General > General Technical Chat
Shelf life of assembled electronics
Berni:
I never specifically mentioned MCUs having there flash firmware rot away.
Yes you will not easily find manufacturers specifying a rated flash data retention rate of 50 years or more. It is generally specified for around 10 to 40 years. But this is just what the manufacturer guarantees. The MCUs generally contain some of the best flash memory because they are forced to use the same fab process to produce the CPU, SRAM and Flash as one single die. This prevents them from implementing the most dense flash technology, so the flash cells are big and is the reason why you generally don't see MCUs with more than 1 or 2 MB of built in flash. Some MCUs (Like the larger ARM chips from ST) even put ECC on that already reliable flash, making it that much more solid. So while manufacturers don't guarantee it and products are not designed for it, it still is likely that most of those MCUs will indeed live 50 years just fine. Tho after that they might indeed start giving up the ghost, but i will likely be dead by then anyway.
Still no reason to call those people morons. A lot of modern products are not designed to last on purpose, because it is bad for business long term to sell people products that last a lifetime. For example a lot of LED bulbs are crap on purpose. Just as little care is given to the lifetime of a modern mobile phone, it will be obsolete well before the 10 year mark anyway.
However modern products are outgrowing humble microcontrollers these days. So they have SOCs running a full on OS, as a result needing flash memory that reaches into 100s of MB. These capacities are only cost effective on dense NAND flash manufactured on optimized flash specific nodes. So most of these SOCs have external NAND flash in some form (be it raw nand chip or some controlered kind like eMMC and similar) that tends to be the cheep end stuff and placed near the toasty running processor chip. To top it off they tend to place the bootloader and OS filesystem in the same chip. These are the kinds of devices that i am going to constantly see around me bricking themselves well within my lifetime. The particularly annoying part is that often that bootloader inside the rotting flash chip is required to do the manufacturer approved firmware update procedure, so the product can't be fixed without taking it apart. Tho a lot of SOCs and even some MCUs have built in bootloaders in ROM that let you push new firmware into them over USB and such, but the device manufacturers usually do not expose those for the user.
The worrying part is when this awful high density NAND ends up in products that do make sense to last a long time, like an oscilloscope or in a car(I am sure someone else will eventually have a Tesla like moment with there infotainment shitting itself).
james_s:
I think "infotainment" systems are about the dumbest thing ever to come to cars. Just give me physical switches, knobs, sliders and indicator lights, and a proper DIN slot so I can select the head unit of my choice and upgrade it as needed.
AndyC_772:
--- Quote from: harerod on December 01, 2022, 06:31:12 pm ---At any rate, your report should prove that investing in a mint condition camera equipment collection may have its hazards. :(
--- End quote ---
I'm certainly no longer of the opinion that camera equipment is any kind of investment.
When I originally upgraded from standard consumer lenses to 'L' series, I figured that although they were expensive, they should at least last well. I am, after all, an occasional hobby photographer, and not a working professional.
Unfortunately it appears that this kit was never intended to last a long time. It's certainly robust enough for heavy use, and I don't doubt that occasional servicing will see it give a working pro a good return on investment - but when each item has been superseded, it may be time to seriously consider trading it in before parts become unavailable.
It'll be interesting to see what support is like for DSLRs now the world is clearly going mirrorless. I'm not that keen on Canon's commercial approach here; RF lenses are considerably more costly than their already expensive EF cousins, and I understand that they've sued 3rd party manufacturers who have tried to release RF compatible lenses that might compete with them. That's not an action that consumers should turn a blind eye to, IMHO.
I recently discovered that they also no longer make a RAW conversion SDK available, so if I were to switch to any cameras much newer than the ones I have today, I'll have to change my software workflow too. That's also a backward step commercially - again IMHO.
tom66:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 01, 2022, 07:53:24 pm ---I think "infotainment" systems are about the dumbest thing ever to come to cars. Just give me physical switches, knobs, sliders and indicator lights, and a proper DIN slot so I can select the head unit of my choice and upgrade it as needed.
--- End quote ---
It may have changed now, but you can usually get trim kits and adapter cables for your car to allow you to install nearly anything, like an Android head unit.
Of course, the infotainment systems in these vehicles often control other things, like the HVAC, TPMS, maintenance warnings etc... And there's no common standard for those, so you'll probably lose those.
jmelson:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on December 01, 2022, 12:09:33 pm ---I call bullshit about Berni's comments about the flash.
--- End quote ---
I have an over 20 year old P&P machine. A fair amount of stuff has gone bad on it. Last year, one of the main servo amps started causing violent banging moves on occasion. Then, it finally stopped working at all, powering up with an error display that wasn't in the manual. A replacement unit fixed it. Then, the other axis started doing the same thing, and finally failed to power up. These have some flavor of micro on the control board, and I am pretty sure this was a failure of embedded PROM memory inside the CPU.
Jon
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version