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| Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby? |
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| Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 26, 2021, 01:15:22 am ---Still, I must point out that in my view/terminology, reducing safety target that low because of fiscal resource constraints, is still malice. --- End quote --- Oh, I do agree with this. But I also see the actual Arduino hobbyist, who's now suddenly in a "real company" and called an "engineer", who came up with the technical details of the kill switch, isn't the one who decided to reduce the safety. Likely they were carefully mentally manipulated to accept this while not even understanding what's happening. Add unnecessary stress to blur the vision and make the "engineers" do panic decisions so that the demo next day can run. Make them feel they are somehow saving the world by participating in this project, maybe this drone solves the climate change and saves millions of human lives. And, make them believe the project fails if they can't provide a demo the next day. This sounds stupid when put like this but a real sociopath is well capable of manipulating great majority of people, even those who are far from being gullible. Even outright lying is possible. This is just speculation based on what I have seen in similar situations, but I wouldn't be any surprised to hear the engineer had doubts about the safety but the higher-up promised and guaranteed that this demonstration will be arranged physically somewhere where spectators are all protected or far enough and there is no controlled airfield nearby. Such promises are always off the record and made in private to be outright denied later. That kill switch thing is really hard to do properly. It should have features like an autonomous drone but then it becomes a whole different level of task, namely designing the autonomous flying system to fly safe. If I absolutely had to do this without involving the rabbit hole of full autonomous flying, my list of priorities would be, 1) Do everything I can to make that communication link reliable so I can invert back to the usual logic (no signal -> cut power) 2) Do some stupidly simple (analog?) logic that indeed cuts power, but with a super-reliable delay of say 5 seconds. During that wait, in the main flight microcontroller, run a semi-stupidly simple rescue logic which is unlikely to fail, supposed to provide maybe uncontrolled but still smoother landing; for example, keep the IMU-controlled leveling enabled (feeding back the ratios between motor settings) while rolling down the general "throttle" (or average power to all motors) setting during that 5 seconds; but I do realize this isn't enough for proper safety level, either. It might be two orders of magnitude better than what they had, but still not enough. For a good solution, I would like to have a good team, time and money, and limited stress level so my brain is allowed to work. |
| james_s:
Even the hobby quadcopters already have a simple safety system that works pretty well. If they lose radio signal, which happens occasionally for various reasons, they don't just cut the throttle to zero, they reduce it to a level that causes the craft to descend while maintaining control so the craft stays level and doesn't just fall out of the sky. A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic, at least using one that did that while the thing was at significant altitude would be. A full kill switch could be useful for ensuring the motors are shut off once it's on or near the ground or near people. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: james_s on June 26, 2021, 07:53:49 am ---A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic --- End quote --- Having only that sort of a kill switch, yeah. But we've pretty much established already that what a drone should do in exceptional situations is complicated, and isn't really the point here; it is understandable if that was the problem in this case. But it isn't. The point is that that this design chooses to deliberately ignore things like loss of communication, and instead relies on an external signal as the trigger or detector for exceptional situations. I've thought about this some more, and reading the other arguments here, I think my attribution to malice is indeed incorrect, and negligence is a better match. Similar to say a driver causing an accident because they were busy playing with their phone while driving. There, too, I would not blame the phone (or Arduino) for the accident; those were just something that got used while the user was being negligent. |
| Zero999:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 26, 2021, 01:07:08 pm --- --- Quote from: james_s on June 26, 2021, 07:53:49 am ---A kill switch that completely kills the motors would be idiotic --- End quote --- Having only that sort of a kill switch, yeah. But we've pretty much established already that what a drone should do in exceptional situations is complicated, and isn't really the point here; it is understandable if that was the problem in this case. But it isn't. The point is that that this design chooses to deliberately ignore things like loss of communication, and instead relies on an external signal as the trigger or detector for exceptional situations. I've thought about this some more, and reading the other arguments here, I think my attribution to malice is indeed incorrect, and negligence is a better match. Similar to say a driver causing an accident because they were busy playing with their phone while driving. There, too, I would not blame the phone (or Arduino) for the accident; those were just something that got used while the user was being negligent. --- End quote --- I'd say ignorance, more than negligence. The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring. Similar to a child finding something dangerous like a car battery dumped in the street, playing with it and starting a fire. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on June 26, 2021, 04:49:16 pm ---The designer lacked experience and didn't envisage such a dangerous situation occurring. --- End quote --- They were fully capable adults, so lack of understanding is not and should not be a protection against culpability. Let's say you design a hand-held widget with a 2000 mAh lithium-ion battery in it. But because you're not experienced in such design, yours has this metal spike that will pierce the battery and short it, if the device is held "incorrectly" in adult human hands. Would you seriously try to claim you are not responsible for the ensuing fires and injuries, because you didn't realize your design would cause those? While you did not cause them to happen, your negligence made them possible/likely, and in most legal jurisdictions you would be culpable. I believe you should be culpable, because you were negligent in the design of the hand-held widget. Same for the drone case. |
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