The child comments from yours are mentioning nuclear weapons as a parallel but there's one big difference between drone tech and nuclear weapons: plutonium is really hard to make.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
Yes, and so far it's much easier to drive a van into a crowd of people. Nobody has tried to mandate tech in cars that detects and prevents such malicious behavior.
Vehicles are registered and licensed to tie them to specific owners. You are required to provide a identification/drivers license when renting a vehicle. The largest, most dangerous vehicles like semi-trucks have additional restrictions on licensing and access. There is a pretty robust system in place to reduce unattributable crimes using vehicles.
Even without vulnerabilities like that, something like https://comma.ai/openpilot could very likely be used in the same way ArduPilot was used in the recent Ukrainian drone attacks.
> A lunatic will be able to wipe out school children playing outside and have little chance of getting caught, for example.
America insists on making sure that guns are universally available so that school shootings can still happen. Doesn't register. The death toll seems to be politically acceptable.
Well yes, but that's a utopian idea that can never be fully realised. You can't fix them all. There'll always be some number of crazy, broken, malevolent psychos out there. If you don't think this is true then you need to meet more people.
We need to minimise the damage they can cause, and that means preventing them from using slaughterbots.
the premise is that the person doing it is very mentally ill. the question, "why would they do that when they could do something else that makes more sense?", doesn't make a lot of sense itself under the premise.
If a person is very ill mentally then there are already many ways to kill people in numbers, some of which ways are much more accessible than slaughterbots.
I mean... yeah, that’s a definite possibility. If a lunatic has access to explosives, there’s an infinite number of ways they could do that.
The hard part is that there is no effective way to regulate anything in the supply chain involved except for the explosives themselves. Everything else is super commoditized at this point and, other than the props, very multi-purpose. The first significant hexcopter I built used a BeagleBone Blue for processing, generic ESCs and BLDCs for the motors, and an aluminum frame that I cut out of aluminum tubes from Home Depot. Max takeoff weight was 55lb, because that’s the heaviest it could legally take off with. This was 7 years ago.
If one is a lunatic, there are easy to find recipes for making bulk (albeit dangerous to be around) explosives.
one thing in societies favor though - sufficiently unstable lunatics tend to self delete themselves in various ways by being unstable lunatics. few tend to be in the “sweet” spot of dangerous lunatics who are stable and focused enough to follow through successfully with a dangerous plan. thankfully.
For example - most people who could synthesize multi-kilo quantities of TATP without blowing themselves up and successfully build a DIY drone to carry it have better and more productive things to do with their lives. at least in the west.
> I think I prefer the coffee from an Aeropress more, but the convenience of the Keurig is hard to beat.
I do dirty field work a fair bit. Large drone test flight campaigns in the middle of nowhere for a week at a time. I've got an Aeropress Go with the stainless filter, a hand grinder, and a small electric kettle that I keep in my suitcase. I'll usually grab a bag of locally-sourced beans. Man oh man has that little kit ever brought a lot of joy into the world. When someone seems like they're starting to burn out I'll make them a fresh ground cup of coffee and you can just see their eyes light up when they take that first sip. Such a wonderful piece of plastic made by a frisbee company :D
Well, for just $2500-$4000 more have you considered a mid-range espresso machine & grinder? You might need an electrician to install a 20 amp circuit and it’s totally not portable and takes a long time to heat up, but you know, it’s another option. Or Aeropress. Either way works…
But absolutely don't have room in my kitchen or time in the morning for that. If I was the kind of person who had a leisurely second cup of coffee in the afternoon, I probably would. But I have exactly one caffeine unit as soon as I wake up and I'm done for the day. My brain chemistry doesn't allow me to deviate from that.
I'm currently still somewhat in the AI skeptic camp but you've intrigued me... I'm curious about taking a lesser-known RFC and trying to see what kind of implementation one of the current code-generating models actually comes up with from the spec.
I don’t have a link handy but one of the videos I saw on Twitter looked like there was pretty bad latency. Once they got to the target aircraft they went into a hover and very slowly set it down on the wing before the FPV feed froze.
In most of the videos I've seen there are failsafe warnings on the screen indicating a loss of GPS, which I'm not surprised at all about. Russia's well-known for having GPS jammers, and having them on-site at an airforce base when the enemy they've been fighting is using drones is just common sense. The video I linked to really looks to me like it's being stick flown with IMU stabilization but probably without Pos Hold.
Exploding on impact is a mature tech for things like shells, but it requires building a mechanism into the shell so that it won't explode before it is fired.
If the drone will be controlled by a human operator till the end, then it might win for the drone design to avoid the complexity of a sensor to detect impacts and of the aforementioned mechanism.
Also, landing on an airplane wing is easier to train for and to test than a mission plan that involves a drone that explodes on impact.
I'll throw a bit more flavour in with the sibling comment talking about transposing x and y.
The system I work on every day has:
- multiple GPS receivers that report latitude, longitude, altitude (MSL) and altitude (HAE)
- an interface to some GeoJSON data where coordinates are stored as longitude, latitude
- a geographically-local Cartesian coordinate frame that is an AEP (Azimuthal Equidistance Projection) with a latitude/longitude origin. The "XYZ" axes of this frame are a NED frame (north, east, down)
- an aircraft-local Cartesian frame with FRD (forward, right, down) axes
- an interface that provides map tiles with zoom/x/y coordinates
- a bunch of other sensors mounted on the aircraft that have their own FRD frames, except the camera which has an RDF (right, down, forward) frame because... reasons.
- terrain RADAR units mounted on the aircraft at specific FRD locations that provide AGL (above ground level) measurements independent of their rotation (the aircraft can be 20 degrees nose-up and we still get a measurement straight down to the ground)
- terrain LIDAR units mounted on the aircraft at specific FRD locations and orientations that provide a straight-line measurement to the ground - if we're over flat ground and the aircraft is 20 degrees nose-up, these report AGL/cos(20 deg)
Keeping track of what frame everything is in is... a daunting task and we've definitely had bugs due to accidentally using a coordinate from the wrong frame. I've been deep into a bunch of this code this week and have been strongly considering doing a zero-cost abstraction similar to what Sguaba is doing, but for C++. I'm pretty sure that we could do it using templates and type tags without really changing any of the underlying math and without implementing a bunch of custom operators but I'm not 100% convinced of that yet.
Another related issue that I don't think is addressed by Sguaba is time. We're hopefully going to get everything standardized to PTP timestamps everywhere but currently all of these sensors are running on unsynchronized clocks and we also have to be careful about keeping track of the origin of a given timestamp and making sure to convert it into the right scale before using it.
RF/EMC: definitely. It's an intentional radiator (WiFi) and an unintentional radiator (high-frequency CPU). Using pre-certified COTS modules helps with this quite a bit because they'll, hopefully, pass on their own but they do not relieve you of the certification burden.
Safety: from a legal perspective I don't believe safety certification is mandatory because it runs on low voltage. The wall wart would need to be certified. But... from a liability perspective it might still be necessary. If one of these devices were to catch fire and burn someone's house down the company is going to get sued. Maybe sued by the homeowner, maybe sued by the homeowner's insurance company. The counter to that is to have solid product liability insurance and the insurer may have specific safety certification requirements before they'll even issue an insurance contract, and they may have additional safety certification options that would reduce the premiums.
> Even when I live with others, we aren't worried about bathroom noise.
I think there's a specific target customer that would love this. I'm in the same camp you are... I couldn't care less. When it's just my wife and I at home it's pretty rare that we close the door even.
In university though I had a roommate who was absolutely paranoid about people hearing her in the bathroom. She would generally run the faucet the whole time she was in there to mask the sounds. Sometimes... I think she'd even run the shower; I don't know this for sure, but I'd hear the shower running in the bathroom for a while and she'd come out looking just as un-showered as she had when she went in.
> Recently read The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Gelles which is an excellent review of the Welch years, how he worked, and how he sent his minions out across the corporate world to wreak havoc.
The parts about Boeing in that book are... rough. Not rough as in "poorly-written" but rough as in "holy hell is that ever a brutal way to ruin a good company". Excellent book but lol it's not a feel-good read :)
Maybe a decade ago I read from critics concerned a shift to an aggressively globalized supply chain was certain to wreak havoc on Boeing’s quality control.
e.g. safety-critical nuts and bolts used to be produced down the street, now you get a few nuts from say Thailand and a few bolts from Malaysia… the critics complained it was certain to lead to problems.
Was that a part of what you read about in that book?
Not significantly no, it was much more focused on the McDonnell-Douglas reverse acquisition. To summarize: McDonnell-Douglas was failing and bought Boeing with Boeing’s own stock (technically Boeing bought McDonnell-Douglas with Boeing stock but in practice McDonnell management assumed control). MD’s executives were Jack Welch protégés and did the same thing to Boeing that happened to GE.
The part that story always stays silent is that Boeing then-CEO was big fan of Welch-ism apparently and oversaw major changes that caused long-term issues
... while new people (albeit not execs) from McDonnell-Douglas were publishing internal memos about how MD has experience on why the actions taken by Boeing (not MD!) CEO will cause problems.
Not quite the same scale but one of my personal favourite stories involved hardware buried under a highway. The Ethernet stopped working, but the PoE was still ok. We had the foresight to install a serial line to the console on the equipment too. This meant that I could power cycle the hardware at will (through the managed PoE switch) and talk to the boot loader (U-boot) over serial. While not exactly a REPL in the conventional sense, it had enough functionality to be able to talk directly to the MAC and PHY to determine what was going on.
Sadly we couldn’t convince it to work, even at 10 Mbit. My suspicion is salt water ingress into the vault. What we did manage to do, though… There were just enough tools installed on it that I could cross-compile zmodem at home, convert it to a hex file, upload the hex file by essentially just running cat > on the target, convert it back into a binary using… Perl I think? Or xxd? And then doing the daily data offload over zmodem every night instead of over TCP as was originally planned. It was a crazy weekend…
Neat. I’m curious about long run serial as someone who’s only done arduino stuff at 5V, what does industrial serial talking over a miles long connection look like? Higher voltage? Repeaters?
Often, though evidently not in this case, people use RS422, which is differential, so you can get megabits per second or kilometers, though not both. Shared-bus RS422 is RS485, like LocalTalk or DMX512. The voltages are actually lower than the ±12V normally used by RS232. Converting back and forth between RS232 and RS422 is easy and cheap. https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slla070d/slla070d.pdf is a TI appnote with an overview.
Ahhhh it was standard RS232 which uses -12V and +12V instead of the 0-5V signalling that TTL serial uses. Otherwise very similar and easy to convert with eg a MAX232.
A lot of machines that use u-boot wont give you a prompt unless you connect them from a serial connection. Ideally, these ARM VM8850 and up based netbooks should have a u-boot prompt with a keybinding. Also, it would be far better if they had an Open Firmware (Forth) based BIOS.
I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric rate. It's funny though...
> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
We might be able to put a pin in this tech from a policy perspective, but the cat is way out of the bag as far as the tech goes. A cell phone already has all of the sensors you need baked right into it (honestly, we can thank mobile devices for getting the cost down). An ESC for a motor is a cheap microcontroller and a couple of MOSFETs. The frames can be made of cheap plastic. Even if things like ArduPilot didn't exist, a smart EE student could build one from scratch, including the flight control software, using parts from Digikey and relatively basic PID control code.
The cat is definitely out of the bag.
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