Silicon Valley Redneck

Another lost concept

So, CuriousMarc continues his efforts at getting his extremely-vintage HP desktop computer back in operation, even resorting to wearing his quasi-replica magic pants.

(The pants don't have the true 1970s magic, as they're not proper bell-bottoms.)

Anyway.  The most recent installment features a pair of vintage HP diagnostic probes: an HP 546A logic pulser and an HP 547A current tracer.  They didn't work for tracking down the problem at hand, but the principle is intriguing: use the pulser to apply a signal to a net, then use the current tracer to see which trace is actually carrying current; the trace with the current leads to whatever is shorting out the net.

Hm.  I wonder if anybody's refined this, maybe into something safe for boards with the latest generation of low-voltage logic...?

Apparently no.  Seems like the only current tracer probes around nowadays are meant for use by electricians, and are much too bulky for poking around on circuit boards (even low-density 1970s boards).  I did find a reference to someone (since deceased) who'd had a go at making some sort of 547A knockoff, years ago, for his own use.

Well!  Seems like this is yet another thing to put on the Maybe-A-Product-Someday list.  Gotta make the probes (including the magnetic pickup for the current probe) pointier nowadays.  And... methinks selectivity could be improved by synchronizing the current tracer to the pulser, so it'd have a sample window just when the pulse ought to be happening.  Maybe the pulser could have selectable output levels, perhaps 1V, 2V, and 4V (in case anyone's still using 5V-tolerant logic) [see addendum].  And, selectable peak current, or pulse energy, or something?

Limitations, though... this'll play nice with 2-layer boards, or 4-layer with the inner layers used as ground planes, but utility falls off as the layer count increases.

Anyway, not something I'll be playing with anytime soon.  Maybe when I have a bunch of focused, brain-functioning free time, long about the 37^th of never.

(Alternative approach to finding the short: apply a low-voltage, high-current DC source to the offending net, and use a thermal camera to see what traces get warm.)

Addendum:  Seems the pulser probe accommodated a range of system voltages by the simple expedient of running off a user-provided power source and being able to handle 3~18V for TTL or [CD4000-series] CMOS.

A footnote to recent work-related posts

The term "Cortex M4" does not refer to a smart carbine.

See also: Mars Attacks brain gun.

...Oh, and now I have a vision of an Art Project.

Afterthought: If it has something like a Sig Brace, that makes it an arm Cortex M4, dunnit?

Starting point should probably be airsoft, just to avoid trouble.

What the world needs now

This one is actually a serious idea.  Imagine that!

Certain fields have checklists, to keep things in order and ensure that everything that's supposed to get done at a particular time gets done at that time.  I'm thinking aviation, as a well-known example.

But there's no checklist for stocking a pill dispenser.  Someone who's on a bunch of meds for various times of the day is likely to have memory and concentration issues, so the weekly ritual of putting the pills into the 7-chambered pillboxes (one each for early morning, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late night, perhaps) gets confusing, frustrating, and error-prone.

So here's an idea I'll throw out for free.  The patient (or the patient's spouse or whatever) needs a checklist.  Actually, a checklist for each time of day that pills are to be taken, plus a master that shows what checklists there should be.

Each checklist should include the patient's name, the date it was issued, which time of day it applies to, and the list of how many of what type of pill, plus a section for optional pills which may be taken at that time and why.

The master should include the patient's name, the date it was issued, and a list of the checklists and their current issue dates.

These should be printed on good-quality card stock in large print, laminated, and provided with a perforation in the top left corner so that the set of current cards can be kept together on a ring.

The format should be conducive to checking off items with a grease pencil (to be wiped clean at the beginning of the next week or whatever).

So what does it take to make this happen?

Printing, laminating, and perforating equipment are pretty standard.  I expect someone's already got a combined inkjet printer and laminator, even.

Then there needs to be software to do the formatting.  Not a big deal, right?

The problematic part would be extracting the necessary data from the patient's medical record... and making sure that the information that needs to be conveyed to the patient is (or, indeed can be) in the medical record in the first place.  Which, I suspect, is a complete show-stopper, from what I've seen of medical record systems.

Oh, well.  Another easy, life-improving, and possibly life-saving idea runs afoul of Big Software.

In which I throw out a design idea

There's money to be made on this, but not likely by me, so I'll just throw it out there.

A couple of days ago, I had to fix my parents' TV.  Again.  The symptoms, as described over the phone by my mother, were horribly baffling to anyone not familiar with the modes of the remote.  As it was, I kind of figured one of the three inappropriate mode buttons had gotten pushed somewhere along the line, and it was maybe trying to control the nonexistent VCR or perhaps the sprinkler system instead of the actual cable box.

And, as expected: once I was there, I just had to push the "AT&T" button (instead of "TV", "DVD", or "VCR" or whatever the options are), and it commenced to control the cable box (and, minimally, the TV), as normal.

(My father has long refused to learn how to operate a TV set, preferring to read a book.)

So here's the idea: instead of having non-indicative soft mode buttons on the remote, have a rotary selector switch with a big honkin' arrow pointing to the selected function: "TV SET", "CABLE BOX", "DVD PLAYER", "STEREO", whatever.

Either that, or stop making every remote have the stupid modes for controlling other appliances, and just go back to having one, clearly-marked, remote per appliance.  But I guess that would be too easy.  And appliance manufacturers would have to mark their remotes: "PANASONIC TV SET", "AT&T CABLE BOX", "SONY DVD PLAYER", "MAYTAG WASHER", and so on.  And all it takes is one clown putting out modal remotes to re-introduce the confusion.

So: who's gonna make the universal remote with the big comprehensible selector lever?

Afterthought: Another thing that'd be nice for universal remotes?  A USB port, or Bluetooth, or some such computer interface for configuration, plus a configuration utility.  Instead of trying to look up, e.g., your TV set in a list of models to find the right magic configuration code, and then having to push the magic button sequence to enable tv-set configuration so you could enter the code, you'd just connect to your PC and run the configuration utility to do the lookup and update the configuration (alternatively, for Linux users, you'd go to the manufacturer's website, do the lookup, and save the resulting configuration file to /media/FoobyRemote3567/TVconfig.xml).

Hmmm, product idea.

Predatory towing companies being in the news at the moment... and still being a thing after all these years... I find inspiration striking.

Once your car has been removed from its parking space, it's just your word against the towing company's as to where it was parked... and any accusation of Grand Theft Auto on your part will be cheerfully ignored by the Authorities so long as the pirates have kept up on their Thieves Guild dues.

Ergo, a standby-mode black box.  A datalogger that keeps operating for a few days (not forever; don't want to drain the battery) after the car is parked.  Records GPS data (there's a module out now that claims 1.4m accuracy), motion (3-axis accelerometer), and engine on/off status.

So, in the event of your car being towed, the hidden black box records exactly where it was parked, when it was taken, and where it was taken.  Evidence!

And, even with the high-res GPS, this dingus could sell for quite a bit less than a towing charge (though installation, if not DIY, might run a fair bit more).  Isn't it worth it, for the chance to send a scuzzball to prison?

For those with a bigger budget, add a cellular data modem and send the data To The Cloud.  That way, you don't have to retrieve your car to retrieve the location data (and this works even if it's been stolen by unlicensed thieves).  But surely this is already a product, right?

Hm.  Assume it stores, oh, 64 bytes/sec on average when in motion, and much less when stationary.  A modest 8Mbyte flash chip would hold 36 hours worth of while-moving data.  A 64Gbyte SD card would hold enough for 33 years in motion.  I'm thinking either a largish SPI NOR flash part, or a small eMMC.

Too lazy to Google this right now

In the modern era of smartphones with voice commands....

Suddenly an old-style phone with no dial looks plausible again, no?

Cloud? Hmmm.

Seems there's a buncha business software from Back In The Day, that runs on those quaint old minicomputers: PDP-11, VAX, HP-3000, and so on.

(HP-3000?  Which generation?  I seem to recall there was a total architecture change in the 80s.  The one I hacked on in high school was a stack machine, and I think the newer ones are RISC or something...?)

Anyway: someone's gone and written emulators and is offering use of them as a cloud service.

Many years ago, I had the notion of implementing a PDP-11 CPU as a VHDL learning project.  I subsequently switched to learning Verilog instead, did a few FPGA projects... and still haven't done that PDP-11, let alone the DEC-10 that's also on the "somebody oughtta do this" list.

Seriously, though: a fairly cheap FPGA these days should be capable of handling any of the old 16-bit architectures, much faster than the original hardware.  Add an SDRAM chip and a microSD socket, and you've got a complete PDP-11, Nova, Eclipse, HP-3000, TI-990, etc., all in a business-card-sized form factor.  If you want to run a timesharing service on it, you'll need a much bigger board to handle all the connectors.  And, of course, a 9-track controller/formatter can be shoehorned into the same FPGA, but the connector for the drive (never mind the drive itself) will dwarf your actual computer.

And then there's the problem of getting ahold of the antique operating system of a long-defunct company... and permission to use and/or distribute it.

Still, it's a cool possibility.  Maybe, In My Copious Free Time, I should design the hardware and create a couple of example legacy CPUs, plus the supporting cores for a typical application or two (e.g., making an SD card look like an array of DG disk drives).  Probably needs a (yuck) ball-grid package and many-layer board, just because FPGAs with lots of logic don't tend to be offered in QFPs.  So, keep the expensive board as compact as possible, and have fine-pitch stacking headers for a cheap, 2-layer I/O board?

And that way you could own your legacy solution, and have a bunch of spares in a shoebox in the office supply closet!

(Now I'm thinking back to the MicroVAX a former employer rented from one of the other employees, and the way it'd load its microcode from a little tape cartridge.  Cute!  But now the tape cartridge would be a little flash chip, and the process would take hundreds of milliseconds instead of a few minutes.)

Update: Foo.  Don't have a handy source for 18- or 36-bit-wide DDR SDRAM.  There's a 16Mx18 RLDRAM part, which I guess would do the job, but the supply appears to be drying up.  Oh, well.  If I really thought there was a market for the dingus, I guess I could call around to memory vendors.

Update 2: The heirs of Sir Henry Ninebit-Byte will be relieved to learn that Cypress Semiconductor is still making synchronous SRAM chips in 9, 18, and 36 bit widths, with capacities up to several Mobies on a single chip.  A 4-Moby part runs about $50 in onesies; not bad.  And... these things are fast enough that an 18-bit, or even 9-bit, memory bus would probably outrun the CPU (and would most assuredly outrun one of the originals).

Man... I remember the days of 1024-bit RAM chips.  With microsecond cycle times.

Dangerous ideas

Earlier this week, XBradTC linked to an interesting vid on DIY radar.

Which stirred up the ol' creative juices.  I hate presentations in video format; much prefer text + drawings so's I can skip back & forth easily, and the vid is in tl;dw territory at the moment, but I downloaded a copy and skimmed through, and it reminded me of some things I'm sure I knew back in the '90s, but had somehow forgotten.

Like, the easy way to get range is with linear chirps and interference-frequency measurement, rather than trying to do direct time measurement between two detector outputs (with the attendant requirement for very short pulses, if you're trying to measure smallish distances).

Modest-range radar had crept into my mind a couple of years ago, in connection with the problem of trying to put a plane on a runway blind.  (Gee, what happened a couple of years ago that would bring up such thoughts?)  Augmented GPS will get X and Y close enough for a plane that's much smaller than what the runway was designed for, but accurate Z is a major headache.  Integrating GPS and a short-range radar altimeter to get the last couple hundred feet with sub-foot resolution?  Well, it might just work.

Not that there's much prospect of actually making a product of that (despite my having a totally cool, as well as blindingly obvious, UI concept).  Between regulatory issues and potential liability, I rather suspect it's a non-starter.

Still, various ideas are now rattling around in my head (and competing with all the other ideas I haven't been having time for).  Maybe next year, if I manage to relocate to a place where I'd have a proper workshop and lots of tinkering space, I'll turn some of them into products, or at least subsystems for sale.

Price points, or pointlesses...

Just got a cool-new-products email from one of the Euro-component companies.

Attention-grabbing: a 1" square by very flat SMT lithium cell, 0.7AH, for powering those tiny IoT thingies when it's dark.

So I click, then click through to a distributor: $28 each in quantities of 250.  Eek?

Really, now.  What "just because it's cool" IoT gadget can you sell at a price consistent with a $28 battery?

We need cheaper energy-storage devices!  (Yeah, rather bulkier no-name Chinese lithium cells of similar capacity, intended for use in toys, can be had for under $5 in modest quantities... but apart from the bulk, I'd be concerned about long-term reliability.)

We also need cheaper radio modules.  Incorporating an OEM ZigBee module is another market killer, partly because ZigBee is such a big (and subject to licensing) protocol.

Maybe I should dust off Bluebird.  My prototypes, several years ago, worked fine, and a transmit-only module drew right around 1µW in standby mode (ready to wake up if an input changed state, so suitable for applications such as motion sensors and doorbell buttons).  Never got to the FCC certification stage, but that should be a no-brainer.  A super-low-standby-power transmitter module, and a fairly-low-power transceiver module, range of 100 feet or so indoors, provided as little boards with certification?  Product idea!  (Actually, it might make more sense just to make the transceiver module and have a mode-select pin; TX-only can be slightly smaller and cheaper, but starting with a single hardware article cuts NRE, low-volume manufacturing costs, logistical headaches, and so on.  It would also need to incorporate the functionality of a planned-but-never-prototyped third module, the hub.)

Someone needs to make a YouTube promo vid

Product concept: Helicopter Parent.  It's a quadrotor that follows your daughter around and keeps an eye on her.

With the optional shotgun attachment, it becomes the Chaperone Drone.  (Maybe also a pheromone sniffer unit?)

For positive tracking, the subject should be wearing a transponder.  Maybe in a locking collar.

No need to build the actual product, just some props for the promotional vid.  Basically, a couple of quadrotors, one with a pan/tilt camera mount, plus a toy shotgun (lightweight plastic) and an adapter to hold it in the camera mount.

Cast... need the kid (maybe two, ages 15 and 18), Mom (perky helicopter-parent type), several leering boys (maybe one group of high-school seniors and one of college sophomores), and of course the Voice-Over.

Location: has to look like a school.  Also has to be a place where something that looks like an armed drone won't trigger a total freak-out.

More practically

How about this one?

Laundry machines that send a message to your phone when they're done (or in the event of a load imbalance, or other anomaly).

Not so much for home; that'd be more of an IoT thing, with status available through the household network.  For laundromats, guest laundry at motels, and such.

Maybe use NFC to send the phone number.  (If done right, this could discourage pranking.)  Better still, combine with pay-by-bonk.

(Not that I use pay-by-bonk, nor even have it enabled.  I haven't even looked at Google Wallet lately, aside from noting that, when I set it up years ago, I seem to have used a credit card which is now long defunct.  Is there even a way to set it up with a modest cash balance and no associated credit card?)

Another fun idea

If you're out and about, and every so often check your smartphone to see what WiFi networks might be in range, you'll occasionally see an unsecured access point with a name that sounds remarkably like a wireless printer.

Obviously, What The World Needs Now is a smartphone app that, when the phone isn't connected to WiFi, looks for unsecured, default-printer-named access points, figures out approximately what model of printer it's looking at, and sends a print job.

Or perhaps

Or simply

What the world needs now

Just a couple of throwaway ideas, being as how I don't have the connections to get them into production... and, hey, maybe they exist and I just haven't seen them.

I've got a double-walled (so, somewhat insulated) plastic cup with its own swirly straw.  It has a standard-sized base, to fit a standard automotive cup holder.  So far, so good.  But! Being regular-soda-sized on the outside, it's quite small on the inside, so filling it with ice & water in the morning doesn't keep me supplied with cold sippin' water for the day... not even to lunchtime.  How about making these things in large & jumbo sizes, keeping the standard base dimensions?

Relatedly: is anyone making a car with Peltier modules in the console cupholders?  Wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to keep drinks cold, or hot, or one of each?  If automotive consoles were of standardized dimensions, this could be an aftermarket item, but I fear it really needs t be a factory goody.

What the world needs now

Is a random-looking-number generator.

Thing about random numbers is, they don't necessarily look random.  Ask a true random-number generator for a 4-digit random number, and 0000 is just as likely as any other.

But 0000 isn't a random-looking number. 3586 is a random-looking number.

So, to generate random-looking decimal numbers... for starters, the first digit can't be zero.  It just can't.  Or maybe it could be zero, but with a low probability.  Then, repeated digits are bad.  So:

Start with 10 bins, representing digits 0 through 9.  Bin 0 gets maybe a 2% probability, and 1 though 9 get 10.889% each.  For each digit in the result, pull a digit out of a bin according to current probabilities, then take some of the probability from that bin and distribute it evenly among the others.

This should result in numbers that look nicely random, despite being considerably less random than really random numbers.

Has someone already done this?  I dunno.  I haven't done my homework.  I'm just being random, or at least random-looking.

In The Future...

Reading a novel, which I'll probably review after I finish it.

Has a lab explosion, which doesn't quite follow the trope of "experiment blows up, inventor killed, all notes lost, subplot wrapped up neatly."  But it calls the trope to mind.

And I think back to the early days of my stint in Corporateland, and my thought that there really should be a system for keeping electronic lab books.  At the time, this would have involved a Java client, and all the awkwardness that entails; in the modern world of HTML5 and such, all the client-side stuff could be handled in the browser proper.

And it would enable project-level lab books with multiple engineers participating, and that kind of good stuff.

The original concept involved keeping the data in-house, on the corporate server.  But... why not (along the lines of paid repository hosting) have a lab-book hosting service, at a site entirely separate from anyone's lab?  With some sort of off-off-site backups, of course.

And: another note for the open-source not-LabVIEW that I keep meaning to write (or any such thing that anyone is writing): include the capability of streaming results directly to a server, whether on- or off-site.  Preferably, have some way to integrate with an on-line lab-book system.

So, when the lab blows up, or burns down, or is devoured by the Great Old Ones... all the notes are stored safely on a server in a distant location, along with data up to the final moment.

As a service, this would require some policy options, such as a designated heir to the project, release to public if the owner doesn't check in for some specified interval, etc.  Just so the work isn't permanently lost when an experiment in applied theology unexpectedly succeeds.

Just throwing out a pointless idea, here

(Though it is one that might sell, as a novelty item.)

Bacon.

Cook extra crispy.

Crush to a powder.

Package in capsules.

Bacon dietary supplement!  In handy capsule form!

The real trick is finding a supply of certified vegetable-free capsules made from 100% pig gelatin.  (Then give the empty capsules some time in the smokehouse.  Because Bacon.)

I also had a good idea this morning, but I'm keeping that one to myself for now.)

Just tossin' out a thought, here...

How come commercial aircraft don't have some sort of weight sensors built into the landing gear?

It'd provide a way of measuring weight and balance directly... and providing a check on the crew's calculations.  And, if the measurement comes up way too light, and it's not an obvious sensor failure?  Maybe take a dipstick to the tanks.

I'm thinking strain gauges bonded to struts, or pressure transducers on the shock absorbers: something that can (after calibration) give reasonably accurate readings, but doesn't involve adding a new point of mechanical failure.

Also: how about video cameras with views of the engines?  Couple decades back, I was involved in estimating a deluxe version of such a system (high-res, high-frame-rate cameras to watch for FOD during takeoff and landing, plus storage for the video); given the requirements for that application, we concluded that it was wildly impractical using the technology of the day... but, with today's technology, and if the requirement is just to allow the crew to see if an engine is on fire, or missing, or otherwise grossly wrong - and to be certain which engine is out of whack - it seems nearly trivial, and potentially useful.

Ideas tweeted by bored tycoons...

...are not necessarily good ideas, per se.

From Bored Elon Musk:

Instead of lighting the entire house...Drone light bulbs that follow you around. Self dock in chargers while you sleep.

Responses on Twitter raise the obvious issues, as well as pointing to Frank Herbert's glowglobes.

Now, this sort of thing might make sense if we had infinitely cheap energy (for powering the drones) and vastly improved batteries (for powering the drones and the lights for a reasonable portion of the day), or some handy compact low-power means of levitation like a negative-density gas or Cavorite... otherwise, no.

But, it leads to ideas.  Like: wearable headlights!  (Yeah, they exist.  Not very practical for around the house, and people are observed not to use them thus.)

Or: individually-controllable track lights, perhaps with pan/tilt mounts, and a Kinect in every room...?  Find the people, determine where they're looking, and illuminate that.  No batteries, no levitation.

I keep having these really great...

...bad ideas.

The latest: add Style! to your home security system with a quiet little quadcopter, trailing wires hooked up to a stun gun, and announcing:

Welcome. You are unauthorized. Your death will now be implemented.

 On the not-so-bad-idea front: huge wrought-iron(-looking, from a distance) chandelier with many little LED "candles": just the thing for efficiently lighting a mad scientist's laboratory, without having to employ an Igor to change the light bulbs (or to light the candles).  Probably have the LEDs pointing up, and a little mirror above each to direct the light generally downward.

Another story I never wrote...

Today's Get Fuzzy brings up the subject of Man-Spider: a spider with some human attributes.

I had that idea back in... '96?  Suppose a spider bit a radioactive human....

Discussed the wild notion with a co-worker.  She suggested maybe the spider would try sending messages Charlotte's Web style.

Also, it would presumably have a human's lifespan.

This didn't go very far, and I didn't even write down the idea collection.  From what I recall, though:

We need a radioactive human.  How about Karen Silkwood?  She crashed her car because she was distracted by a spider bite.  The spider survived the crash, acquired her memories as well as human intelligence and lifespan, and somehow (mumble, mumble) ended up inhabiting the office of a... nuclear physicist?  Government regulator?

Where do we go from here?