The reason it isn't set up that way is because you would have to implicitly trust every application developer. Unlike the Apple App Store, applications on the Android Market are not vetted by anyone. It isn't like a Linux distro package repository (which arguably the Apple App Store is). It is possible for a developer to have an application out, and then at some point add an unwanted feature. I had an app that started putting advertisements in places throughout the app after an update. Screw that. You could also have an application go rogue and become malicious. Would you want to blindly get the "delete all my stuff" update or the "send this girl's location to this weirdo developer because he's a creep" update? You have to act on each update notification individually for the sake of awareness of what is being put on your phone and security. I'm fine with that.
The average wifi card in your laptop has a 30mW transmitter, seems rather pathetically low power to me.
100mW in VHF with the proper antenna has much better range than a wifi card at the same power with a proper antenna. For comparison, police walkie-talkies have transmit powers between 1W and 5W usually, and they can cover huge areas.
Go to Market -> My Downloads, press the Menu button, select Notifications. Make sure "Notify me when items are updated" is selected. Hopefully you're not talking about silent updates, because that's just plain silly and a terrible idea.
Like the AC who also responded, I've done a lot of work with UAVs. I did some work on the Yamaha R-MAX. It can takeoff and land fully autonomously. Northrop also has the MQ-8B Fire Scout which is capable of fully autonomous flight. Then you have the Boeing Little Bird, the unmanned demonstrator for that was a full size conventional helicopter...and on and on...this isn't new. You can build a fully autonomous Raptor 50 helicopter for less than $10,000.
The Southwest Chief is a nice train, I live in Kansas and have taken it to both its terminal cities, as well as Cimarron/Raton. It can get going pretty fast out west, I clocked it going 100mph on my GPS. Now I'm a pilot though, so if I need to go somewhere in an emergency, I can just rent an airplane and fly without all the TSA crap.
Amateur UAV work is awesome, I've built a few (two helicopters, two airplanes) for myself too. I think its great that it is an active community. However, if you wanted to build a small UAV that could accurately provide location and elevation data, could navigate correctly, and had a proper flight control/autopilot system, there's no way around hard work and math.
GPS navigation is very cool, but for a military UAV, any number of issues can arise that can cause a loss of GPS data. I like having 3-axis inertial navigation (INS) as well with Kalman filtering. As helpful as Kalman filtering is, he's quite pompous. I digress. This allows me to continue flying (or let the autopilot continue flying) with pretty good accuracy. A good all-in-one GPS/INS solution with magnetometers will run $7000. I know, I've had to buy them. Most COTS electronics cannot handle weather, vibration, or sudden acceleration well, and quality costs.
Aircraft design is a very demanding field. Rather than go off on that, I will just say that modern aircraft are usually designed using the principles and methods of one of three aircraft designers. I had the privilege of working directly for one of them, and that opened my eyes to how stringent and methodical an engineer must be when it comes to designing aircraft. Mistakes kill, and there are no shortcuts.
Flight control systems can be developed using MATLAB/Simulink or Mark Tischler's CIFER software can be used for system identification in combination with manual control of an aircraft to determine the control equations for an autopilot. None of these are cheap. Once you have the equations, you need some way to implement them in hardware. An FPGA driving servos works.
If I'm putting together a real UAV, here's my standard stack:
You can also pick up stuff like a Cloudcap Piccolo autopilot, those are pretty nice and take care of most of the above. The system is enclosed in a carbon fiber case; I saw one (mostly) intact after a UAV crashed badly. I think the standard system is like $9000.
Basically, what I'm saying is precision and reliability are not cheap. I can make a 250lb. helicopter land in an arbitrary location fully autonomously, but on the cheap side, it takes about $12500, a commercial solution actually is $30000 for that helicopter though. If you're in Palmdale, CA, and your airplane is in Iraq, its going to be really, really expensive to know exactly where it is and to be able to safely and reliably fly it.
I didn't even get into the software costs for a ground station. Aviation software is the most rigorously tested and verified software in the world, with gambling software probably a close second. Right now I work at a company that is probably the best known vendor for top quality general aviation electronics and navigation systems. You need to be absolutely certain that the ground station software will do what you ask of it, and the software crashing is simply not an option.
Anyway, hope that gives you a little glimpse into the world of someone who has done real UAV work.:)
I beg to differ. The flight control system and comms alone will cost you $10,000. Even if you aren't designing an aircraft for survivability, you still have to design it to *work*. Look at the AeroVironment Raven. Small, plastic, can be taken down with a shotgun at low altitude. FAR from cheap though.
FD: I am an aerospace engineer and have significant experience in UAV development, particularly aircraft design and avionics selection.
Managing large amounts of data was a problem for the chief engineer for a project I worked on. This guy had a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and lots of professional and academic honors. I was running a wind tunnel test that was capturing 8 24-bit signals at 10kHz and writing the data to a csv. Now, he bought good hardware, but refused to pay for decent analysis software, mainly because he didn't know any. So I had to write a program to break up the data into files small enough that Excel could open them, and then he could work with them. I volunteered to write something with a database backend and use gnuplot to graph data, but noooooo, that would take precious engineering time.
Long story short, he ended up spending more time figuring out how to screw with Excel than he spent actually figuring out what the data meant. Of course, the customer had to pay for his lack of competence. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that guy any more.
I was one of the myriad aerospace workers who lost his job last year. After a couple months, my friends started saying "why don't you just get something simple to make a few bucks and give you something to do?" Simply, I told them that I'd have to give up the unemployment benefits, which were more than twice what I'd make with some random hourly job in town. It made more financial sense to NOT get a temporary job while I was looking for a new full time job. After four months of going crazy doing nothing but looking for work, I finally got a new job. Shortly thereafter, I receive a W2 from the state telling me I had to pay income tax on my unemployment benefits. What a wonderful world.
You just made me imagine a beautiful thing: a hipster slashdotter on his way to Starbucks in his econobox car gets stuck in traffic listening to his iPod (because radio is SO 20th century) and gets sucked up by a tornado and blown into the stratosphere. Kind of like mother nature doing a service to mankind. Thank you sir. Thank you.
I love my Dell Latitude D630. Several engineers I work with envy it. It has a 2.2GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 80GB Seagate Momentus 7200rpm hard drive, Quadro NVS 256MB dedicated graphics, DVDRW, 1440x900 screen, 5 hour battery life, and it dual boots Fedora 10 and Windows XP. Fedora runs fabulously well on it, and it is fast enough to compile projects pretty quickly, like building Android in less than 30 minutes. Its also extremely well built, and has a very solid feel to it. For a serious engineer on the road, I haven't seen anything that beats the D630. I think it has been replaced by the E6400.
According to the fuel computer in my Volvo XC70, I can go 550 miles on one tank (18.5 US gal) of gasoline. Pretty good for armored tank of a car. I drive from Chicago to central Kansas often (600 miles) and I never have to stop to refuel more than once. I don't know anyone else with an SUV who can say that. It doesn't always work going the other way since its harder to get high octane fuel that the car wants in the midwest. Usually on Kansas gasoline I get 400-440 miles per tank.
My seriously tricked out 1984 Mercedes 300SD on the other hand, that thing can go 700 miles (20 US gal tank I think) easily without stopping.
I still have a LaserJet IIP, IID, and IIID that I got from an insurance company that was selling off their old hardware 10 years ago. The IIP needs new feed rollers, but with a little help, it will print just fine. The IID and IIID jam every now and then but overall still work fine and print fine.
Its pretty standard practice for high-end corporate or enterprise software vendors to deny you replacement licenses unless you have a support or maintenance subscription with them. I've worked with some really expensive aerospace engineering software ($35,000 per seat for the cheapest license) and the vendors are pretty firm about refusing to help you replace a license file or dongle for an old version if you didn't keep up maintenance. They may however offer you a discounted new version with a discounted maintenance plan.
A modern Stinger might be able to get to that altitude. Four years ago I had an aircraft design contract and actually had to worry about this kind of stuff. The common knowledge was that any Stinger or other MANPADS available in Afghanistan had a very low probability of a kill in an engagement if the target was above 10,000 ft AGL. Also, once a launch has been detected, modern threat awareness systems are able to deploy countermeasures. Something to effectively engage an aircraft at 20,000 ft isn't going to be man portable.
Its a lot harder to shoot down something at 20,000 ft than a lot of people here think. It is, in fact, rocket science, and the overwhelming majority of people here are not rocket scientists.
I hope you didn't get a PX4 Storm. I had a brand new one (last winter) that jammed more than 10% of the time. That didn't compare well with my 57 year old Tokarev which I have never had jam on me.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason it isn't set up that way is because you would have to implicitly trust every application developer. Unlike the Apple App Store, applications on the Android Market are not vetted by anyone. It isn't like a Linux distro package repository (which arguably the Apple App Store is). It is possible for a developer to have an application out, and then at some point add an unwanted feature. I had an app that started putting advertisements in places throughout the app after an update. Screw that. You could also have an application go rogue and become malicious. Would you want to blindly get the "delete all my stuff" update or the "send this girl's location to this weirdo developer because he's a creep" update? You have to act on each update notification individually for the sake of awareness of what is being put on your phone and security. I'm fine with that.
The average wifi card in your laptop has a 30mW transmitter, seems rather pathetically low power to me.
100mW in VHF with the proper antenna has much better range than a wifi card at the same power with a proper antenna. For comparison, police walkie-talkies have transmit powers between 1W and 5W usually, and they can cover huge areas.
Go to Market -> My Downloads, press the Menu button, select Notifications. Make sure "Notify me when items are updated" is selected. Hopefully you're not talking about silent updates, because that's just plain silly and a terrible idea.
I still play Marathon with a few friends. It made me smile to see that the servers were still going for it and there's still people who play it.
Like the AC who also responded, I've done a lot of work with UAVs. I did some work on the Yamaha R-MAX. It can takeoff and land fully autonomously. Northrop also has the MQ-8B Fire Scout which is capable of fully autonomous flight. Then you have the Boeing Little Bird, the unmanned demonstrator for that was a full size conventional helicopter...and on and on...this isn't new. You can build a fully autonomous Raptor 50 helicopter for less than $10,000.
I herd you like wireless, so we put bluetoof in your wifi so ur gadgets can talk while u talk.
The Southwest Chief is a nice train, I live in Kansas and have taken it to both its terminal cities, as well as Cimarron/Raton. It can get going pretty fast out west, I clocked it going 100mph on my GPS. Now I'm a pilot though, so if I need to go somewhere in an emergency, I can just rent an airplane and fly without all the TSA crap.
Amateur UAV work is awesome, I've built a few (two helicopters, two airplanes) for myself too. I think its great that it is an active community. However, if you wanted to build a small UAV that could accurately provide location and elevation data, could navigate correctly, and had a proper flight control/autopilot system, there's no way around hard work and math.
GPS navigation is very cool, but for a military UAV, any number of issues can arise that can cause a loss of GPS data. I like having 3-axis inertial navigation (INS) as well with Kalman filtering. As helpful as Kalman filtering is, he's quite pompous. I digress. This allows me to continue flying (or let the autopilot continue flying) with pretty good accuracy. A good all-in-one GPS/INS solution with magnetometers will run $7000. I know, I've had to buy them. Most COTS electronics cannot handle weather, vibration, or sudden acceleration well, and quality costs.
Aircraft design is a very demanding field. Rather than go off on that, I will just say that modern aircraft are usually designed using the principles and methods of one of three aircraft designers. I had the privilege of working directly for one of them, and that opened my eyes to how stringent and methodical an engineer must be when it comes to designing aircraft. Mistakes kill, and there are no shortcuts.
Flight control systems can be developed using MATLAB/Simulink or Mark Tischler's CIFER software can be used for system identification in combination with manual control of an aircraft to determine the control equations for an autopilot. None of these are cheap. Once you have the equations, you need some way to implement them in hardware. An FPGA driving servos works.
If I'm putting together a real UAV, here's my standard stack:
- PC104 computer
- Power supply
- FPGA board (I've used Xilinx Spartan series)
- 16-channel A/D board
- RF Comms board/radio modem/Iridium modem
- Crossbow NAV420 GPS/INS
You can also pick up stuff like a Cloudcap Piccolo autopilot, those are pretty nice and take care of most of the above. The system is enclosed in a carbon fiber case; I saw one (mostly) intact after a UAV crashed badly. I think the standard system is like $9000.
Basically, what I'm saying is precision and reliability are not cheap. I can make a 250lb. helicopter land in an arbitrary location fully autonomously, but on the cheap side, it takes about $12500, a commercial solution actually is $30000 for that helicopter though. If you're in Palmdale, CA, and your airplane is in Iraq, its going to be really, really expensive to know exactly where it is and to be able to safely and reliably fly it.
I didn't even get into the software costs for a ground station. Aviation software is the most rigorously tested and verified software in the world, with gambling software probably a close second. Right now I work at a company that is probably the best known vendor for top quality general aviation electronics and navigation systems. You need to be absolutely certain that the ground station software will do what you ask of it, and the software crashing is simply not an option.
Anyway, hope that gives you a little glimpse into the world of someone who has done real UAV work. :)
I beg to differ. The flight control system and comms alone will cost you $10,000. Even if you aren't designing an aircraft for survivability, you still have to design it to *work*. Look at the AeroVironment Raven. Small, plastic, can be taken down with a shotgun at low altitude. FAR from cheap though.
FD: I am an aerospace engineer and have significant experience in UAV development, particularly aircraft design and avionics selection.
Isn't spamming slashdot telling people to go to your website tantamount to trying to rob a gun store filled with customers?
"We've lost [the right to] keep & bear arms..."
Not sure where you're from, but I have an arsenal in the closet, a CCH permit, and open carry is legal in my state.
Managing large amounts of data was a problem for the chief engineer for a project I worked on. This guy had a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and lots of professional and academic honors. I was running a wind tunnel test that was capturing 8 24-bit signals at 10kHz and writing the data to a csv. Now, he bought good hardware, but refused to pay for decent analysis software, mainly because he didn't know any. So I had to write a program to break up the data into files small enough that Excel could open them, and then he could work with them. I volunteered to write something with a database backend and use gnuplot to graph data, but noooooo, that would take precious engineering time.
Long story short, he ended up spending more time figuring out how to screw with Excel than he spent actually figuring out what the data meant. Of course, the customer had to pay for his lack of competence. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that guy any more.
Permission granted. :)
I was one of the myriad aerospace workers who lost his job last year. After a couple months, my friends started saying "why don't you just get something simple to make a few bucks and give you something to do?" Simply, I told them that I'd have to give up the unemployment benefits, which were more than twice what I'd make with some random hourly job in town. It made more financial sense to NOT get a temporary job while I was looking for a new full time job. After four months of going crazy doing nothing but looking for work, I finally got a new job. Shortly thereafter, I receive a W2 from the state telling me I had to pay income tax on my unemployment benefits. What a wonderful world.
So in other words, you're having an OMGWTFWIN7GHRBWIIBBQ?
Mercury cadmium telluride is a variable bandgap semiconductor used primarily in infrared photodetectors, not for battery chemistry.
You just made me imagine a beautiful thing: a hipster slashdotter on his way to Starbucks in his econobox car gets stuck in traffic listening to his iPod (because radio is SO 20th century) and gets sucked up by a tornado and blown into the stratosphere. Kind of like mother nature doing a service to mankind. Thank you sir. Thank you.
Wow, yeah, when you said BK, I thought I would take the initiative and get off your lawn.
No, its the math coprocessor. Now get off my lawn. :)
I love my Dell Latitude D630. Several engineers I work with envy it. It has a 2.2GHz Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 80GB Seagate Momentus 7200rpm hard drive, Quadro NVS 256MB dedicated graphics, DVDRW, 1440x900 screen, 5 hour battery life, and it dual boots Fedora 10 and Windows XP. Fedora runs fabulously well on it, and it is fast enough to compile projects pretty quickly, like building Android in less than 30 minutes. Its also extremely well built, and has a very solid feel to it. For a serious engineer on the road, I haven't seen anything that beats the D630. I think it has been replaced by the E6400.
According to the fuel computer in my Volvo XC70, I can go 550 miles on one tank (18.5 US gal) of gasoline. Pretty good for armored tank of a car. I drive from Chicago to central Kansas often (600 miles) and I never have to stop to refuel more than once. I don't know anyone else with an SUV who can say that. It doesn't always work going the other way since its harder to get high octane fuel that the car wants in the midwest. Usually on Kansas gasoline I get 400-440 miles per tank.
My seriously tricked out 1984 Mercedes 300SD on the other hand, that thing can go 700 miles (20 US gal tank I think) easily without stopping.
I still have a LaserJet IIP, IID, and IIID that I got from an insurance company that was selling off their old hardware 10 years ago. The IIP needs new feed rollers, but with a little help, it will print just fine. The IID and IIID jam every now and then but overall still work fine and print fine.
Its pretty standard practice for high-end corporate or enterprise software vendors to deny you replacement licenses unless you have a support or maintenance subscription with them. I've worked with some really expensive aerospace engineering software ($35,000 per seat for the cheapest license) and the vendors are pretty firm about refusing to help you replace a license file or dongle for an old version if you didn't keep up maintenance. They may however offer you a discounted new version with a discounted maintenance plan.
A modern Stinger might be able to get to that altitude. Four years ago I had an aircraft design contract and actually had to worry about this kind of stuff. The common knowledge was that any Stinger or other MANPADS available in Afghanistan had a very low probability of a kill in an engagement if the target was above 10,000 ft AGL. Also, once a launch has been detected, modern threat awareness systems are able to deploy countermeasures. Something to effectively engage an aircraft at 20,000 ft isn't going to be man portable.
Its a lot harder to shoot down something at 20,000 ft than a lot of people here think. It is, in fact, rocket science, and the overwhelming majority of people here are not rocket scientists.
I hope you didn't get a PX4 Storm. I had a brand new one (last winter) that jammed more than 10% of the time. That didn't compare well with my 57 year old Tokarev which I have never had jam on me.