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Pneumatic Tube Communication In Hospitals
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
So the point of this article is that physical tasks, like plumbing or carrying infected blood, can't be done electronically ?!?!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The bandwidth sucks.
They use wheels and manual labor that has been around for a melenia to transport patients. Not the cutting edge turbo jet engines found it military grade aircraft. Congress & senate to investigate why not.
I guess the only question is... why don't you take a look at TFA and get all your questions answered, instead of rushing here to try for a FP?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
James-Bond those urine samples.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The ultra-modern pharmacy in the local town also uses pneumatic delivery for prescription drugs. You present your prescription at the counter, and the attendant checks it, then keys in the appropriate codes on the terminal. The pills/potion/whatever arrives via pneumatic tube while the instructions & labels are being printed. This is faster then the previous method where the same attendant would have to walk off and fetch the prescription materials.
Some banks also use pneumatic conveyance to send currency between the counters and the vault.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
I wonder which engineer thought that would be a good idea.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
When are we gonna get that crap for our home network. I need my EBAY crap NOW!
How do you figure? How much information is coded in a blood sample, for instance, if you count all the DNA/RNA sequencing? For that matter, how much information can you send if you load up a 16-Gb USB drive (or a few) and send them off in a tube?
No, the bandwidth here is just fine.
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
I think most if not all hospitals have this tech.
The station(s) go offline, and service personel come and fix it... parts of the network going offline is not an unusual event. Unlike the 19th century tech, these packet (plastic canister) routed pneumatic tube systems lack humans at the core of packet routing.
From a volunteer's point of view at a non-Stanford hospital, the IT integration was less than stellar. Maybe Stanford has done some work in that area, or maybe this is just astroturfing by a pneumatic tube company.
... Sen. Ted Stevens.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
You must be new here.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
22nd century technology will have it rebuild the sample atom by atom at the destination.....
When the register has too much cash or needs change they just tube it over. There's also at least one pharmacy which has people processing prescriptions at terminals, and storage below from where the drugs are tubed over. If it works, don't fix it I say.
Oh, and here = Helsinki, Finland.
.: Max Romantschuk
You can fit a couple of DDS-4 tapes in a standard pneumatic cartridge. That's 80GB of data, giving you somewhere in the region of 60GB/s
Having to blow into a tube or suck on one?
For that matter, how much information can you send if you load up a 16-Gb USB drive (or a few) and send them off in a tube?
You have a last mile (or last metre) problem there though. Getting the data through the tube will take seconds. Minutes at most. 16GB through USB2 will take a few minutes even if you actually do get the maximum theoretical throughput.
I look forward to the day when humans can be transported through these tubes as in Futurama.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
if each capsule was packed with 16gb microSD cards ?
There has never been a more appropriate time for this response: WHOOSH! (as the parcel goes by in the tube)
This was an article in the medical center's newsletter, so I think its purpose was more likely a profile of one of their internal services and the people behind it.
If it was a plant by a pneumatic tube company it was an epic fail, because one notably missing datum was the name of the vendor.
Why is this news? Seriously, old technology lives on if it's useful. Even sometimes if it's not.
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Ah - but keep in mind that I/O on USB tops out at 480Mbit. Halve that, because (unlike networking), reading (receiving) and writing (sending) can't be done simultaneously - so 240Mbit. Gigabit is already beating it* - even before you add the overhead (however long it takes to; eject the device, remove it, put it in the capsule, type in the right send location / find the right tube, wait for actual transit time, get it out of the capsule, plug it in, mount it/open folder, start copy/move dialogue). It may be worth it for a sub-par network given some threshold of data, but in those cases, it's more practical to just install a decent network in the first place.
* Most "gigabit" connections don't live up to their names - but then again, I've yet to see a USB key read/write at 480Mbit/s.
Wooooosh!!!
Both Berlin and Paris had a networks with a total length of more than 400km.
obvious link
I for one welcome our new tubular overlords.
Ancient transportation technology is better
TFA doesn't answer the questions at all... it just says no cylinder has ever gotten stuck in a tube, ... It’s also a work in constant progress
Without any mention of any way of dealing with a stuck cylinder.
Perhaps it just has to happen once, an important tube getting disabled by a stuck object... for there to be a catastrophe... (and no couriers available to fall back on)
I found the article mildly interesting but the lack of details disappointing. They only mention things like switching points and waiting areas in passing. It would've been a great article if they'd talked about the specific tech - I know it's old tech, but most of us have had little to no exposure to it (I've been to banks that use it at their drive-through windows... that's about it). For example: there are switches; is there any sort of prioritization protocol, or are the switches simply for collision prevention?
#DeleteChrome
Record chart compilation
NASA Mission Control does too.
They also use "Mr. Hand."
They are pretty common in the UK, in all sort of industries.
Tesco supermarket uses them in some stores for moving cash to tills, and they are widely used in Hospitals.
There is one great, if slightly lengthy story that a friend tells, from when she was working in a hospital in Western Scotland a few years ago, I'll try to recount it best as I can.
A patient who has Hepatitis and Epilepsy is admitted to the hospital, he had a fit, and his Dog bit his ear off while he was fitting. So he came to hospital with his ear in his pocket. He was treated in A&E (UK ER) and sent up to the surgical department. His Ear though was wrapped up and put in a tube, however before the doctor could tap in the destination, the pod whizzed off. The hepatitis positive ear was not found for several days (is this just a bit error rate?), as it was quiet a big hospital with a lot of tubes. It could have been worse, as the ear was not intended to be sown back on, but just photographed and incinerated. The doctor who put the ear in the pod was known as Stupid Dave before the incident, but I'm sure this didn't help him shake of the moniker. The worst thing is, most people just ask what happened to the dog.
You don't get that with TCP/IP
Maybe not a fail.. there can't be that many manufacturers of pneumatic tube systems, who are willing and able to take on the added liability and certification requirements to put their equipment in hospitals, and have it serve a critical function.
Pneumatic tube systems are very expensive. If a hospital is considering having one built, the management will be having a lot of research done, to reach the right decisions.
If other potential buyers of pneumatic tube systems for hospitals read the article and are interested.... they're very likely to make contacts, to get more information about their system, including contact with the vendor.
Otherwise known as: spread information by word of mouth, so it doesn't seem like they are "pushing" a product, or spouting advertising / marketing illusions, but use an article to get people talking about the subject.
is it like a series of tubes?
i'm fairly sure it doesn't: it would most probaby be possible to feed 3.5" or at least 2.5" HDs down these tube. Every few seconds.
the latency certainly, though.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
in australia coles and woolworths as well as target and big w, etc. all use pneumatic tubs for cash.
at the hospital at which I worked, you could select the origin station as the destination, and the tube system would dutifully take the carrier all the way around and back. so you could send yourself something, and receive it a few minutes later. I loved sending stuff to myself in the (near) future.
actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
It has been a while, but from what I can remember -
If something gets stuck or really fouled up, they shut off the system, force air through it backward, and empty the system (channel by channel). From what I could tell, this is usually enough to clear any obstructions, but it does take some time depending on how big the system is.
If something contaminates the system (like a spilled or ruptured sample), they send a special container through that contains a liquid agent (bleach + water, or some other disinfectant), which renders the spilled contents inert.
The plastic containers they use are pretty sturdy, and if I recall, the containers are reinforced at each end. They don't move *that* fast through the system, so it's not like one container could literally destroy another simply from impact.
Actually, the Paris system lasted until 1973.
At a hospital in the Washington, DC area which uses this system, a friend of mine needed a baby-anti-theft bracelet from the next nurses station. It took 12 minutes to get there through the tube system, in which time someone could have walked over and gotten it 6+ times
You know its nice to see this technology used for something other than a stupid bank. I'd love to see this used for fast food. I could deff see McDonald's, Burger King, and/or Taco Bell easily fitting into an over-sized tube and making it to the house in a jiff. I don't know how well pizza would work unless its like a pizza sub. As far as drinks are concerned I'd think that they would come up with some method to keep drinks from spilling, ie: develop a new type of cup.
(and no couriers available to fall back on)
Luckily, they have plenty of *general purpose* organic units to fall back on, which, while less efficient than the tube network, can quickly transport the physical objects. Just because no one has "courier" in their job description, doesn't mean there are no available couriers.
What happens when something goes wrong?
Tubes get clogged... (lack of QoS)
Capsule is damaged before being inserted in tube
Capsule gets stuck...
Breaking fails, sample gets smashed..
Tubes get contaminated.
Critical sample gets stuck, or destroyed....
As someone who worked in a place that had a pneumatic system for transporting blood that they used for decades I can say a few things. :)
Never heard of a clog, it was a two station system. One opening at each end. I supposed the ones that branch would have more clogs/stuckies.
The most likely failure was a blood bag or tube bursting on arrival, usually do to over pressure making capsule go too fast.
That only contaminates the one end, huge mess but the whole tube system isn't contaminated.
Critical samples sometimes get lost broken or whatever when they are handled by people, the pneumatic system really doesn't affect the odds of it happening.
So would say it decreases the odds.
Since the blood bank was on one side of the street and the hospital was on the other, the tube meant the people didn't have to cross the street with samples or bags.
Nothing to say here... move along
That had whooshed right over my head too, it sucks when that happens.
The bandwidth sucks.
And the more it sucks the better it is.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
When my youngest brother was born, about 5 years ago, the hospital had "anti-theft" anklets on the babies. When my brother's fell off, it took over half an hour to get one from the nurses station at the end of the hall by tube, when someone could have walked there and gotten it by hand in 45 seconds.
The system is only helpful if people DON'T become dependent on it.
Do you suppose they got the idea from the drive-through prescription lane at Walgreen's?
rj
A sample was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things.
Place a stack of DVDs in a pneumatic device and you can pump data faster than on any type of existing system of delivery.
The Red Lion in Hunningham, Warwickshire, uses pneumatic tubes to shuttle food orders to the kitchen (the order, not the food). The tubes are transparent and take a slightly convoluted route, so it's fun to watch.
What you wouldn't expect from that, is that it's a reasonably traditional country pub in most respects...
On the contrary, it blows.
Pneumatic tubes are a bit more reliable than sample-carrying robots that are being produced for the same purpose. What's more likely to fail, a robot that autonomously navigates a hospital, avoiding humans with ultrasonic sensors, or a simple time-tested pneumatic tube system?
No, actually I think they use some kind of pump to achieve the suction. :)
actually some pneumatic tube systems have procedures for a stuck cylinder, by sending a second heavier cylinder, or by increasing the pressure to higher than normal levels, either way clearing the tube.
as in Futurama: Governor lady said "I'm sending in more trains!"
They promised us high speed communication via carbon nanotubes - and this is what we got. Just like that flying car they promised. :)
how about a esata hard drive then? better?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
If it works, why replace it?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I used such tubes all day, every day, for several years, doing Neutron Activation Analysis. The samples were loaded three per tube, known as rabbits. They went into the slot, closed and blew down the outside wall of the building, underground, and then up into the core of our TRIGA reactor. There they got neutrons of various energies for anywhere from 0.05 to 2-3 seconds, and then they blasted back to me. Behind the shields I removed the samples and placed them at the gamma detectors--moving very fast. Counting gammas took anywhere from seconds to days, depending upon type and elements.
We proved the existence of the Northern Hemisphere ozone depletion with 800 samples, and several of my graduates got PhDs. Another project showed trade routes extant through northern Italy at the construction of the Colliseum.
Once in a while a rabbit would get stuck. A particularly hot one did, right at the corner of my lab. We timed that test so no one else was in the building, and it got so hot it wouldn't come back past the tube joint. If I hadn't known just where the 36" wrench was, the building could have been badly contaminated, and would've shut down, as in national news. I got it out without too much exposure, and was offered the job as building manager later.
Another time a sample exploded while removing it from a rabbit, showering my nose with hot dust. I still get stray hairs growing there...
the internet can certainly not match that!!!
I thought the headline of the article was actually a joke; these systems are found in almost all major hospitals. There are companies that will install them:
http://www.swisslog.com/index/hcs-index/hcs-systems/hcs-pts/hcs-pts-translogic.htm
this is an established industry, and nothing new... Each hospital in the conglomerate that I work in uses a pneumatic tube system.
Weird that somebody picked up this Stanford "press release" and found it suitable for Slashdot...
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've occasionally thought it would be interesting to use this kind of technology for home plumbing. For example, when you turn on your sink and ask for hot water, instead of having a continuous flow in a pipe from the hot water heater to the sink (which wastes a lot of energy), why not use a pneumatic tube system to deliver a packet of hot water to the sink?
Note that the same tubes could be used for delivering hot water an cold water, and taking away waste water? (You'd have separate containers, of course, for fresh water and waste water).
You could do cool things with a pneumatic packet-switched water network. For instance, it would be easy to add a storage tank and route shower waster water to the tank, and then from there to the toilets for flushing.
And I bet with some clever design, you could make it so the pneumatic tube system could double as a centralized vacuum system for house cleaning.
I'm sure this is just meant to poke fun at the serious scientists that are feverishly working on transporter technology so physical items can be moved instantaneously from point A to point B...unless of course, you are traveling at warp speed at present.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Every day, I get to work using 10,000 year old technology that the internet hasn't replaced yet - the wheel. I first read about the internet using a 5500 year old invention (paper) that is still in extremely prolific use today.
What? Huh? There are hundreds of thousands of inventions that are in use at that hospital every minute of every day, that didn't get replaced by the internet. Why single out this one? Is it because, like the internet, this too is a series of tubes?"
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pneumatic tube shuttle full of thumbdrives.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
They use them at Sewickley Valley Hospital in PA to send stuff around the Lab area on the 6th floor, and to send samples from the 2nd floor upstairs.
People love it. It's worth every penny.
They don't move *that* fast through the system, so it's not like one container could literally destroy another simply from impact.
According to TFA, this system moves the containers at 25 FPS, which is about 17 mph.
That should be enough to cause some damage, except, being a pneumatic system, the collision would be softened by a a cushion of air between the objects.
But... Didn't that reduce the number of readily available organ donors?
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Pneumatic tubes are expensive to run and maintain.
However if you have something valuable like cash, drugs, blood samples then the cost is worth it.
Pneumatic tubes cant me mugged, misplaced , delayed and there fast.
With just a few more bends, twists, and crossover points, maybe these guys could enhance the system to carry the patients also.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
So the old fuddy duddy guy was right after all! John Stewart, eat your words!
Having worked in medical field for years, I have had some fun with the tubes. If you had extra tubes, you would send the tube(s) to "00". They system is designed to send the tube to a station that was in need of more tubes. Well, sometimes patient's cloths where left behind... clothes that security had no interest in keeping track of. Such as used underwear. "00" was the perfect way to dispose of these. Want to 'piss off' pharmacy? They would always get up set if body fluids where sent to their "clean" environment. Load up a tube with a urine specimen that was not placed in a foam container and the urine specimen would explode in the tube system. Needless to say, pharmacy would call the floor that the specimen was sent from and express their displeasure. Sweet to wander over to another floor and send urine spec from that unit. And let the fireworks fly.
Well, seeing as the transfer rate of your average MicroSD card is much less than GigE, you would end up with a pile of cards and a few hundred MB actually on the computer at the other end.
Regardless, you completely missed the joke.
Stanford Hospital nearly killed me: I received cyberknife surgery from them. A few months later, I was in severe pain, not understanding what was wrong. Over the phone, they prescribed me decadron, without addressing the great pain I was in. That medicine, coupled with severe pain, almost killed me. I have lost all respect for them.
Hey, it's not the network's fault if there's a bottleneck at the customer's site.
There was a pneumatic system up and working in Ballantynes, a department store in Christchurch NZ. When you booked something up on your account (or your mother's account LOL) they sent the paperwork to the office in these cool little tubes. It was still working well into the 80's.
The pneumatic tube system in the hospital i used to work at in NYC worked great. I wasnt a huge fan because idiots would sometimes send urine samples to the lab with loose caps.... not fun
It's extremely common for hospitals to use these, especially for controlled substances being sent to different nursing stations. This is in no way new stuff.
The article was short on details but why can't we apply the basic principles to other routing of physical goods?
The math and engineering which allows large tube networks route med samples, documents, teller slips etc. could probably handle baggage at the airport.
The requirements are the same. I'm not talking about using pneumatic tubes but conveyor belts, automated carts with some human monitoring and intervention. What is the fundamental difference in the problem?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The bandwidth is great. You can send a 1TB hard drive down the tube.
It's the latency that sucks.
Don't try to play a first person shooter, or stream a video through the tube.
Don't use USB... use Firewire 800, or Esata :)
So it really is a series of tubes....
I've heard of some long read DNA sequences taking up to a full TB of disk space. Pneumatics would be fantastic... :D
Okay, fine, but we're measuring a round trip between two machines -- a bit doesn't get counted as received, until it's read from the source computer, placed on the transmission medium, received by the destination computer, and copied to the local hard drive of the destination computer.
A bit's round trip doesn't get completed until a 'response bit' is read off the 'response' drive of the destination computer and written to the 'response' drive of the original source computer.
It'll be 800gb of data. Transmitted over a distance of 2000 feet.
Network cabling technology will be Fiber, 2 pairs of single-mode fibers, 10GBase-LR XFPs on two switches at each end, with both links aggregated for load balancing and redundancy, to give a total of 20 Gigabits.
There will be 5 files to be transferred, each one 133gb in size.
Both the source and destination computer will each be plugged into switches that plug into each end of the 2 pairs of fiber optic cables, computers plugin to the switches each using a pair of 5 foot Cat6a copper Gig-Ethernet patch cables, interfaces teamed active LACP link aggregation.
Source and destination computers each have 2 RAID5 arrays of 4 300gb Intel X25-M 6gb/S SSDs, one pre-populated on the sender machine with "data to be sent", one populated on the destination machine with "response data".
The expected round trip for sending 800gb of data over the network, and getting 800gb of response data is approximately 20 minutes.
Actually, I'm sure you can send a hard drive through a tube much faster then you can send it over most networks.
You can get even more hard drives in the tube with compression.. You just need a hydraulic press. Downside is it's lossy.
THL phish sticks
Once took a wrong turn and wandered into the pneumatics central room of a major NYC hospital on a really hot summer's day. Lingered in the doorway to take advantage of the refreshing pneumatic breeze. Never got that advantage hanging out near any active computer hardware.
They depended upon you synchronizing two pendulums (one at each end) so often had very poor quality.
Just imagine, you'd be able to send anything anwhere at any time, as long as it fit in a pneumatic tube. Sure, it might be slow, but unlike UPS, where I can track my package as it sits in their warehouse for 5 days only 20 miles from my house, I could actually watch my deliveries as they make their way to me in real time.
I worked at a hospital with a pretty complicated series of tubes. Even after using it hundreds of times, I still thought it was totally sweet.
Yes, tubes DO get clogged, and pretty regularly. We fixed it by calling maintenance and saying "tube's down". I think they reversed the polarity or something. If something was extra-stuck it could be down for an hour or so, so they probably have access points or something if reversing didn't work.
If you use a damaged capsule it can end up clogging the tube, so it's not a good idea. Capsules will get stuck if it's not closed all the way (you try to squeeze stuff too much stuff into it). If you put something in wrapped in a plastic bag (always a good idea with IV bags and things that can break) and a bit of the bag is sticking out it can clog the tubes, too.
You don't generally put in things that can break easily -- you wouldn't generally send glass bottles, but vials are okay if you throw some padding around them. They don't stop gently, it's a pretty good thud even with whatever braking they use so you make sure the contents will survive impact before you send it. Usually you'll double-bag for biologic and chemo products. If a capsule gets contaminated with bio or chemo there are cleaning procedures. Generally it's just the capsule that gets contaminated. There are probably procedures for shutting down and cleaning the tube system after contamination. It was one of those things that you always think could happen and how much it would suck, but it didn't happen when I worked there.
If a critical sample gets stuck or destroyed, then tough cookies. There will always be noob mistakes.
True story: the tube system we used had a function to send tubes out if you had an excess of empty tubes. You push a code and it takes it -somewhere-. Then if you need a tube, you push a code and it sends you an empty one. I don't know how that works, but I always imagined that it involved monkeys.
That sounds like a challenge!
IT people like to make fun of Stevens for the analogy and yet don't even think about it when they talk about how big the "pipe" is when talking about bandwidth.
Maybe if he had said it was a "series of pipes" it would have gone over better. Because tubes are different than pipes.
Work Safe Porn
"Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
This article might be interesting if you are, say, 15. But they were (and still are) used in banks, the post office, supermarkets and anywhere else people need to transport small packages and money in a complex. Look around next time you are out in the world and you will likely see a few of these tubes.
How about an article on another archaic, 19th-century piece of technology that works better than any modern Silicon Valley wizardry: the internal combustion engine. I look forward to the one about the bicycle too!
Am I the only one that is some what distressed by the ideal of forcing air and physical containers all around a building that contains infectious diseases?
Or the thought of a urine sample leaking in the tube ......
was invented, discovered, constructed centuries ago but we still find it useful, indispensible. What is surprising about the pneumatic tube system remaining useful?
in the olden days.
Not to be confused with pee-mail, messages that dogs leave for each other on trees and stuff.
The interesting thing here is that one could potentially invent a whole new business model of delivery of goods instead of bits. One could imagine wiring up one of the skyscrapers so that the retail stores have a tube connection to one's apartment. Want dinner? Order it online and have it tubed. Want to try a dress? Tube it. Want to return a dress? Tube it. How about a quart of milk? The possibilities are endless. Shopping will become more convenient and also more JIT. You'd think retailers would kill to have a direct pipe to your apartment. Should work in NY or SF.
I assume they do this everywhere, but here in Texas, all of the banks use pneumatic tubing to transfer checks between customers at the drive-through "tellers" and the actual tellers in the bank. Its a pretty cool system.
What about teleportation? Well, I guess it's not electronic either.
Memorandum
From: Pathology Laboratory
To: Sixth Floor Nurses' Station
Re: Stool Samples in the Pneumatic Delivery System
Please remember to pack all stool samples in the specially designed containers. Improvised solutions are not acceptable.
Thanks in advance.
The Laboratory Guys
PS: Next time we are sending it back.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Bandwidth = throughput (packets per second)
Latency = time (seconds)
You can somewhat overcome latency by using big packages. Load the tube up with hundreds or thousands of 16Gb USB drives and do everything in batches.
This actually applies to transport as well. People complain bitterly about the latency of public transport and the advocates merrily reply by saying "but look at the bandwidth"... Which is no use if it takes me 3 hours to get to work. What they really need to do is solve the latency problem.
Deleted
Wait until you see a cylinder full of 64GB memory cards, then you'll sing a different tune.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think it's probably more to do with a tech that still today has a cool factor, and manages to still seem futuristic. Seriously - you put a pod in a tube, and it is whisked off to some location on the other side of the building or even a campus. It's the next best thing to Star Trek transporters - and it is indeed made all the more impressive by being a 19th century invention.
Sure there are oodles of old inventions we still rely on or even marvel at, but I think the pneumatic tube system is indeed a worthy candidate of special attention, particularly as many will not have encountered it and it is perhaps getting more use again.
Incidentally Tesco here in Ireland use it for cash (surplus from checkouts dispatched into it, and possibly small notes sent the other way).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Stuck cylinders can be cleared much in the same way that you can clear a clogged bit of plumbing - access the pipe at the nearest joint/junction to the clog, ram a stiff but flexible probe down there, use the air pressure as best you can, and get on with your life. If all else fails, you can remove the clogged segment and replace it. Depending on what it is, the lost payload may be a real bummer; perhaps irreplaceable. That amounts to a bad day for a couple of people; not a catastrophe. If it is an essential lab test, they'll pull another sample. If it is an essential drug, they'll whistle more up from the pharmacy. If it is not an essential anything then, well, it isn't essential.
An interesting footnote: many hospitals have "hot labs" for handling radiopharmaceuticals - drugs that have radioactive isotopes in them. These are often used for diagnostic tests rather than treatment. The isotopes involved are usually short-lived, with halflives on the order of an hour or two. As a result, the drugs are manufactured on demand for a particular patient, then shipped up to the diagnostic lab via pneumatic tube. The prepared syringe gets put in the same carrier as ordinary payloads, except these carriers have shielding (usually lead, but sometimes other materials). The shielding is there not because of the concern of irradiating people as the drugs gets whisked by in the tube system - it goes by too quickly to deliver any significant dosage. Rather, the shielding is there in case the carrier gets stuck - delivering radioactivity to one particular place in the hospital. This presents a technical challenge due to the significant additional weight of the carrier - hundreds or thousands of grams - which can make these carriers more prone to getting stuck.
This gives the word airborne another entire meaning.
I always hear and see people who throw out, get rid of, and replace perfectly good, working equipment, just because it isn't the newest and latest.
Where I'm working right now, they are aware of this. We are building and using systems built on the older, slower Celeron technology, becuase it's inexpensive, has a proven track record, and simply does the job. Sure, a faster system will do the job faster. But what's the difference between getting the job done in 1 second vs a half second?
.. the whole country is going down the tubes..
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
I worked at H-P Products (http://www.hpproducts.net) in High School. Great place. They specialize in tubular products -- which meant that they would manufacture everything from BMW after-market exhausts & roll-bars, to central vacuum systems, Viper seat frames, Corvette Intake manifolds, and... they were the OEM for all these Diebold pneumatic carrier systems you see at bank drive-ups.
We had pneumatic tubes all over the big factory, from every department, from the first floor to second floor in the offices, and even -under-the-street- for a 300+ yard run to the small factory. Even though this was mostly a straight-shot under the parking lot, picnic tables, street, and into the factory, I could not out-run the tube.
The R&D room in the small factory was where they tested new pneumatics. Totally cool. I saw the (current, then 'next') generation of switching systems being tested while I worked there. They had an 8x8 multiplexed, full-duplex terminal system that could handle multiple payloads per tube over two tubes. Really fricken' cool.
You could try to make your own at home, and shoot, I'd encourage it, but have fun trying to figure out how to bend PVC or ABS without deforming / collapsing the tube. Hint: Get your compressor ready, and be prepared to violate patents. :-)
Bandwidth is good - the problem is getting the tube to support full duplex. :)
But... Didn't that reduce the number of readily available organ donors?
Nah, most drivers swerve to avoid hitting the stainless steel carts. :)
Most of the organ donor jokes I hear are about people who ride motorcycles without helmets.
They call those donorcycles, kind of morbid.
Nothing to say here... move along
Just put a 1.5 TB SATA drive in the tube and skip the USB transfer all together.
*whoosh*
Just sayin'
So use USB3. :)