Same here. I used to have Linux on my iPod and Xbox, MythTV running on a server and Fujitsu netbook. Now between the hockey rinks and soccer fields, I take out my iPad Pro for HN, light photo editing and Netflix if I’m lucky enough to find an hour of down time. There’s enough Linux, QNX, Windows, FreeRTOS, Azure, etc etc all day at work now.
As someone who has this week been going through, in detail (is there any other way?), the American CCL and Canadian ECL, this is absolute gold. Thankfully the items in question are no longer on the USML…
...and the less is spoken of the time I had visited a CubeSat workshop at CalPoly carrying the actual flight prototype of my university's first effort in my carry-on - for compliance testing - the better.
I found out the interesting way when leaving the States that ic it goes into space, it comes with lots of ITAR red tape of which I and my university had been blissfully unaware.
Being escorted onto my flight (which had been held for an hour!) by a couple of State Department officials who simply told me to sit in the first available seat when we got aboard was kind of cool, though. Instant upgrade to business class, and the pax in the vicinity probably spent the flight wondering who the heck I was and what I had been up to...
This is one of the BS of space engineering. Apparently if you combine a Pi CM4 with a carrier board manufactured in China running open source Linux, and you say its for a cubesat going to space, it might fall under ITAR
This is why a lot of European space hardware sellers have ITAR-free as their selling point
Cubesat Developer's Workshop? Which year was this, if you don't mind me asking?
The funny thing is that I did pretty much the same thing, I had our flight computer prototype in my hoodie pocket to fidget with (since I'm leading all the electronics for the project) but luckily we weren't travelling far and didn't get any invitations from the government folks.
Our first sat, NCUBE, never made it out of the launch canister once in space; the 2nd one was on a failed launch which probably made some Kazakh farmer's day very interesting - judging from the photos I saw, it seems it came down in a wheat field - but the third one deployed successfully, but at that time, alas, I had graduated.
It's not as big of an issue for us since we use nearly all consumer/industrial stuff with build in ESD protection. I was also using it as a way to stress test whether the board would develop problems from handling, temperature and humidity changes, shock and vibration, etc
I grew up with Calvin and Hobbes collections in the back seat of the car on family vacations. I was 14 when the strip ended so I had lots of historical material to go through at the book stores (!).
We have the anthology at home, I think it’s time to introduce the kids (6 & 9) to Watterson, although my son is already an expert at Calvinball without even knowing it.
What struck me reading this piece was thinking about how all the constraints that Watterson faced just don’t exist today, as he pointed out with his “click of the mouse” comment. Constraints can often lead to creative solutions, I wonder where Calvin and Hobbes would go in today’s landscape.
They were being used for CPU cooling by enthusiasts in the early 2000s, in combination with water cooling. Having a peltier device in it adds so much heat to the overall system that it's really only a measure of last resort in terms of bulk heat transfer.
You also have to be careful that the cold side doesn't get so cold that water condenses around it and into the CPU socket. That was an expensive mistake.
TEC's are pretty cheap and can be had for around $2 for a 100 watts of cooling power unit (plenty for a typical refrigerator).
The thing that stops their widespread use is their very low efficiency. You need big noisy fans to get rid of all the waste heat from the hot side, and that drives up weight, price, size, etc. In nearly every application, gas based refrigeration systems win out overall.
TECs have a very low delta-T limit, rapidly lose efficiency, and those internal losses quickly constrain multistage systems that try to workaround the limits.
Many consider them a niche part with narrow applications. =)
Of all the power you pump into one of those modules get 5% cooling and 95% heating. It's practically like running resistive heating.
They're not so much useful for cooling as they are for achieving sub-ambient temperatures where power use isn't a problem. Extremely light and compact fridges/freezers. Final stages of quantum computers to really get down to that zero kelvin.
During the pandemic we ended up going the thinkpad route due to availability. We now have all our users on ThinkPads from admin to engineering, including CAD capable models for our Mech team. No complaints really.
