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https://www.rockwellcollins.co... AFDS-770 Autopilot Flight Director System Put the proven standard autopilot flight director system of the Boeing 777 to work for you. The Rockwell Collins AFDS-770 incorporates technology advancements consistent with Boeingâ(TM)s state-of-the-art design objectives. So you can trust it fully digital, fail operational autopilot, flight director and fly-by-wire backdrive system. The triplex system provides multichannel cruise autopilot and flight director control functions for speed selection, altitude modes, heading/track modes, vertical speed/flight path angle modes, vertical/lateral flight management control selection, and fully automatic landing and go-around modes. The AFDS-770 also provides for backdrive of the captain's and first officer's control columns and control wheels during all phases of the flight envelope, and will also backdrive the rudder pedals during autoland and go-around. The backdrive system provides traditional wheel, column and pedal feedback for the 777 fly-by-wire system under autopilot control.

That was my thought too, but apparently they do exist already with magnetic bearings, for example this one. But problems with gyros/reaction wheels seem an old problem, wasn't Hubble stranded once for a few months with not enough gyros?

Rockwell Collins is headquartered in Cedar Rapids Iowa and has several products in development for or deployed in UAVs. A postage stamp-sized secure GPS sounds pretty nifty, and they're also working on some things related to autonomous UAVs.

Rockwell Collins is headquartered in Cedar Rapids Iowa and has several products in development for or deployed in UAVs. A postage stamp-sized secure GPS sounds pretty nifty, and they're also working on some things related to autonomous UAVs.

Also, this gear is nowhere near new, has been standard since the 90s... that, of course, raises assumptions, hypothesis, and the like. Don't read too much into that, it can get rather maddening.

Rockwell Collins FCS-700 and accessories - for Boeing, similar models for other aircraft. Soon to be similar tech in cars, as well - but that's old news.

http://www.rockwellcollins.com/news/page8813.html

Clicky for bigness.

20 years ago, cell phone mounted under the passenger seat in your car.
10 years ago, cell phone could be held in your hand
5 years ago, cell phone easily fit in your pocket
2 years ago, cell phone become even smaller/thinner, had better battery life, and could take a crappy picture
1 year ago, cell phone has longer battery life, bluetooth, plays .mp3s, connects to push email services, takes even better pictures, etc.

This is in the early prototype stage, for all practical purposes. The system you may be referring to is the JTRS, a piece of this technology (although I admit that I really haven't been following the news on this for some time now, so the real deal could be in the hands of a few for testing now).

The point is, if you have a lot of people/machines on a battlefield, and every comms device is capable of being a relay for anther, you don't need a lot of power (=weight). I would think most hand-held military radios transmit several Watts, just because there are so few of them as to need to cover several miles of a battlefield. The cellular phone followed the growth of the network to the point that now all that is needed is less than 300mW for most of us to reach a tower. I would think that antenna development is ultimately going to be the big hold up for this sort of technology to really succeed. If someone can invent an antenna that will fit in a pocket, match on just about any frequency and radiate a signal efficiently they'll have something. Now, where did I put my can of magic smoke?...

Surveillance package. It's gonna be made by Rockwell, for Rockwell.

Easier actually.

http://www.rockwellcollins.com/news/page6237.html

Rockwell collins designed a secure processor for the NSA that PROVABLY can run multiple threads where each thread can get no information about the others. That way they can run processes with different clearance levels on the same CPU.

Model checking can make you big bucks if you can find the customers to pay for it.

Was that using Standard Positioning Service (SPS) or Precise Positioning Service (PPS)? The SPS is used by both military and civilian. Anyone who can purchase a $100 receiver can use it to detect their location within an accuracy of 100 meters (95 percent) horizontally and 156 meters (95 percent) vertically.

The PPS is used by the military and users authorized by the U.S. P(Y) code. Not anyone can use this one. It provides provides a predictable positioning accuracy of at least 22 meters (95 percent) horizontally and 27.7 meters vertically. Not to mention that most PPS GPS devices are hard to come by. PPS is typically used in military, aviation, and marine usage.
The only way I can figure you got ~1mm accuracy is if you used a ground station as a known point of reference to correct the skew. Either that or your triangulation is wrong ;)
GPS also uses, I believe, up to twelve satellites at a time to improve accuracy. Very rarely do they only use three satellites to obtain its coordinates.

Link

My suggestion with the sensor was to pick a color that didn't blend in with the surroundings. Aka, don't pick white when you're on the slopes. I don't think the whole display glasses idea is impossible, it's just nobody's working on it real hard. These guys have a 20% transmission, which is about on par with some sunglasses. Dial down the resolution and the colors, and maybe you could make it more compact.

Regardless of my stupid ideas on how to make it more useful, I think if somebody actually tried to make a pair of display glasses that were somewhat comparable to normal glasses, I think people would buy them and push the technology along. Original point being, that would be more exciting than an MP3 player strapped to some sunglasses, especially if they were wireless. :-)

"So... how easy is it to spoof a GPS signal?"

Depends what system you want to fool.

If you want a GPS receiver to believe it's in a certain position, you need something like this, which is in the 'telephone our salesman to negotiate' price range (or it might be 'US government only', I can't quite tell..)

If you want a computer to believe its attached GPS receiver is in a different location, you simply send formatted text from a serial port.

Linux has been evaluated and certified for safety critical applications. LynuxWorks and Rockwell Collins worked together to certify a specific Linux kernel and distribution to
DO-178B Level A certification.

DO-178B is the standard for software on commerical aircraft. It's difficult and expensive to do, but it's required by the FAA. Level A is the highest level of certication. Level A certification is required for critcal components like the displays, fight controls and the auto-pilot.

There really aren't any software certification standards that are more rigorous than DO-178B, and Linux already has been certified.

I know some folks workin' on it.

Here was one demo.

Here's a picture.

I know some folks workin' on it.

Here was one demo.

Here's a picture.

The irony is that our company (in other divisions) makes most of its money on defense work (non of those jobs are leaving, as that's a requirement of those contracts). If you want to outsource jobs to India, so be it. But I can't help but feel my stomach turn that they're also getting what's basically a subsidy from the government.

If you ship U.S. jobs overseas, should you still be granted government contracts?

Not so. Please check out WIndows XP Embedded (which supports IE) and Windows CE (which supports IE and pocket IE). In fact, my employer selected CE for use by the passengers on airlines in our next generation IFE system primarilly because IE is available and is the dominant browser. When your users spend only 8 hours using your product (long haul flights), you can't spend any time teaching them how to use it. They have to know before they even sit down.

Now, I don't wish to start an argument about Microsoft's commitment to CE, or its likelyhood of dominating other embedded RTOS'es, or the wisodom of tying ourselves to IE (if, indeed, it's days are numbered as you suggest). I merely wanted to point out that Opera does have competition in embedded market. I'd also be surprised (actually, stunned) if other browsers are not being considered for the embedded market.

Again, just a nit. You've still written a very informative post.

In all our testing, the FAA took the view that it was not their responsibility to prove that something was unsafe - it's the manufacturer's responsibility to prove that their product isn't. This is the real reason airlines are so paraniod about cellphones, etc. Unless Nokia spends $500K+ per model to certify that there's absolutely no way the device can produce interference even in a failure mode (and provides every consumer with an embossed certificate to that effect), your flight attendant will be asking you politlely to shut the thing off.

There is, of course, always the possibility of a sea change. Perhaps the manufacturers will begin doing real testing of their devices for EMI, although that will increase costs (although much less than for IFE equipment because the volume would be higher). However, that would have to happen on every device manufactured anywhere and require the user to show some kind of certification to the airline. Perhaps the FAA will require even better shielding on critcal equipment, but that implies retrofitting every piece of equipment on every commercial aircraft in the world. Or maybe the FAA will simply come under political pressure to relax their safety requirements, but that will end the second a plane goes down for any non-obvious reason and a herd of lawyers appears screaming "I told you so!"

Unless there is a paradigm shift on one of these fronts (none of which are really palatable), you will see more and more restrictive policies on the use of consumer electronics in the cabin.

Until then? Simple. Leave your laptop powered off and read a book. Maybe you'll learn something...

PS - A pretty amusing cartoon appeared in the New Yorker peripherally related to this topic once. Check it out here.

I'm thinking it won't be long till a $50 device for spoofing

It's not quite $50 yet, but this is what it'll look like.

Yes, the GPS signals are cryptographically signed. It's a feature of the system called Anti-Spoofing (AS). However, it won't do this piece of shit any good because the keys required to authenticate the signal are considered classified data, and only available to the military and a select few others. And it's not like GPS simulators don't exist, either.