I just finished a novel called "Newton's Cannon", by Gregory Keyes (I think?) where one of Isaac Newton's students invents such a weapon. The student defects to France, and targets the asteroid at London. A neat bit of historical speculative fiction.
I really doubt you'll get anything faster than a PII in a true PC/104 form factor. "Soon", but not yet. Also, I can't think of a single PC/104 video card that could handle any modern games.
PC/104 is targetted at Embedded devices+OS's (QNX, etc) which usually don't even have a display.
There is another compact standard called EBX that has higher computing power, such as those at Versalogic.
The scene during the first few minutes of True Lies (Arnold Schwarznegger), where he boots up the bad guy's computer (Windows 3.1!) was right on. It even showed him hooking up a wireless modem (with its twin in the van outside) to the COM port to transfer the evidence over Hyperterminal.
I think James Cameron is an awesome director, he consistently gets these little details right.
Tamrock is one of the MAP partners, probably half of the equipment in this mine is Tamrock's. I worked on an autonomous Tamrock LHD, in fact, as part of this.
What's new here is that everything is done from surface: Explore->Survey->Drill->Blast->Support->Muck->Repe at.
What I'd really like to know is if any of the advancements they made to make the project work will be given back to the space and robotics community they tapped.
There are a number of papers about the advances on the telemining.net website.
The 175 Ore Body, on the North Mine property, about 10 minutes north of Copper Cliff. You can get tours of the control room at General Engineering on Highway 17.
Uh...sorry. The El-Equip system just gives you a few 9600 baud data links. Our RoboComm system (custom developed for the robotics) gives you hundreds of 10 Mbps and full-motion video links between u/g and surface. Similar in concept, though.
I knew this would come up. The fact is, most of the miners in the area where this is used are within 1-2 years of retirement. Nobody's applying to refill the jobs (very few want to be miners), so this is also an attempt to stretch the capabilities of the people they still have.
I've even had retired miners say to me, "My grandson's looking for a job, and I won't want him to spend 30 years underground like I just did. So make something better!"
The control center for the machines is actually about 20 kilometers from the actual mine. We've been able to run the machines from as far away as Montreal (800 km away).
Actually, the "RoboScoops" (load-haul-dump vehicles used to move the ore) are fairly autonomous and very mobile, they drive themselves throughout the mine.
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This technology is already being used by these guys: http://www.existech.com
I just finished a novel called "Newton's Cannon", by Gregory Keyes (I think?) where one of Isaac Newton's students invents such a weapon. The student defects to France, and targets the asteroid at London. A neat bit of historical speculative fiction.
There is another compact standard called EBX that has higher computing power, such as those at Versalogic.
I think James Cameron is an awesome director, he consistently gets these little details right.
It sounds like El-Equip's working on "going digital" to increase their bandwidth lately, I look forward to seeing what they come up with.
What's new here is that everything is done from surface: Explore->Survey->Drill->Blast->Support->Muck->Repe at.
There are a number of papers about the advances on the telemining.net website.
The 175 Ore Body, on the North Mine property, about 10 minutes north of Copper Cliff. You can get tours of the control room at General Engineering on Highway 17.
Uh...sorry. The El-Equip system just gives you a few 9600 baud data links. Our RoboComm system (custom developed for the robotics) gives you hundreds of 10 Mbps and full-motion video links between u/g and surface. Similar in concept, though.
I've even had retired miners say to me, "My grandson's looking for a job, and I won't want him to spend 30 years underground like I just did. So make something better!"
The control center for the machines is actually about 20 kilometers from the actual mine. We've been able to run the machines from as far away as Montreal (800 km away).
Actually, the "RoboScoops" (load-haul-dump vehicles used to move the ore) are fairly autonomous and very mobile, they drive themselves throughout the mine.