather sophisticated mode of operation despite not containing a "computer"! --- Quote ---The circuit has a built-in, self-arming feature. The driver turns off the ignition, presses the arm button on the Computalarm, and leaves the car. Within 20 seconds, the alarm arms itself -- all automatically! The circuit will then detect the opening of any monitored door, the trunk lid, or the hood on the car. Once activated, the circuit remains dormant for 10 seconds. When the 10-second time delay has run out, the circuit will close the car's horn relay and sound the horn in periodic blasts (approximately 1 to 2 seconds apart) for a period of one minute. Then the Computalarm automatically shuts itself off (to save your battery) and re-arms. If a door, the trunk lid or the hood remains ajar, the alarm circuit retriggers and another period of horn blasts occurs. The Computalarm has a "key" switch by which the driver can disarm the alarm circuit within a 10-second period after he enters the door. The key switch consists of a closed circuit jack, J1, and a mating miniature plug. --- End quote --- |
| eti:
I've seen this topic before, in various guises. A HUGE waste of time and energy is wasted on this. Void thread, bin it. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: rstofer on June 22, 2021, 05:23:36 pm ---65 pages of wasting time! Where in that tome is the reason for the 'Case in point'. In any event, even real airplanes fall out of the sky when things go wrong. The Boeing 737-MAX, a brand new design, has crashed a couple of times and they used real engineers and everything. --- End quote --- I thought it was well written and very comprehensive, the sort of investigation I'd expect for any aircraft crash. This was not some kids quadcopter, this was a 9 foot long unmanned aircraft weighing several hundred pounds and it was chock full of rookie mistakes. Yes real airplanes crash too but this thing was virtually guaranteed to crash and it's only dumb luck that it didn't kill somebody or cause serious property damage. Deciding that upon loss of radio signal the craft would continue at the present throttle setting rather than gradually decrease for a more or less controlled landing or deploy a chute is mind blowing. Declaring redundancy because there are four motors is idiotic, anyone who has ever flown a quad knows that if any one of those four motors fails the thing falls out of the sky. Four motors is not an asset in terms of reliability, it is a liability. It's very clear that none of the people involved were engineers and certainly not with any background in aviation. It looked like some kids who had some experience building and flying toy quadcopters thought they could simply scale up the design and call it good. That is exactly the point, illustrating the problem when hobbyists get arrogant and think they are real engineers. That's not to say that there aren't some extremely skilled hobbyists out there but these guys are not them. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: george.b on June 20, 2021, 06:56:56 am ---Case in point: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/602bb22f8fa8f50388f9f000/Alauda_Airspeeder_Mk_II_UAS_reg_na_03-21.pdf --- End quote --- Ah yes: a "dead man's switch" implementation which requires a separate person to go check the pilot, and if still struggling, put him out of his misery with a switch. Their "kill switch" was literally a LoRaWAN module that in theory should be able to energize a relay to cut off power to the rest of the device. The incident occurred, because this "kill switch" could not contact the drone to "kill" it. That sort of stupidity is not characteristic of the Arduino environment; it is characteristic of humans who believe their stuff is more valuable and therefore always to be prioritized over any risk to others. (Edited to clarify: The only reason you'd wire a kill switch to require a working connection to kill a device instead of having the connection keep the device alive and kill it whenever the connection was lost, is because you believe an accidental killing of the device would be a bigger loss than anything a completely uncontrolled device could cause. And since the device at hand was a flying death trap of over 90kg of metal, plastic, and glass fibre, including several high energy Li battery packs easily capable of causing a fire individually, the "designer" was an idiot who apparently felt that killing someone else would have been preferable over losing the device itself. They should be prosecuted, and never allowed to "engineer" anything more complicated than a ditch in the ground ever again. May sound hyperbolic, but when a person shows they are willing to risk the lives of others to reduce the risk to their own property, they need to be evaluated and judged by the same criteria they applied to others, or they'll never change their behaviour.) |
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