Recent Comments:
Excuse me, were you going to hang that here? Homeowner associations won't allow energy conservation {Autoblog Green}
Oct 21st 2006 1:52AM HOA's are only necessary for condos and townhomes. You can fight this as part of the free market. If you are buying a new or used home, make the offer contingent that you will be exempted from all current and future HOA's and you will provide your own services.
The HOA's won't allow this, but your refusal to make an offer otherwise will make a point. Once people realize they won't be able to sell their HOA dictatorship house, enough of them will vote to disolve the HOA and turn over the common grounds to the city. It has happened.
SAE Convergence: Improving automotive microcontroller performance {Autoblog}
Oct 21st 2006 1:44AM TJ,
You cannot compart microcontroller systems to PC's. That PSP or your IPOD will not last 20 years, and will not see the temperature extremes that the systems in your car will. Try putting that PSP in the freezer for three hours, then heat it up to 150 deg F. for an hour. Then repeat that over and over for about a week and see if it works. Most of the processing capability is for the graphics. Also, your IPOD doesn't have that much processing power.
If you packed that much computing power into every microcontroller system in your car, the car would cost $20k more and crash at random.
A microcontroller is an entire system on a chip, including program ROM, system RAM, timers, UARTs, parallel interfaces, external address I/O on a chip about the size of a quarter. The actual die is much, much smaller than the ship. So you have everything on a motherboard in a chip that consumes about 20mA.
Most microcontrollers today have 16kB of program ROM, 256 bytes of system RAM and run at 5-30MHz. They also only cost about $5-$10/chip. Specialized applications are available if more of any part is needed. However, increased speed means more heat and more electrical power.
Most automotive systems don't really need any more performance, they need adaptability. Your regular radio, cruise control, air bags, windshield wipers, etc wouldn't be any better with processing power. What they need is communications with the other systems to have more features like speed controlled radio volume, adaptive cruise control, rain sensitive wipers, speed sensitive airbags, etc.
Jaguar tried to pack in more processing power into the Lincoln LS. It lead to complete system crashes at random, the cars would just quit working until the battery was disconnected.
Some systems are going to need more processing power. PCM's get more and more complicated, especially in hybrids. Systems that self-park will require a bit of processing power to interpret the images used to position the car.
Moore's law is just an estimite, and it applies to the die sizes and the circuit speed. That doesn't relate directly to processing power. Just because the technology exists to make mroe powerful microcontrollers, doesn't mean it will happen.
The redunancy technology isn't in software engineering. The redunancy in microcontrollers applies at the electronic level. For instance, if a processor register stops functioning, the chip would move to a backup redundant register. This is done to prevent module failure, which is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.
As for my unique perspective, I worked my way through college as a Ford mechanic, and am now an embedded systems/broadcast engineer.
End of life pricing on Lincoln LS: $8,000 discount {Autoblog}
Jun 24th 2006 3:27AM The LS was a decent car to drive. It had a lot of nice features, drove and handled well, and had a lot of pep (granted I don't usually drive German sedans).
Putting a manual box with the V8 would have been the perfect combination and would have attracted more buyers.
However, I was a Lincoln/Mercury tech from 1999-2004 and these cars were an electrical nightmare. They had 4 main modules controlling the body electrics and ran into many different issues interfacing between the modules. There was also a severe lack of diagnostic ability between these modules. At the same time, Ford was cracking down on warranty claims, so you couldn't just replace a module to see if it helped, you had to be abosolutly sure of the problem.
Also, the customers who bought these things were just complete and absolute elitist jerks (jerks being a nice term). They complained about every aspect of the car compared to a number of different cars. They were also commonly known to think they should get service first over Ford and Mercury owners. I'm sure most service departments will be glad to see the car go.
Ford setting up "War Room" to defend F-150 {Autoblog}
Jun 23rd 2006 3:27AM To really fix the F-150, they need to cut the weight down. Stop trying to make it a 3/4 ton truck. A 2004 F-150 extended cab weighs nearly 6000lbs. My Dodge Ram 1500, which is a 1998 quad cab weighs only 5000lbs. Cutting the weight will help it feel like it has more power and increase mileage (seems like those are two common complaints with the F-150).
Gas prices are driving more towards motorcycles - or at least providing a great excuse {Autoblog}
Jun 8th 2006 10:55PM I picked up a mid-80's cruiser (750cc) for about $2k last year. It's quite a bit of fun, and gets about 43mpg city and highway. I've put about 2000 miles on it. I would have gotten one some day anyway, just picked last fall because gas shot up. I have had to put some work into it, but not too much in parts.
I did the math, and comapred to my pickup, it was going to take about 10k miles to recoup my cost. Compared to a Taurus, or something similar, about 15k. That was also with gas calculated at $2.30/gallon (thought it wouldn't shoot back up).
I thought about getting a civic beater, or something like that, but the bike is less money, less stuff to break, a lot more fun to drive, and much cheaper to insure (about 1/3 of a car).
I took the motorcycle safety/license course before I bought it. I would definitly recommend the course to anyone who's thinking about getting a bike. You'll get your endorsment and learn a lot. Even if you decide you don't like it, it's a fun weekend, and they provide the bike, helment, etc. I payed about $200 for the course and $1 to add the endorsement.
Corn business booming thanks to need for ethanol fuel {Autoblog}
May 17th 2006 5:13AM "If we quit feeding the world, (and cut way down on our own food intake) we can run our lives on ethanol. I don't see that happening anytime soon."
Most corn is used to feed cattle. Ethanol uses the starch in corn to create sugar, then ethanol. The leftover product still contains all of the protein it originally did. The cattle need the protein, not the starch. In fact, the leftover product from ethanol production is easier to use for cattle feed because it's already ground up. We would still use some corn for human food (I'm not talking about sweet corn here).
Also, we don't have to just pick one product to make ethanol. Sugar cane and sugar beets can be grown in certain parts of the country, those parts can grow these crops to create the ethanol for the region. In a decade or so, cellulose ethanol may also do a lot for ethanol production.
We are lucky in the US to have such a vast expanse of ground that can be farmed. Moving to ethanol will strengthen our country and save an industry in danger.
