Slashdot Mirror

An Honeywell MIMU.

A little more detail than A.C. gave. Honeywell produces a number of IMU's, the most accurate of which are MEMS based, "microelectromechanical"... right there in the name.

If it was the old, classic, manual thermostat I bet she'd have zero trouble.

often long on knowing exactly how things work, and short on actual insight on how things actually work.

And, oddly enough, some may have actually worked for a few years on such a system for a major aircraft company https://aerospace.honeywell.co...

So Identify yourself, and educate us.

often long on knowing exactly how things work, and short on actual insight on how things actually work.

And, oddly enough, some may have actually worked for a few years on such a system for a major aircraft company https://aerospace.honeywell.co...

if your house was well insulated, you could to use the AC less. the less leaks in a house envelope the better but you'd have to work out some sort of ventilation system that cools air coming in from outside (opposite to the normal heat ventilation recovery systems http://yourhome.honeywell.com/... )

Easy. Just install something like this and something like this and you're set.

Nor would the under $20 fully programmable, been around since dirt, standard as the day is long, conventional wall thermostat.

Come on for pete sake, turning on the heat when its cold is the job of a thermostat. They've been doing it since the 30s, and became programmable since the late 70s. Don't act so impressed that your thermostat actually worked.

You've paid in excess of 15 times what you needed to pay for program-ability, only to have it be totally dependent on the internet!

There's one born every minute.

Just because this person is easily impressed doesn't mean he didn't, or people in general don't buy them for the remote monitoring, design, presence sensing, prediction, ease of use, or other features the $20 thermostat obviously lacks. You're also ignoring the whole array of thermostat features Honeywell itself offers well above the $20 mark.

"Programability" is not just a thing you buy with a thermostat or not. It's sold in multiple tiers. The "One Week" you quoted being the lowest end and cannot program for different days. Some only have weekend/weekday settings, and others have daily schedules.

A no-frills 7 day programmable Honeywell thermostat at retail can be around $100, with-frills going up from there, and you'd could have made your point without coming across as a basement dweller that has never been down the thermostat isle at a Home Depot.

Thanks, but no thanks. Honeywell (and others) have put a lot of R&D and solid engineering into their sensors (door, window, motion, glass-break, running water, etc) and there are already "convenient" standards like z-wave for home automation.
Honeywell systems like the L5100 are dead easy install, and very easy.
http://www.security.honeywell.com/hsc/products/control/wi/ly/329673.html

BUT they suffer from this cloud service business. Ulgh? No. Cloud functionality is fine, but not when used for lock in. The honeywell system has a great mobile phone app? But You Must Subscribe to their service at $10-$20/mo. No thanks.

What I would fund on kickstarter would be some kind of open interface or open firmware for these. Ideally the low level stuff we leave alone, because it works well, and just dress up the front-end. It needs to be open source.

No need to reinvent the wheel with modules and sensors at this stage. That comes later so we can have free hardware, also.

Anyone know of any open firmware replacements for anything like the L5100?

Commercially available.

http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/products/thermostats/

Are there really 53 different products there? I might have miscounted.

I think people on Slashdot especially are smart enough to be insulted. What's the difference between a 7-day thermostat, a 5-2 day thermostat, and a 5-1-1 thermostat? I'm pretty sure if you popped the cheap injection-molded plastic cover off, you'd find the same 8-bit microprocessor and eeprom in each of them. Why should they all be priced differently? And could you or I, sitting in a room somewhere, even dream up fifty different feature sets for a thermostat?

A modern top-of-the-line thermostat has to reliably integrate and control HVAC systems that may be 150 years old to systems that may be 150 days old. My Honeywell 7-day thermostat can control something like 17 different kinds of HVAC systems, ranging from steam heat only to multi-stage, multi-zone, central air with humidity control with capability for both heating and cooling within a defined day -- with the attendant timing and control issues inherent to each one.

So while the switching may not be all that complicated, there is an amazingly diverse set of heating and cooling devices to which a given thermostat may be attached.

Their crime is making a superior competitor to Honeywell's expensive proprietary technology. See my comment upthread - all of Honeywell's expensive programmable thermostats use touchscreens with fiddly little onscreen buttons for everything. The only thermostat from them which lets you use a nice big rotating outer ring to adjust anything is a barebones digital emulation of the most basic home thermostat you can buy - no timer or programming features and requires you to manually switch between heating or cooling.

Ah, I beg their pardon. Honeywell do have one digital thermostat where you can rotate the outer ring to set the temperature. Except that's literally all you can do - there's no timer or programming features, it's an exact emulation of the most basic analog thermostat you can buy with a digital readout.

http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/products/thermostats/

Are there really 53 different products there? I might have miscounted.

I think people on Slashdot especially are smart enough to be insulted. What's the difference between a 7-day thermostat, a 5-2 day thermostat, and a 5-1-1 thermostat? I'm pretty sure if you popped the cheap injection-molded plastic cover off, you'd find the same 8-bit microprocessor and eeprom in each of them. Why should they all be priced differently? And could you or I, sitting in a room somewhere, even dream up fifty different feature sets for a thermostat? The fact that they named their high end product "prestige" is itself an indictment.

Honeywell wouldn't be sinking so much $$ into legal attacks if they didn't feel threatened, and they wouldn't feel threatened if they knew they had a better product. The issue is, Honeywell has had decades with minimal competition in this market, so they let everybody have their way with the interface. Look at the web page! No two of them have the same interface, because the interface is a feature. Seriously, game controllers have better interfaces.

Decades later, I still have to walk over and switch from "heat" to "cool" and back, dozens of times each year. My house is five, FIVE, years old. If Honeywell really gave two craps about the consumers, they could have migrated THAT one useful feature downmarket at some point. Nobody buys a house based on the thermostat, and both Honeywell and the builders know it. That's why most of the thermostats installed in new homes, regardless of the home's price, are crappy. Do I really need to buy a million dollar home before I get a thermostat that both "heats" and "cools" without my intervention?

Honeywell marketed all these at the residential builders, that's why there's dozens of different price points and no consistency in the interfaces or clarity in the feature sets. Nest is marketing their one product at the people who actually live in the homes, who have to actually use and live with these things.

I can't see ad-hoc networking being very useful for instrumentation.

Honeywell OneWireless
"The OneWireless Network is an industrial wireless network that forms a fully redundant and self-healing mesh network to support Wi-Fi devices and industrial I/O devices simultaneously."
http://hpsweb.honeywell.com/Cultures/en-US/Products/wireless/default.htm

I am not sure but I would think that M-1 Abrams' multi-fuel engine can already use biofuel. Honeywell doesn't mention it on their product page.

From: http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/Flight_Data_Recorder_(SSFDR).pdf

The SSFDR's crash survivable memory unit (CSMU) provides for complete data recovery when subjected
to the crash conditions stipulated in ED-55 and ED-56a:

Impact Shock 3400G, 6.5 milliseconds
Penetration Resistance 500 lb. weight from 10 feet
Static Crush 5000 lbs., 5 minutes
High Temperature Fire 1100C, 30 minutes
Low Temperature Fire 260C, 10 hours (per ED-56a)
Deep Sea Pressure and Sea Water/Fluids Immersion 20,000 feet, 30 days

Is that a technical term?

TFA is Michael Cooney's Layer 8 blog. I'll give Cooney the benefit of the doubt and assume he did the 30 seconds of research necessary to find out the correct term and just assume he misplaced a key memory part.

I was thinking more of something like the Honeywell Micro Aerial Vehicle:

http://www.honeywell.com/sites/portal?smap=aerospace&page=mav_video&theme=T8

No, I think an enemy would definitely notice one of these.

I was thinking more of something like the Honeywell Micro Aerial Vehicle:

http://www.honeywell.com/sites/portal?smap=aerospace&page=mav_video&theme=T8

They are more like helicopters than planes. I imagine anything like that would use far more energy than this bird, not to mention making a lot more noise.

They do lots of things.

Here. It's a ducted fan design. I didn't see any flight length info (probably classified). Although they do mention it has an operational ceiling of 10,500 feet (their goes anyone's idea of hitting it with an rc copter) and that it can store 100 waypoints in it's flight plan.

yields are the big limiter right now. MOS devices are attacking oxide trap problems similar to silicon research in the 70's. manufacturers are demoing 1200V, 50A JFET's. they're getting there, but the device technology is a lot further along than other power device options (GaN, diamond, etc.) But those others are getting a lot of attention as well, especially in Japan.

there are many packaging techniques available to take advantage of high SiC temperatures. None cheap and commonly used, since Silicon can't make use of them, but ceramic boards, non-alloy wirebonds, eutectic die attaches, high temp brazes. they all exist, and have been used, but they're expensive. not-so-aggressive options can get you to 250 without too much trouble. e.g. http://www.honeywell.com/sites/portal?smap=aerospace&page=High-Temp-Electonics3&theme=T5&catID=C82A27CF1-C0F1-76E9-6B52-2C477FB52FF7&id=H5E761CAC-F16E-40AF-B54E-3DFBA7F0A988&sel=1

He specifically mentioned Honeywell Spectra Fiber which is billed to be "pound for pound 10 times stronger that steel"

We need to translate that statement first. They don't mention what KIND of steel. Steel can have a tensile strength of 0.3 GPa to 1.88 GPa depending on type. That gives SF2K a tensile strength between 3.0 GPa to 18.8 GPa. (Wikipedia apparently agrees with this assessment...)

Using Wikipedia as firther source, "A space elevator can be made relatively economically feasible if a cable with a density similar to graphite and a tensile strength of ~65-120 GPa can be mass-produced at a reasonable price." Graphite has a density of 140 lbs/cu.ft, so this imaginary material needs a minimum strength/density ratio of 65/140 = 0.46.

SF2K has a specific gravity of 0.097, which translates to 97 kg per cubic meter (6.055 lbs/cu.ft.) That puts the strength/density ratio at 0.50 to 3.13 - Higher than our theoretical required material, so it should be strong enough.

SF2K also has "High resistance to chemicals, water, and UV light" and "good resistance to abrasion and flex fatigue." These are all desirable qualities.

He mentioned the ribbon would likely be "15 feet wide and less than the thickness of a human hair". Average human hair is about 4 mil (0.004 inches or 0.00033 feet). That's a theoretical cross-sectional area of 0.00495 feet. At that thickness, one pound of material will stretch just over 200 feet. They need about 62,000 miles (327,360,000 ft)of the stuff, so that's only about 820 tons. 820 really isn't THAT much in the grand scheme of things... imagine 28 standard shipping containers, that'll hold 820 tons of cargo.

So as far as the cable itself goes - yeah, that's "doable" right now if you've got the cash.
=Smidge=

As with anything, the devil's in the details. From a previous trip around the web in re: bodyarmor.

It's not Tupperware, but 'Ultra high molecular weight polyethylene'.

See also:
Spectra
Dyneema
Aramids (from "aromatic polyamide")
- Example: Twaron

Kevlar, of course.
Also Nomex - known for it's heat-resistant attributes, also strong. It's an "aromatic nylon, the meta variant of the para-aramid Kevlar."

It's been done for other applications too, by hobbyists, inventors and engineers using the Honeywell/PointResearch miniature DRM and GyroDRM - these belt mountable units supliment GPS positions with dead reckoning when no GPS signal is available (canyons, mountains, cities) for under $3000.

Better Yet, Get a real security system that has a radio transmitter backup. Most large cities have support for the lowercost (non cellular) service, Check A networks or B, C for cellular (Cingular). My local monitoring company charges $24/mo with this setup, not bad considering national monitoring companies are raping $29/month and demand 3 year contracts.

Modern theives are sophisticated enough to clip a couple of plainly exposed wires on the side of your house before smashing and trashing it. Even if the alarm sounds, they can smash the alarm panel in your closet before the neighbors hear it, even if it was heard it is likely that it will be ignored if it shuts off rather quickly.

If you can't get wireless, and do rely on a wired connection to your home for tel/internet. You can build a security box around where the wires come into your house. There was a site I saw on the tubes a while back that makes a metal cage just for this purpose (can't seem to find them now), but was very expensive and didn't do it.
I went with wireless. You could always cover it with a cheap wooden box, and leave some decoy wires. :)

The jobs disappearing from EU were preceeded by US layoffs some time ago. And it is not just IBM, but I think that many here know that already.

You got that right. I work for, um, another large US company, and the day before yesterday, in fact, a full 50% of the developers in my group were laid off. Some have until the end of June (that is, next week), some until the end of October, to pack up their desks. Oh, and while they're still around, their primary job will be to "assist in the transition" of their own jobs to India. The Indians have already sent a contingent who are busy swarming around the lab, calling dibs on the nicer pieces of equipment, big job-eating grins on their faces. My guess is, I won't last past the end of the year--we've already been told that 90% of our development work will be going to India.

And to all those people who think they're protected because their skills are so irreplacable, well, good luck to you. The people who were laid off this week cumulatively represent about 100 years' worth of experience in a very obscure proprietary software system. No way are they going to be replaced. Supplanted, maybe, but not really replaced.

Curious thing happened during the layoff meeting ... one of the young HR gals who was there to "answer questions" (even though they seemed to know less about the layoff than we already did) saw one of my buddies packing up his MP3 player, and she just about had a fit. "What's that? Is that a recording device?!" He assured her it was not, but she grilled him for several minutes before letting him go. WTF? We haven't ever been told not to talk about it, so I'm not sure what she was on about.

No, I don't fault the Indians for being superior competitors at this moment in time, at least in the eyes of corporate management. More power to them, I say. But please don't try to tell me not to be somewhat agitated about losing my job, mmkay?

This article shows that "short range" RF technologies such as bluetooth or RFID are only short range in the context of a particular transceiver. If someone wants to access an RF device from a greater distance, they need only build a high-gain antenna.

Not necessarily true.
There IS such a thing as short range RF.

If you want to have a certain probablility of receiving and decoding a given message, you're going to have to meet a certain signal to noise ratio. This isn't an implementaion issue, it's a fundamental information theory problem.

Between environmental attenuation and inverse square law effects, it should be possible to calculate a distance for which, your signal is "buried in the noise" (even with a fairly sensitive antenna).

The thing is, most signals are generally designed to propagate as far as possible given the constraints in which they must operate.
The best example I can think of for "short range RF" is the radar altimeters used on military aircraft.
If you're going to make a box like this that goes in a fighter plane, you want to design it to be as undetectable as possible. That's going to influence, frequency band, antenna pattern, power level, etc.
Sure you're trying not to slam into the cliff up ahead, but you also don't want to survive that just to be taken down by a SAM.

Press Releases

Honeywell Files Lawsuit Against 34 Electronics Companies For Infringing Patented LCD Technology

MORRIS TOWNSHIP, New Jersey, October 6, 2004 -- Honeywell (NYSE: HON) today filed a lawsuit against 34 electronics companies claiming infringement of a Honeywell patent for technology that increases the brightness of images and that reduces the appearance of certain interference effects on a liquid crystal display (LCD).

Honeywell's lawsuit claims the company's patented technology is being used in a variety of consumer electronics products, including notebook computers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, portable DVD players, portable LCD TVs, video game systems, and digital still cameras.

"Honeywell invests millions of dollars in research and development every year, and we aggressively defend our intellectual property to protect that substantial investment," said John Donofrio, Vice President of Intellectual Property at Honeywell.

Honeywell's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the district of Delaware, asks for monetary damages and an injunction to prohibit selling products that infringe its patent.

"The two largest LCD manufacturers, LG.Philips LCD and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., have previously taken licenses under this fundamental patent," said Donofrio. "Honeywell has a long history of successfully licensing proprietary technologies worldwide for non-competing uses as a core component of our strategic business model," Donofrio said. "We are pleased that LG.Philips and Samsung Electronics are benefiting through their licenses from our technology."

Defendants named in Honeywell's lawsuit are:

• Apple Computer, Inc.
• Argus a/k/a Hartford Computer Group, Inc.
• Audiovox Corporation
• Casio Computer Co., Ltd.
• Casio, Inc.
• Concord Cameras
• Dell Inc.
• Eastman Kodak Company
• Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd.
• Fuji Photo Film U.S.A., Inc.
• Fujitsu Limited
• Fujitsu America, Inc.
• Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.
• Kyocera Wireless Corp.
• Matsushita Electrical Industrial Co.
• Matsushita Electrical Corporation of America
• Navman NZ Limited
• Navman U.S.A. Inc.
• Nikon Corporation
• Nikon Inc.
• Nokia Corporation
• Nokia Americas
• Olympus Corporation
• Olympus America, Inc.
• Pentax Corporation
• Pentax U.S.A., Inc.
• Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.
• Sanyo North America
• Sony Corporation
• Sony Corporation Of America
• Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB
• Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications (U.S.A.) Inc.
• Toshiba Corporation
• Toshiba America, Inc.

This release contains forward-looking statements as defined in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements about future business operations, financial performance and market conditions. Such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties inherent in business forecasts as further described in our filings under the Securities Exchange Act.

Contact:
Ron Crotty
602-436-6823

If Honeywell were such genuii to come up with this idea in the first place, why werent they producing them?

Honeywell has been using LCD technology for several years. On their digital thermostats for example.

straight from honeywell's website. maybe you should check some facts and pull your head out of your ass before spouting off about "patent bs"

I am part of a trio that uses motion sensors to perform sound art:
Hypersense Complex
These are custom built microcontroller / USB devices.

We are currently exploring the use of accelerometers, with a view towards full motion capture. However, this is a difficult problem to solve, as gravity provides a constant acceleration offset. Another area we will be looking at is useing wireless chips, eg. the honeywell ROC chips.

Simon.

HOW do Defense/Military Contractors get MONEY in all of this? Please tell. Were not shipping weapons, the only thing that we could use that they produce would be some high grade parts and rocket engines.

While the whole thing is still pie in the sky, IF the funding is approved I would guess that a the likes of General Electric, Boeing and Honeywell would get a nice fat slice.

This is just a guess on my part, so feel free to correct me if it doesn't pan out like this ;-)

Here's the data sheets.

Here's a couple:

There are many others under development.

The news of the Transmeta chips stirred up more speculation in the 'coming soon' market of pads (FIC Aqua). And it seems like there's always a new one shown at Comdex, but afterward they disappear faster than a virgin on prom night. The Norwegian company Screen Media touted a produkt called FreePad which sounded good to me, but I guess the name loses something in the translation. As for a cheap wireless pad... well we all saw how long 3com's ergoAudrey lasted.

Recently there was word of the Honeywell WebPad, but as for the inexpensive pad... I continue to hope, dream, and become more cynical by the day.

It's too late now, but at least this will be in the story when it gets archived.

There are more than 100 computers on the space station, just counting built-in. Indeed, each individual experiment rack -- about the size of an apartment fridge -- will include its own computer and custom software written for that experiment, all intended to link into the ISS network for data transmission and science interface. Many of the racks in Destiny (and future modules like Columbus and Kibo) provide station functions such as robot arm control, and each of these has its own computer as well.

But the core functions are called CDH (Command and Data Handling), including everything from navigation to turning the lights on and off: really, it's just the network infrastructure. Cabling is Thinnet. These computers are provided to NASA under contract by Honeywell, and are called MDMs, for Multiplexer/Demultiplexer. Think of a rack-mount swappable-processor system and you'll be close. These run the RTOS (Real Time Operating System) called VxWorks (from Wind River) -- the same RTOS used on the successful Mars Pathfinder mission, and custom software written by Honeywell and specific system vendors using Matrixx from the same vendor.

The crew use laptops, and there are quite a number of them judging by photographs, many seemingly permanently linked into one or more MDM functions. Since the MDMs have no other interface to the crew, this makes sense. The laptops that link to the MDMs use Sun Solaris and a custom client that provides data feedback and a semi-graphical user interface, depending on function. These laptops go by the generic name PCS (Portable Computer System) and conform to specifications set during the mid-1990s. The PCS model in use is the IBM Thinkpad, and contrary to popular belief, these models have evolved along with the Shuttle and Station programs -- just more slowly than the commercial market. Models need to be constructed with higher-quality components and undergo flight qualification. The laptops available to Expedition One were (I believe) at least Pentium I-MMX class machines.

Some of these laptops are dual-boot with Windows NT on the other partition. Windows NT does have a function on the space station, but it is in no way linked to the command and control systems as outlined above. The major purpose it serves seems to be e-mail, but probably also record-keeping and recreation in the form of games or playing portable media such as CDs or DVDs. (There is also a built-in DVD player in one module that the astronauts can gather around for "movie night".) Windows NT can behave perfectly well when given a known, well-defined set of hardware and a well-tweaked configuration. The astronauts have access to spare hard drives that have images created on Earth using Norton Ghost. In one incident during Expedition One this was insufficient, and a spare hard drive was sent up during the current shuttle mission in order to bring that laptop back into service. But since they have plenty, it probably did not materially affect operations to be missing one.
----
lake effect weblog

http://content.honeywell.com/yourhome/webpad/webpa d.htm

--tim

Anyone have experience with the Honeywell wedpad? Looks nice, but expensive (atleast it is available though)

I know this may come off a little randian, please pardon, but why can't this stuff be left to work itself out on its own? I am not so much a libertarian as I am concerned with this 'tort culture' that seems to be taking over here in the US. I think lawsuits like this are a major waste of time and money. I think these people new the deal they were gettiung into, and if they were actually valuable mindshare, they might have been hired full time from the get-go. Life is tough. But everything would have worked out OK if lawsuits like this were discouraged. consider:

If the situation were left to develop it's natural course, say by not allowing the lawsuit, there would eventually form a market around
providing temp jobs to an always hungry MS. Soon, a scarcity in temp workers might prompt a temp agency to offer benefits so as to attract the most qualified applicants, thus allowing them to charge a premium, etc. seems simple to me, and at the scale we're talking about, insurance premiums become pretty inexpensive.

As I look artound me, I see a lot of anger about corporate greed, but it is my feeling that much of bad corporate behavior is just as likely attributable to laziness. Both individual laziness and a type of interdepartmental reluctance to share credit. Any big company suffers this problem (excepts maybe those orcs over at Honeywell). But once the lawsuit started, MS was stuck: who would want to hire people that had just sued you? and so they played a stalling tactic and settled cheap. Which prevents any precedent entering the lawbooks, afaik ianal hand.

I would also like to point out that MS stopped handing out incentive shares to programmers and similar level positions many many years ago. This lawsuit was probably mostly almost definately about health insurance. I dunno though, I forgot and the nytimes is down or something right now. thanks,

mm

So what if every company in the work has announced that they are going to have a webpad on the market next year? I found this nifty webpad, well ok it runs CE, (but linux and qnx will run on the processor), but it does have some cool features like wireless connection with a broadband base. The best thing is you can buy it today. Dsscube

I have used both systems, so I'll comment on my experiences. I haven't administered a CVS repository, so some of my knowledge will be incomplete there.

The migration process question is easy to answer: when you migrate, you're gonna lose all your history. So when you do, I recommend you burn a CD with your VSS repository on it and archive it on a server somewhere. Then, do a complete checkout of your source tree into a fresh location. From there, do a massive add to your CVS repository and boom, you've got your source migrated over. One thing you may want to do is write a script that will insert an $Id:$ tag in a comment up at the top of each of your source files before they get added; I find it awfully nice to have the revision number right there so that when somebody asks me what version I'm working on, I can tell 'em.

On the differences, an exhaustive list would be really long. You might take a look at the FAQ for comp.software.config-mgmt as a starting point. In brief, though, CVS has these advantages over VSS:

• The repository doesn't automatically get corrupted by usage. (VSS does this.)
• Checking in and out don't get exponentially slower as the repository gets big.
• There are clients for just about any development platform -- so your Mac HTML/Graphics people don't have to have CodeWarrior and the VSS plugin in order to check in their work.
• It's free

Actually, if you can afford the package, I'd suggest looking into Perforce. It's very similar to CVS (including the variety of platforms for which it has clients - although the Mac client is an MPW tool, which is great for programmers but icky for designer types), and it introduces a couple of very nice features: atomic changes (so when you check in a bunch of files, the commit doesn't happen until they're all in) and a really slick use of the filesystem so that with really huge repositories it's still lightning fast.

i believe this is the page you are looking for. http://www.iac.honeywell.com/Pub/Tech/CM/PMTools.h tml#FreeTools.
There are reviews of many commercial and free apps.

at work we use css, cpma, infoman, and soon remedy and esm. most of these are rare and/or custom built. the one feature i like, however, is an audit trail for updates, with timestamp. a must have.