emusan

Blue Origin has not sent a rocket to mars in the sense that SpaceX wishes to send Starships to mars. They have sent a probe. SpaceX has launched probes to far further celestial bodies than Mars.

They have copied the external look of the rockets (which is, for obvious reasons, not protected by ITAR), but to my knowledge no one, China or otherwise, has managed to match the internal engineering prowess nearly a decade later.

To say that China is "very effective at copying all the stuff SpaceX is doing" is quite the stretch.

These are quite often used in defense and space applications where the flexibility of the DSP allows for custom waveform implementations that would otherwise require incredible CPU processing power or small batch ASICs. The versal fabric will only expand the potential use cases even further in these domains. Cost is often lower on the priority list for these as well.

Anduril Intelligence and Space (https://www.anduril.com/) | Reston, VA (onsite, relocation available) | Full Time

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology.

Anduril Intelligence and Space (AIS) is focused on positioning Anduril as a lead provider of specialized engineering and products for Intelligence Community (IC) customers.

In particular we are looking for engineers with experience in:

- Embedded Software Development (bonus points with Rust or Haskell experience!): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4597...

- FPGA Design: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4591...

- Hardware Design: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4591...

Apply here: https://www.anduril.com/open-roles/

Feel free to reply or email me with any questions!

There is hope for us lowly humans!

This is a difficult question to prescribe an answer for that works for everyone, but the best I personally can think of is "practice".

To make that more actionable... My approach in life has generally been to find a project (even something seemingly incredibly dumb, as long as it is fun), then work through it, learning what I need to know as I go along. To learn "well", you must then also constantly question what you have done as you complete various stages of the project to see if you have done them as effectively as possible, and try to incorporate any lessons learned into future projects.

I have found that how individuals do the learning required for this differs significantly from person to person, so it is hard to recommend any particular approach.

There are a few factors that make this possible:

1. As others have pointed out, the link budget (how much energy loss a particular radio link can handle before it is broken) for D2C satellites assumes a nearly direct line of sight from your handset to the satellite. This is much easier to achieve with satellites in space than it is with traditional cell towers that might have numerous walls/buildings in the way.

2. The D2C satellites use massive phased array antennas that are able to point a very narrow beam very accurately to the ground. This provides a substantial amount of antenna gain that further helps the link budget. The gain from the antennas allows the satellites to pick up even relatively weak signals from a handset.

There are other tricks as well, but these account for the largest differences. Of course, doppler gets in the way, but it is a solvable problem.

Anduril Intelligence and Space (https://www.anduril.com/) | Reston, VA (onsite, relocation available) | Full Time

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology.

Anduril Intelligence and Space (AIS) is focused on positioning Anduril as a lead provider of specialized engineering and products for Intelligence Community (IC) customers.

In particular we are looking for engineers with experience in:

- Embedded Software Development (bonus points with Rust or Haskell experience!): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4415...

- FPGA Design: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4367...

- Hardware Design: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/andurilindustries/jobs/4367...

Apply here: https://www.anduril.com/open-roles/

Feel free to reply or email me with any questions!

Curious to know what app you are using to get boundaries and layers, OnX?

I think “low speed” is quite a relative term here. PCIe serdes lanes are for very high data rate communication (> 1gbps per lane). This is the realm of the Syzygy XCVR standard.

The lower speed Syzygy standard, while not operating at these speeds, is capable of much higher rates than a typical microcontroller. There are many peripherals with I/O requirements beyond a simple LED or SPI device, but below that of a PCIe or other high rate transceiver such has:

- moderate to high end ADCs and DACs (LVDS and parallel)

- image sensors (LVDS, parallel, and HiSPI)

- various networking PHYs

The lower end syzygy connector has pinouts to support LVDS differential pairs, which can easily achieve hundreds of Mbps data rates.

With many of these types of standards (FMC and Syzygy) it becomes helpful to include some form of memory on the peripheral cards. With Syzygy it is required in order to store some helpful data about the card (product name, manufacturer) along with supported voltage ranges for an adjustable voltage rail from the carrier board. FMC used standard off the shelf I2C eeproms for this task, with some pins on the FMC connector used to indicate the address for the particular slot that the peripheral was attached to on the motherboard. We wanted to lose as few pins as possible for address lines on Syzygy, so we opted to instead use a microcontroller with an ADC for our peripheral flash memory. There was a single pin used to indicate the peripheral address. This pin had a fixed resistor to a power rail on the peripheral and the carrier would have a port-specific resistor to ground on the same pin. By reading the voltage across these resistors we defined 16 addresses with just a single pin. IIRC the microcontrollers we selected were almost the same cost as the I2C flash we would have used in their place!

It was a pretty neat hack.

Placing small microcontrollers on the peripherals also opened up other functions like using them for basic power supply sequencing.

Hadn’t expected to see this here! I helped put this standard together while working at Opal Kelly.

I think we had some nifty ideas in there (using an analog voltage for peripheral addressing was one of my favorite). It has slowly seen more adoption as time passes. Would always love to see more adoption!

If you're interested in the cantenna radar you might also find Henrik Forsten's radar interesting: https://hforsten.com/6-ghz-frequency-modulated-radar.html. It uses largely the same high-level design, but is a bit more integrated as a single unit (rather than a series of minicircuits components).

I've built the MIT radar before and it is a great way to learn the basics of radar!

In either design you can likely get away with <$500 worth of materials.

Henrik has follow-up blogs adding and modifying this design for more functionality, it's a pretty neat project to follow!

I owned the first CAT phone with a FLiR thermal imaging sensor and this was by far my biggest gripe. The hardware felt like it was built to last a decade or longer, but the software was chock full of vulnerabilities from day 1, and I think they only provided a few months of proper software updates. I have since (reluctantly) moved to iPhone where I expect that (with my usage) the software should outlast the hardware.

Related discussion on the initial tweets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935

Everything is fine, the S&P500 is nearly back to its all-time high again.

(/s)

Opal Kelly Inc. (https://opalkelly.com) | Electrical/Computer Engineer | Portland, OR | ONSITE | Full time

Founded in 2004, Opal Kelly designs off-the-shelf, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 FPGA modules and helps customers deploy them in a wide ranges of applications with the easy-to-use FrontPanel software interface and robust API.

We're looking for an energetic, bright, social, and engaged engineer capable of working with both software and hardware in a lab setting. You’ll be working on supporting existing customers, reaching out to new customers and markets, and helping with product development. Ideally, your experience, ability, and interests should cast a wide net -- we need someone who is comfortable working with a number of technologies and adaptable to acquire new experience.

Requirements: - FPGA design experience (Xilinx or Altera preferred, VHDL or Verilog)

- Superior troubleshooting, debugging, and analytical skills

- Excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills (design documentation / code documentation)

Experience with revision control (primarily git) preferred. Software programming is useful.

Contact me at tom.mcleod[at]opalkelly.com

While they certainly have some nifty safety features, I don't feel as though they really take safety seriously when they have one of the worst completion rates for the Takata airbag recall (source: https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/takata-recall-spotlight#comp...).

For a few years my only vehicle was an old, beat up Volvo station wagon. The door locks were damaged and would only lock ~50% of the time. Since I parked the car on the street I would always check to ensure that the doors were locked by pulling on a door handle.

One time I did this as a car passed by and a number of people started yelling out of the car at me accusing me of breaking into my own car and even threatening me if I continued.

Just because a small, cut down clip "looks like" attempted robbery does not mean that it is.

>Quantum computing advances are presumably not an industrial design challenge...

Perhaps not, but getting laypeople to care enough about quantum computing to fund its development could very well be.

I believe most of the criticism stems from the fairly eurocentric/whitewashed view of history portrayed by the book.

(note: I have not read the book myself, but I've heard the criticism from a number of professors that had)

While the military arms at the time were muskets and bayonets, that was not the only technology available. Many colonial troops had rifles of their own that they used. These rifles were superior to the British musket in many regards and helped the colonial troops win.

Surely the founding fathers were aware of this and knew that the second amendment would allow citizens to have weapons that were more deadly than the standard military firearm at the time. In fact, this trend even continued well into the Vietnam war. It was really only in the past 50 or so years that the military has eclipsed the citizens in terms of standard issue firepower.

So no, the founding fathers were not aware of the M-16 and AK-47[0], but they also had more than muskets and bayonets, and were perfectly content to have a citizenry that outgunned the military.

[0] - I should note that the M-16 and AK-47 are essentially illegal in the US at this point, along with any weapons of similar firepower, so that point seems moot anyway. The only people able to acquire them are incredibly rich collectors.

The vast majority of retailers on gundeals sold accessories which is legal for anyone to do.

Those that did sell guns were federally licensed retailers, gundeals did not (to my knowledge) allow for private sellers to post. All federally licensed (FFL) retailers must perform a background check (or transfer to another FFL to perform one) before transferring to a purchaser. I don't see how any of that could be considered as not "law-abiding".

All of that applies only to the US of course, but I'm not aware of other countries having deals there.

Aside from maybe your first point, what do any of those points have to do with "troubles with Elon Musk"? After the second point I'm not even sure what they could have to do with Solar City in general.

Your third point seems to be more of an issue with a local construction company and the last point seems to be an issue with Cuomo. Could you clarify? Am I missing some connections?

That's not entirely true. There are no CCS DC fast chargers (the type the bolt uses) in much of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North/South Dakota. You might be able to drive from Seattle to NYC but you'd have to drive pretty far out of your way to do it.

Super chargers are available in all of those states, making any cross country driving in that area significantly faster and easier.

I think the original patchset is from December 4th: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/4/709 though I could be mistaken.

I think it's important to point out though that cattle can digest and "convert" a significantly wider variety of plant sources into meat. Our bodies simply can't digest a lot of what they can.

https://www.gandi.net/ does as well and has been pretty great in my (somewhat limited) experience.

That's a pretty serious abuse of correlation...

Right, they get the charging free, though I'm not sure that includes unlimited parking once charging is complete (though I haven't actually read the agreement myself either).