[HN Gopher] Starlink dishes go into "thermal shutdown" once they...
___________________________________________________________________
Starlink dishes go into "thermal shutdown" once they hit 122deg
Fahrenheit
Author : lakis
Score : 305 points
Date : 2021-06-16 08:03 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| bostonsre wrote:
| They should probably sell white painted versions for warmer
| climates.
| tpmx wrote:
| The enclosure is made of some kind of white plastic. But the
| consumer units also consume ~100W evenly spread out just below
| the flat plastic surface. So many (expensive) chips needed to
| do that phased array antenna thing.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-terminal-cos...
|
| _SpaceX signed an agreement a few years ago with Swiss
| manufacturer STMicroelectronics to build the terminals, a
| person with knowledge of the deal told Insider in December.
| They added that SpaceX may be paying $2.4 billion to produce 1
| million Starlink terminals._
|
| At least it will melt any snow/ice during winter time in
| northern climates.
|
| Comment: ST is primarily French-Italian, with a HQ in
| Switzerland. I wouldn't call it Swiss.
| max_ wrote:
| How does a starlink internet connection perform in a light storm?
|
| The dish looks a bit delicate.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| As an aside to this.....I worked for a switch vendor. We where
| asked by the DoD to provide commands to disable heat, etc.
| related shutdowns. 'Nuf said.
| kortex wrote:
| Hey, remember that time _the entire power grid in Texas_ was
| crippled due to things going out of temperature range spec? Only
| in that case, it wasn 't a beta product, it was critical
| infrastructure, that they were warned about and had ample
| opportunity to fix.
|
| Getting components rated outside of "normal operating conditions"
| is a PITA on a good day, and impossible otherwise. You straight
| up don't design for every possible condition for the beta. That's
| bad engineering and a waste of time and money. Pick the number of
| 9's you want, estimate the conditions, draw a line in the sand,
| and build the damn thing, knowing damn well X% of customers will
| have an issue. Revise, fix it, refine your product and process.
| path411 wrote:
| Yeah but this isn't a 9. If it's really that low temp spec,
| it's gotta be kicking off most days for this and next month in
| AZ
| kortex wrote:
| What percent of customers don't experience thermal throttling
| in june? 90-99%? That's 1-2 nines.
|
| E: another comment mentions some cities in AZ are the hottest
| places in _the world_ right now.
| bagacrap wrote:
| 122 is not that hard to hit in direct sunlight. All of
| Texas, Florida and Arizona, plus many other areas, will hit
| this number on a regular basis in the summer, so this is
| less than one nine in terms of no of customers.
| willis936 wrote:
| There are no nines in 60%.
| kortex wrote:
| The (back of the napkin) metric I'm using is: Integrate
| the total uptime of each Starlink customer, for every
| customer. Divide that by the integral of time billed for
| each customers.
|
| So if you have 10,000 users billed for 1 month, and 10 of
| them get thermally throttled for half a day, every day
| that whole month, that's 99.95% reliability this month.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Parting Shot: "To all beta testers using Starlink this summer,
| better come up with a dish heat management system or else face no
| connectivity. Not surprising, considering this is a company owned
| by Elon Musk."
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Well it is a beta test after all. This is when the design gets
| a real life shakedown.
| southerntofu wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but despite my not being a
| rocket scientist, i know for sure 50degC is not an OK limit
| for outdoor stuff on many parts of the planet. It's like
| Outdoors Electronics 101 so not exactly something to test for
| in a beta.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Forget beta. Apple's _production_ iPhones go into thermal
| shutdown several times a year for me where I live. Most
| recently, yesterday.
|
| You can tell it's getting close because the screen will dim.
|
| The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of the
| planet doesn't have the same weather as San Francisco.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _The tech bubble has never understood that the rest of
| the planet doesn 't have the same weather as San
| Francisco._
|
| Two things: first, Apple is headquartered in Cupertino,
| which gets quite a bit warmer than San Francisco. Second,
| I've seen phones overheat and shut down in the summer in
| SF. This isn't a bubble thing; this is a company
| prioritizing miniaturization over proper functioning. Form
| over function.
| 8note wrote:
| Its really apple protecting its users from low
| temperature devices.
|
| People buy iPhones because they know apple knows cold
| devices are bad
| Sebb767 wrote:
| To be fair, designing such a small thing with cooling for
| this kind of temperature is really hard. You'd actually
| need active cooling, because otherwise you'd be too
| susceptible to colder temperatures, and even then the sun
| would quickly bleach out all components - assuming you'd
| even see something on the screen to begin with. Not
| designing your phone to run under the direct sun is IMO a
| reasonable trade-off.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, it's always incredible to see how myopic tge tech
| bubble is - starting with software that couldn't handle
| East Coast US 5-digit ZIP (postal) codes that begin with
| "0". Google Maps never shows the highway exit # until
| you're nearly there, but that's all we use on the East
| Coast, since there are many old roads that run parallel to
| the highways for many miles, so telling me to "get off at
| Rt110" is hopelessly ambiguous with a dozen exits for that
| road. I could go on...
| sixothree wrote:
| Does google maps still not know where subway entrances
| are?
| kelnos wrote:
| I have the opposite issue; Google will tell me the exit
| number on highways that don't have exit numbers posted.
| [deleted]
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Same. I want it to tell me "take Rengstorff Ave exit" and
| it just tells me "take exit 53b." I have no idea what 53b
| is and the big signs don't say it either.
| bombcar wrote:
| Look for the highway mile markers - the exit number is
| based on them. Should get you closer at least.
| ipython wrote:
| Not all highways work like this. Take I-87 in New York
| for example. Thankfully most of those roads are slowly
| changing exit numbers so they follow the sane convention
| you describe!
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Bananaware. Reaches customer's premises in an unusable state.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| For a product intended to be used by people in remote
| locations, temperature range is an _alpha test_ feature, not
| a beta test feature, because there 's a very good chance they
| will need to completely redesign the dish internals to
| operate at higher temperature ranges, especially if they
| expect to weatherproof the dishes in future designs.
|
| the design process is _different_ for hardware because you
| can 't just fix everything with a patch after-the-fact. You
| have to actually _anticipate_ problems and account for them
| in your design, especially when you are charging people money
| for the product and marketing it as a remote solution.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| It's a bit weird though to not test these at different
| temperatures beforehand, given that's probably pretty easy to
| do. Maybe it's more like an alpha test than a beta in
| practice.
| infogulch wrote:
| You would think that people working in software would
| understand the idea that your assumptions about the
| environment your product is in are very often invalidated
| during real world testing, but this thread doesn't seem to
| bear that out. Perhaps the mountain of abstractions,
| automated retries, fault tolerance, and error correction
| that makes technology as reliable as it is, has made us
| complacently unaware of just how hard it is to build
| something new.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| With how often large swaths of the internet are down or
| having issues I don't think most people in software have
| anything more than a cursory understanding of some of the
| terms you have in there, hard to be complacent about
| reliability when a lot of software is equally held
| together by tape and gum.
| [deleted]
| josefresco wrote:
| A line like this (and Reddit sources) makes me question the
| authenticity of this story.
| rconti wrote:
| I mean, it is Zero Hedge.
| quanticle wrote:
| The Ars Technica version of this story [1] has more detail.
| The tl;dr is that Starlink dishes have an upper limit of
| 50degC and a lower limit of -30degC. While these limits are
| fine for consumer electronics used indoors, they're obviously
| inappropriate for outdoor electronics.
|
| [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2021/06/starl...
| gpm wrote:
| > they're obviously inappropriate
|
| They're unfortunately constraints, but for 95% of people
| they're workable constraints. If there are difficult
| problems with bumping these limits (I have no clue), it
| could just become part of the market definition.
| mcguire wrote:
| 95% of which group of people?
| gpm wrote:
| Otherwise potential starlink customers.
|
| Like most stats, it is made up.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| For something that's likely to be mounted on a roof, and
| is outputting around 100 watts of its own heat, the range
| where problems happen gets a lot bigger.
| quanticle wrote:
| Only if you're counting people who live in San Francisco
| and other similarly temperate climates.
|
| I live in Minnesota. Last week, the high temperature, in
| the shade, was about 40degC. A device in the sun would
| easily see its temperature exceed 50degC. In the winter,
| overnight lows can go to -40degC. An outdoor device with
| thermal limits of -30degC to +50degC is not fit for
| purpose in many parts of the Midwest.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm in Toronto incidentally, not sf.
|
| I suspect overnight lows of -40 are ok, because it sounds
| like it's -30 after the self heating.
|
| There are definitely reports of people having it work
| through 40 degree heat waves, but I suspect that's close
| to the limit. Keep in mind it is white, so the sun isn't
| as bad as it could be.
|
| I don't have stats to back this up, but I think it's the
| case that most people live in reasonably temperate
| climates, 50 degrees is really frickin hot (dangerously
| so), -30 degrees is really frickin cold (dangerously so).
| quanticle wrote:
| Agreed that 50degC is really hot, but you have to
| remember that 50degC includes the ambient heat _plus_ the
| heat generated by the circuitry. My cable modem gets
| noticeably warm (and I can hear its internal fan spin up)
| when I download a large file that saturates my connection
| for a while. I could easily see the internal circuitry of
| the Starlink dish going over 50degC under load even when
| external temperature is 40degC.
|
| From what I'm reading, it looks like the dish is
| passively cooled, which I find surprising. I would have
| expected at least a small cooling fan or something to
| provide a bit of airflow for convective cooling.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Large tracts of the US have a continental climate, where
| temperature excursions are common. Remember that Starlink
| is marketed at people living in the flat countryside.
| smoldesu wrote:
| "all beta testers" is a bit broad. I live in Michigan, and our
| highest recorded temperature is still 10 degrees lower than the
| point at which the dish would shut off. Maybe certain users
| should pay attention, but most beta testers were in northern
| latitudes to boot, so it's a little more nuanced than that.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| That's air temperature. 35degC can easily be enough to hit
| 50degC inside when the sun burns down on it all day.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Last week we had a heat wave that hit 37C, we had internet
| the entire time. Just my anecdata, but I have yet to see a
| thermal shutdown.
| AngryData wrote:
| Sure, if you expect your satellite to be in the shade and not
| sitting on a rooftop which easily hits 140F+ multiple times
| per year in Michigan.
| draklor40 wrote:
| Zerohedge is severely anti-Elon Biased. He might be at fault
| for many things, but this is just a first gen product that
| hopefully improves in the next generations.
| iamhamm wrote:
| FWIW, I have Starlink and I'm in Pahrump, NV. We hit 111F today
| and my dishy is in direct sunlight so easily was over 122F on
| surfaces. Didn't go into thermal shutdown, no disruptions in
| service, and I didn't have to water it either.
| sfblah wrote:
| What do you do in Pahrump, NV!? Such a remote place!
| zie wrote:
| It's about a 1hr drive from Vegas but cheaper land.
| iamhamm wrote:
| I'm cybersecurity CTO for a fortune 100 company. I told
| them I was getting out of the bay area and they were fine
| with it!
| hulitu wrote:
| 122 F seems to be 50 degC. Are those things designed for space or
| for home office ?
| zdragnar wrote:
| +100F in Sun isn't at all uncommon during a hot summer in the
| upper Midwest if the object is dark. Air temperatures of over
| 100 are a semi-annual occurrence, typically around August, so a
| dark object (such as a roof or blacktop) pushing 120 wouldn't
| be a surprise at all. Still not as bad as AZ, but it's not
| _that_ much different.
|
| We aren't even close to a desert or space either- forests,
| plains, lakes and rivers abound.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It was 102deg F in St. Louis today. Not hard to imagine 20deg
| hotter on some roofs.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| _122_ + F ambient on concrete.. it's going to be much
| hotter than that.
| postalrat wrote:
| Neither. They are designed to sit outdoors with a clear view of
| the sky (and the sun I guess).
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Sort of funny that the solution for streaming is to literally
| turn on a stream of water.
|
| On a separate note, even if you don't live in Arizona, a litmus
| test for good engineering is whether or not you see reviews of a
| product melting in Arizona. Yeah, melt. Literally.
|
| Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US. If it doesn't work
| here, it's not mass market.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Networking vendors who know what they're doing literally put
| gear into ovens for extended periods as part of the DVT phase
| of testing, and put outdoor gear like cellular antennas/ptp
| wireless/ptp optical into stress environments prior to
| manufacturing. This again seems like the typical Musk venture,
| like the Tesla non-automative screens, where they didn't
| seemingly talk to anyone in the industry.
| coolspot wrote:
| Yep, can confirm: when Jensen Huang presented new RTX 30xx
| series, he literally pulled 3090 from the oven.
|
| https://youtu.be/q8ow_M5Hl2Q
| ethanbond wrote:
| A good litmus test for good city location is whether or not
| melting objects/burns from touching objects is a daily concern
| gspr wrote:
| Yeah, I agree: the bug here is humans building giant cities
| in the desert.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Not really Homo Sapians originated in the hot environs of
| Sub-Saharan Africa. Most early civilizations were in
| deserts, like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Their have been cities
| in deserts longer then there have been temperate climate
| cities. Humans are built for hot climates we just don't
| like them.
| tdeck wrote:
| Mesopotamia and Egypt weren't deserts when those early
| civilizations got started.
| lakis wrote:
| Yes they were. They had rivers running through them.
| Civilization sprung next to the river.
| yesenadam wrote:
| This[0] suggests that the Sahara wasn't desert when
| ancient Egypt got started, though it depends on your
| definitions of those words I guess.
|
| _A timeline of Sahara occupation_
|
| _22,000 to 10,500 years ago: The Sahara was devoid of
| any human occupation outside the Nile Valley and extended
| 250 miles further south than it does today._
|
| _10,500 to 9,000 years ago: Monsoon rains begin sweeping
| into the Sahara, transforming the region into a habitable
| area swiftly settled by Nile Valley dwellers._
|
| _9,000 to 7,300 years ago: Continued rains, vegetation
| growth, and animal migrations lead to well established
| human settlements, including the introduction of
| domesticated livestock such as sheep and goats._
|
| _7,300 to 5,500 years ago: Retreating monsoonal rains
| initiate desiccation in the Egyptian Sahara, prompting
| humans to move to remaining habitable niches in Sudanese
| Sahara. The end of the rains and return of desert
| conditions throughout the Sahara after 5,500 coincides
| with population return to the Nile Valley and the
| beginning of pharaonic society._
|
| [0] https://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-
| populate...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| afaik Phoenix as a massive city wouldn't exist without
| the air conditioning. There's "humans can tolerate high
| heat" and then there's "so hot that we need technology to
| make it liveable."
| bbarnett wrote:
| People have lived in the artic at -50, and in the desert
| since recorded history. Lifestyles, and buildings were
| different, that's all. No need for modern tech.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| The same applies to the Gulf region. In fact, most people
| who can afford it leave the region during the summer.
| mcguire wrote:
| Like southern California?
| AJ007 wrote:
| A lot more than the southern part.
| azernik wrote:
| Palm Springs? Yeah. The Inland Empire? Eeeeeh.
|
| The LA Basin, OC, and San Diego? No. Their temperatures
| are kept much more sane by the ocean, and agriculture is
| the real problem for the water budget.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Our giant cities are on the coast.
| threatofrain wrote:
| If you say south California it's difficult to know how
| much inland you mean, because as you travel inland you go
| from hot to Hot.
|
| You can measure a city in terms of how many days of
| productivity your family would lose if you didn't have AC
| or heat running full blast.
| [deleted]
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Hahaha... yeah that's probably a bigger concern.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "Product is fine, it is human civilization that is broken",
| huh?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Building cities of several million people in regions with
| no water? Growing cotton, cattle, and world renowned golf
| courses? Yeah, that's pretty obviously broken.
|
| I grew up in Arizona. You _regularly_ hear people saying,
| "well, there's no water left to build but hey, people keep
| buying so we'll keep building!"
|
| Cheap land and subsidized water paid to give to a bunch of
| ranchers who despise socialism. "Broken" is being generous.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Human civilization is absolutely broken.
|
| We're great apes running on on 50,000 year old hardware
| trying to cope with things invented after we were born: htt
| ps://www.ted.com/talks/ruby_wax_what_s_so_funny_about_men..
| .
| [deleted]
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| The Phoenix area is really only has a metropolitan statistical
| area rank of 10 so it's about the size of Atlanta or the Boston
| area in terms of population. By GDP it's only 16 which is lower
| than the Detroit area.
|
| It is a lot of people but it's not even close to being #4 once
| you account for desert cities being physically larger due to
| geography and political needs.
|
| That said, SpaceX/Elon should not have sold the product
| anywhere where it could not withstand the environment.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| the device works fine if you dont put it in an inuslating box
| open to the sun on top.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but it has a large population
| _and_ is physically larger, thus it is less significant?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I'm always surprised how poor engineering gets exposed in
| products I purchase being an Arizona resident.
|
| No, failing at 122F is not acceptable. If your hardware is
| exposed to outside conditions, it should operate easily below
| 32F, and well above 140F.
|
| Considering that phones can operate below 0F and near 122F,
| that's embarrassingly bad.
|
| Same thing in vehicles. If you're driving consistently at
| interstate speeds, you should be able to cool a cabin down below
| 72F while driving through 120F weather. Too many vehicles fail
| this, and frankly it's repulsive for something you buy for 5-6
| figures.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I'd say maybe places where the air temperature regularly gets
| to >110 F aren't meant for human habitation
| dylan604 wrote:
| What's your definition of "regularly"? You're probably ruling
| out most of the US southwest. I made the same comment about
| people living in areas that are routinely >90% humidity,
| mosquito infested jungles and was totally slammed for it.
| People moving to those locations are the odd ducks to me.
| People born and raised there don't have a choice.
| kortex wrote:
| Really, it's not "don't live there," as humans have
| inhabited these conditions for thousands of years. But
| "don't live there and expect the same standard of living."
|
| Contrast living in an adobe house/masonry house with no AC,
| taking a siesta/riposa in the hottest hours, and tolerating
| a bit of sweat, vs in-ground pool, AC set to 68, driving
| around mid-day in a rolling greenhouse.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| It's not trivial to do things at tens of gigahertz at a wide
| range of temperatures. They didn't engineer it this way because
| they didn't consider the existence of Arizona, Texas, and
| Southern California. The thermal limits exist because RF is
| absurdly difficult. Maybe in 30 years we'll have TCXOs and
| other RFICs that make it trivial. Right now it's not.
|
| tl;dr: Your phone doesn't have radios capable of talking on
| bands like 10.7-12.7 GHz (X/Ku band) and 37.5-42.5 GHz (Ka/V
| band)
| murgindrag wrote:
| It's not impossible either.
|
| Cheap brute force hack: Have a chip burn power to heat the
| chip up to a constant temperature. This was done in one of
| the early precision band-gap references.
|
| More expensive brute force hack: Stick a Peltier cooler on
| the thing, and servo to a well-controlled temperature.
|
| Communication equipment is critical to work for emergency
| use, and coincidentally, emergency use is when you're most
| likely to see high temperatures.
|
| tl;dr: Military equipment is required to operate like this,
| and has insanely high-performance RF equipment.
| nixgeek wrote:
| Military BGAN doesn't get anywhere near this throughput in
| this package, so the size-performance is quite different
| there IMO, and isn't a fair comparison to what Starlink is
| doing with their terminal.
| madengr wrote:
| I design RF/Microwave hardware. The issue is the long term
| reliability, specifically the semiconductor lifetime drops
| drastically with temperature, not to mention the passive
| components. The temp cycling may be more of an issue, as I
| have seen antenna arrays pull themselves apart during
| accelerated lifetime testing. I shutdown all of my stuff at
| 80C.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| The military is not a business with business constraints.
| If cost and power draw is no concern, then sure, it's
| possible. Hell, put a little AC unit beside the enclosure.
|
| These are CPEs and they're sold at a tremendous loss
| already (a quick google says a whopping $2500 loss on a
| $500 price tag!). They won't stay in business long if they
| burn an extra $500 per device to make it suitable for a
| couple thousand extra customers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Every one of their dev teams likely costs more in a year
| than that $1M increment in BOM costs.
|
| I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's probably not
| going to be a kill the company expense.
| rootsudo wrote:
| While you are 100% right, starlink is not marketed for the
| military.
|
| Starlink, is like Tesla a decade ago. This is their
| roadster.
|
| Will I get it, yes. Will I complain about early adpotee
| stuff, yes.
|
| Is my life better just having it along? 1000% yes.
| wumpus wrote:
| Starlink is marketed to the military, but so far they've
| been testing it with the antennae they normally use.
| willis936 wrote:
| I don't see why they don't just leave the antennas in the
| dish then run waveguide to a box in the shade.
|
| Edit: after looking at a teardown I suppose it's because
| there are ~3000 channels. Woof.
| huslage wrote:
| SpaceX is literally based in Hawthorne, CA. These dishes are
| made in a place where it gets stupidly hot.
| coolspot wrote:
| I get your point, but specifically Hawthorne is a coastal
| city, so it doesn't get "stupidly hot". Average max temp is
| 85F in August.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne,_California
| shaklee3 wrote:
| It's not trivial, of course. But it's also not okay to
| pretend that you can sell a device for $500 (which in reality
| costs $2,300), and skimp on the fundamental things that
| everyone else spends money on to ensure these things don't
| happen. This could have been fixed. It didn't as a cost
| cutting measure. I don't know why you were talking about
| V-Band. SpaceX is not using V-Band. They are mostly using low
| frequency kaband, and we'll be using high frequency soon.
| This is exactly the same as all other satellite internet
| providers out there that have solved this problem. They are
| not special in disregard. They just chose to ignore it.
| dkbrk wrote:
| Existing phased-array antennas cost, at a minimum, tens of
| thousands of dollars.
|
| Getting Starlink Dishy to around $2,000, and I understand
| it's closer to $1,000 by now, is an incredible engineering
| achievement. SpaceX didn't accomplish that by
| overengineering the shit out of it.
|
| I do not doubt that now that this problem has cropped up
| SpaceX will address it. If they don't, if in a couple of
| years this is still a problem with the system in full
| operation, then criticism would be justified.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| There is no evidence I've seen showing that it's less
| than $2000. Please send a link to the source.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| You mentioned $1000. $1500 is impressive, but is there a
| follow-up?
| dkbrk wrote:
| > According to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, the
| company has "made great progress on reducing the cost."
| Initially, Each dish would cost SpaceX $3,000 USD to
| manufacture, Shotwell said they reduced the manufacturing
| cost to around $1,500 USD.
|
| https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/starlink-
| dish
| [deleted]
| stefan_ wrote:
| We're talking about 122F _and exposed to direct sunlight for
| long durations_. So more like 150F inside that thing and then
| with one stroke you are locked out of using any sort of
| customer electronics parts or packaging. I 'm sure SpaceX will
| look into it but you might not like the outcome.
|
| (And no, most phones will not operate at that temperature for
| longer than a few minutes)
| zargon wrote:
| I completely agree with you. Though as a Minnesota resident, a
| 32F low temp operating bound is hilariously ludicrous. "Well
| below" -20F would be the expectation here. I'm sure Canadians
| would extend that to well below -40.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Maybe they didn't do the math or are planning to improve upon
| it. But maybe they did do the math and consciously wrote you
| off.
| Sevii wrote:
| My iPhone starts panicking whenever it runs maps when the temps
| go over 100F which considering its 115F today is not a good
| user experience.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _Same thing in vehicles. If you're driving consistently at
| interstate speeds, you should be able to cool a cabin down
| below 72F while driving through 120F weather. Too many vehicles
| fail this, and frankly it's repulsive for something you buy for
| 5-6 figures._
|
| You're driving what is essentially a greenhouse, I don't want
| to pay extra for a cooling system that's designed for
| temperatures up to 150 degrees. Though also I wouldn't pay 6
| figures for a car.
| pbreit wrote:
| It's a v1 beta. Maybe put it in the shade.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure shielding a satellite dish from the sky makes
| it inoperable.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| As a Canadian, 32F seems like an oddly high lower limit to me.
| Things should operate down to at least -40.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| fascinating how a post about inclusive design manages to have
| a blind spot that it does not consider. A wonderful
| demonstration on why diverse backgrounds in engineering is
| important.
| krapht wrote:
| Right. Snow tires, 4WD, and engine block heaters should be
| standard equipment on cars because obviously things should be
| designed to handle every environment they might reasonably
| encounter.
|
| /s
| noizejoy wrote:
| Block heaters are pretty standard on many new cars sold in
| the colder parts of Canada. So are all season tires.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Great point. I think this highlights the importance of what
| we consider acceptable tolerances.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Assuming you can keep something in the shade - does anywhere
| on Earth get to 140F beside inside forest fires, lightning
| bolts and volcanoes?
|
| There is a substantial portion of the worlds population that
| lives months at a time where temperatures are regularly well
| below freezing.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| A satellite dish doesn't do super well in the shade :)
| jessaustin wrote:
| Line of sight to a satellite is only close to the sun for
| an hour or two a day, and only in certain locations on
| earth. It is entirely feasible to shade the rest of the
| sky.
| tyingq wrote:
| My guess is that most people follow the directions to
| place the satellite dish with an unobstructed view of the
| sky. Thus, most of them are in the sun, regardless of how
| they are pointed and oriented.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Depends on the shade:
| http://www.dishcamo.com/fabric_dish_cover.htm
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Pavement.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Side note: "40 below" is approximately where C and F
| intersect.
|
| As a result, that temperature being "effing cold" is
| something US Americans and Canadians readily agree on.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| This is literally a record breaking heatwave;
| https://www.allsides.com/story/western-us-hit-heat-wave-thre...
|
| 122F is not a normal temperature.
| kortex wrote:
| > Too many vehicles fail this, and frankly it's repulsive for
| something you buy for 5-6 figures.
|
| What's repulsive is the way many people live in AZ.
|
| Literal hot take: maybe people living in one of the hottest
| places on Earth shouldn't expect to have the same consumer
| experience (without modulating their habits). IMHO, AZ is chock
| full of human hubris. Pools, fountains, water features, grass
| lawns, and golf courses.
|
| Why should people expect to live as if it were Cascadia or New
| England with water consumption? Same with car performance.
| Maybe you don't get to have an icy 68degF in your rolling
| greenhouse behind a 40,000BTU power plant at dead noon in the
| heckin desert.
| EADGBE wrote:
| To be fair, we're all environmental parasites no matter where
| we are on this heckin planet.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's not a safety issue like car regulation, engineering
| choices have costs.
|
| Just because it doesn't work in your environment doesn't mean
| that it's not suitable elsewhere and the burden of spec changes
| for your climate may make the cost go up for people elsewhere
| who don't have the same requirements
| cartoonworld wrote:
| * This product is not intended for sale in AZ, NV, NM, TX,
| Parts of Utah, California, Idaho and the Dakotas in the
| summer, direct sunlight, and most roofs.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Is it common to have a car on the roof?
| AngryData wrote:
| Where is it suitable then? I expect higher temps on roof of
| the farthest northern borders of the US.
| [deleted]
| edoceo wrote:
| Why build a product for everyone you're marketing to when you
| can cheaply build a product that works for some but still
| sell to all. Caveat Emptor after all. Hit my OKRs for the
| quarter, I'm going to the pub.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Eh, every design choice is a compromise between multiple
| variables. The cost has to be reasonable for there to be
| someone to sell the product to.
| newsclues wrote:
| Because the cost would go up, and marketing becomes harder
| which makes it harder to get data and revenue to continue
| engineering.
| edoceo wrote:
| Google shows me loads of industrial SBC devices that
| operate from -40 to +85C(!) that are under $200 USD.
|
| It's not reasonable for Starlink?
| newsclues wrote:
| Starlink dish costs $500, and has an antenna and motor.
|
| $500 seems cheap for what it does, and that makes sense
| if it's cost optimized but doesn't have the broadest
| climate zone tolerance.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| Interesting. What phone operates at 0F? A few years ago I was
| in 15F conditions, the batteries in both my phone and my hiking
| partner's phone would not work at all. Going out briefly in 0F
| weather and pulling the phone out of the pocket of a warm
| jacket might be fine, but I'm doubtful a phone could continue
| to function when thoroughly cooled to 0F. If there's been a
| recent shift in phone technology, then I'd like to know more.
| Aerroon wrote:
| My OnePlus One (old, I know) worked just fine this winter. I
| was able to read on my phone the entire 20 minute walk to the
| store and back. It's when I got home into the warmth that it
| would end up rebooting/saying the battery was empty.
|
| It's possible that the phone generated enough heat to stay
| warmer though. The main problem with operating it was
| actually how cold my hand that's holding the phone gets since
| it doesn't move like the other hand does. I had to wear
| double gloves.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I live in MN, and if it's cold out, I keep my phone next to
| my body somehow, like a pants pocket or inner jacket pocket
| in the chest area. This keeps the phone warm enough to work
| for a while at any temperature you would attempt to use a
| phone in (I don't try to use my phone outside when it's -20F
| because I don't want to remove gloves, but 0F is fine) and if
| it's too cold, you can rapidly warm it up by placing it
| between your legs/against your skin/etc.
|
| In he summer, I don't leave my phone in direct sunlight for
| extended periods or else it will overheat. Simply placing it
| in the shade or in a pocket prevents this. It usually only
| hits 100 here, so I don't have experience with the 100-120F
| range and overheating.
|
| Tl;dr Prevent your phone from reaching extreme temperatures
| and it will work fine.
| moogly wrote:
| Samsung used to guarantee their smartphones to operate down
| to -4degF. Not sure they still do. Having trouble finding
| current information online.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've only had problems even well below 0F in Minnesota using
| old phones.
|
| It's just battery chemistry, current capacity and voltage are
| depressed by low temps.
|
| Some phones aren't engineered very well and regularly pull
| current near their battery's capacity which is just poor
| design.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| Of course 3/4 of the people responding to how cold can a
| phone get are from Minnesota. Lolol. Edit: I am also
| ls612 wrote:
| Every iPhone I've had has worked fine outside in Minnesota
| winters. The phone uses energy to function and so probably is
| hotter than the surrounding air.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| I've found this is very much a function of how new/good the
| battery is. I've been out skiing in ~0 degrees for a couple
| hours with a newer phone and not had trouble and I've had the
| same phone a year or two later go dead after 45min in 20
| degree weather. My current iPhone 12 Pro lasted 45 min at -15
| this winter and didn't run out of battery. I keep my phone in
| an unheated water bottle carrier
| cortesoft wrote:
| > No, failing at 122F is not acceptable
|
| I don't think it is a simple as saying that. If, for example,
| it cost twice as much to design something that works up to 140
| as it does to make it work up to 122, I don't think it makes
| sense to make everyone in the world pay twice as much for
| something they don't need.
|
| You should sell a more expensive version that works up to 140.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| There's a cost to building multiple SKUs. Also you massively
| overestimate the cost of materials for withstanding such
| temperatures.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but I was replying to your general comment that it is
| simply unacceptable for something not to be engineered to
| withstand heat above 122.
|
| I think it is a design decision, and the costs and benefits
| have to be weighed. If the extra cost per unit is more than
| the lost revenue from not being able to sell to consumers
| in hight temperature locations, it might make sense not to
| design it for high temperatures.
|
| As long as these limitations are communicated to potential
| customers, I don't see a problem with that.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| 122F is 50C. How much of the world actually gets that hot?
|
| AZ is currently the hottest place in the world at the moment.
| Not the upper range. The hottest place.
|
| https://www.wx-now.com/Weather/WxExtremes?hottest=true
| colechristensen wrote:
| A sizable portion of the world has reached 45 C or higher.
|
| And you have to keep in mind the temperature is measured in
| particular ways, local temps near dark surfaces can get
| significantly higher.
| msrenee wrote:
| This isn't the hottest month though. And the air temperature
| doesn't have to be 122F, just the dish.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Palm Springs CA gets that hot, especially inside a vehicle.
| brianwawok wrote:
| You don't put a star link inside a vehicle
| user3939382 wrote:
| That's true, but also -- an object sitting outside in the
| sun is going to exceed, or greatly exceed depending on
| the materials, the ambient temperature.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| When the ambient temperature is 123degF (e.g. yesterday)
| where are you supposed to out it? Does the terminal work
| indoors? Even on cooler days in the low 100s your home's
| roof is going to be significantly warmer than 120f
| tyingq wrote:
| I think the issue is that these dishes might be routinely
| mounted onto roofs, concrete pads, asphalt pads, etc. And, by
| requirement, in direct sun. Where the temperature could be
| significantly hotter than the air temperature you hear on a
| weather report.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Spain, or the deserts of Africa, California, Chile, or the
| southwestern US, as well as a good chunk of the middle east?
| What about anywhere along the equator?
| kiadimoondi wrote:
| I guess you could consider border states of Mexico as the
| same geographical region as the southwestern US, but those
| too. Anecdotal, but I've seen routine thermal throttling on
| macs in a border state with outdoor temperatures of 45,
| ambient indoor temperatures of 30-33, so you basically need
| either AC or some other external cooling system to manage
| more performance than a web browser and office apps.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I have heard anecdotal stories of the adhesive on rear-
| view mirrors of cars literally melting in the Phoenix sun
| (which can hit 120 F / 49 C or worse). So your story is
| not surprising at all, sadly
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Very few places have air temperatures that hot, but in _most_
| of the US the surface of a metal fixture right under the sun
| can and will exceed 122F.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| +55-56C is about is the hottest AIR temp you'll get globally.
| Pretty common to see telecomm gear that falls in line with
| this max temp. The +55C does not include heat from direct
| sunlight/insolation. Unless rated for much higher temps,
| you'll need a sun shade for your gear out in the field.
| Problem with Starlink is that with a sun shade you'd most
| likely lose line of sight to the sats or attenuate the signal
| badly.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Synthetic turf fields at your local park can get as hot 160
| degrees pretty easily.
| beervirus wrote:
| A piece of metal sitting in the sun can get that hot pretty
| easily in lots of places, even if the ambient temperature is
| much more reasonable.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Where I live in Florida, roofs routinely get hotter than
| that. Listed temps measure _air_ temp, in a ventilated box 5
| feet above grass. This is _nothing_ like being on a roof in
| Summer here. We aren 't a desert and we have tens of millions
| of people. This isn't going to work.
|
| An aside, I was dating a woman from The North. She came here
| and we were travelling around the State. We stopped in Venice
| at a restaurant, I wasn't paying attention, and she just
| hopped out of the car _barefoot_! Only did that once, though.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| This would be absolutely wild to do in "the North" during
| summer as well.
| tombot wrote:
| You are living in a city affected by global warming
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| I live in America's wang. Another few decades of "Global
| Improvement(tm)" and the USA will be a eunuch.
| oivey wrote:
| Everyone is.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| In addition to what people have said about the temperature of
| surfaces in direct sunlight, you have to account for the
| power the electronics are using. The aluminum backplate is
| serving multiple purposes, but judging by the gap pad they
| are using and RF electronics in general, it's likely a non-
| trivial amount of power.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| In the desert sun it will be higher than 50 degrees.
| fy20 wrote:
| Even in Northern Europe, a car parked in direct sunlight can
| easily get to 70C (160F) inside. In winter the same car may
| be expected to start up straight away without issues at -30C
| (-22F).
| varjag wrote:
| While most modern car much of the time manage to start at
| -30C indeed, "expected" is overstating it. You really need
| one with an engine heater.
| ffggvv wrote:
| it's not about the air temperature. it's surface temperature.
| i was at the beach the other day when it was only like 75
| degrees but the sand was hot enough to burn my feet.
| mjg59 wrote:
| An object in direct sunlight is going to get hotter than the
| ambient air temperature.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| especially when it's in direct sunlight sitting above
| roofing asphalt. Air temps can get up to 150 F without too
| much trouble on building roofs with a dark material.
| chairmanwow1 wrote:
| You live in a desert. I feel like the extremes of your
| environment are not a useful barometer for a reasonable
| operating temp.
| edoceo wrote:
| Millions of humans live there. And loads of other equipment
| operates. Maybe it's not really at the "extreme" point yet -
| since all the existing stuff has moved extreme further out.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I also live in the fifth most populous city in the United
| States. So, yeah, it is.
|
| If anything, you should fully expect, at this point, that how
| we deal with extreme conditions in Phoenix is a harbinger of
| what is to come for other parts of the nation.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >I also live in the fifth most populous city in the United
| States. So, yeah, it is.
|
| But that's still less than half a percent of the US
| population.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I guess we should also avoid rust proofing metals since
| most people don't live by the ocean, too.
| 8note wrote:
| You need rustproofing wherever you put salt on the roads
| in winter, too
| jayd16 wrote:
| I mean, I don't expect California cars to get
| undercoated, for example.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Just because lots of people made the same decision doesn't
| make it smart or reasonable.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I just don't understand comments like this. 7 million
| people didn't decide to move here _this year_. Conditions
| in Arizona have dramatically changed over the lifetime of
| the state.
|
| It doesn't make sense to live where you can freeze to
| death or don't have access to water, either, does it?
| Except those two scenarios include _most Americans_.
| Without modern infrastructure, it hardly makes sense to
| live anywhere.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Obviously 7 million people didn't move there over the
| course of this year. If that's what you thought I was
| getting at, I'm not surprised you were confused.
| Conditions have changed, but are people reconsidering
| their own decisions?
| zzzztopp wrote:
| Nope, namely if you suggest they decide to move. But
| other taxpayers has to pay to help them continue
| comfortable live as they live now.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| People don't decide where they want to be born.
| arcticfox wrote:
| Right, but your point seems to be getting at Starlink
| owing you a functioning dish in your climate, which is
| just kind of an odd take. There are dozens of products
| that are a bad fit for where I live.
|
| If it makes economic sense, I'm sure they'll fix it or
| someone else will do it better eventually. If not, maybe
| the municipal governments can subsidize something that
| works there?
| cartoonworld wrote:
| Please. The whole point of Starlink is that it's suitable
| for places where there is poor existing infrastructure.
| The desert tops the list! They also have service area
| restrictions for sign up.
|
| Just say Tesla dropped the ball on this engineering
| prototype and V2 will work on the sun.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| To be clear, I hope Tesla fails in everything they do.
| That wasn't really the point I was making though.
| cartoonworld wrote:
| I guess you hate Phoenix? Alice cooper, the Meat Puppets,
| stunning desert vistas?
|
| People should almost certainly get over grass lawns, I
| know there is going to be huge problems with water, but
| afiact Phoenix recycles a huge proportion of their
| greywater, and this is a perfect use case for solar,
| molten salt, nuclear.
|
| Hard to farm, I guess. Isn't there gold to mine too?
| jessaustin wrote:
| _I guess you hate Phoenix?_
|
| Before reading this thread I didn't...
| hnick wrote:
| Do air conditioners need special handling over there? When we
| got ours serviced the guy told me that in Western Sydney the
| split systems sometimes shut down on the worst days when you
| need them due to heat in direct sunlight. You need shade, but
| even then some had sprinkler/misting systems for the hotter
| days.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| No, they're built with pretty extreme tolerances. Further,
| they're often placed on rooftops, so it's by design rather
| than convenience of the materials used.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I have a Starlink, but I also live in Michigan, so it probably
| won't get exposed to temps like that. Guess I dodged a bullet?
| anotheryou wrote:
| I'd try attaching a tiny tarp to the dish itself
| wumpus wrote:
| Several posters on r/Starlink report that they had seen their
| dishes at more than 122F, when this topic came up a few days ago.
|
| It's entirely possible that this story (and 122 hn comments so
| far) is about a dish with a loose heatsink, and not a product
| that always shuts down at 122F.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I also believe this was sitting on the ground on the tripod
| stand included in the box. I have ours roof mounted and noticed
| that the temperates were lower once mounted vs on the ground.
| That said our Farm isn't in AZ so it wasn't nearly as hot.
|
| I think you're probably right about it being an edge case
| heatsink issue, one that was amplified by Dishy's placement.
|
| Outside of that, Starlink has been great for us. Having a real
| connection rather than a 1 bar 4g connection has been life
| changing out at the farm.
| avipars wrote:
| I am unsure, but it reminds me of the top gear episode where
| they intentionally destroyed the tesla for the script...
| iamhamm wrote:
| I have Starlink and I'm in Pahrump, NV. We hit 111F today and
| my dishy is in direct sunlight on the ground so it was easily
| over 120F. Hell, my direct sunlight thermometer showed over
| 130F! Didn't go into thermal shutdown, no disruptions in
| service, and I didn't have to water it either.
| mrandish wrote:
| Very valuable comment. If this isn't all, or even most, of
| the beta units then it may indeed be a loose heat sink or
| variance in manufacturing tolerance. This can be far more
| easily (and cheaply) addressed than a population wide issue.
|
| It may also be the case that the thermal limit is currently
| set more conservatively than it needs to be. When every
| hardware unit is rare, costly and yet vital to gathering beta
| data, the choice to go extra conservative on thermal limits
| to prevent damage to scarce hardware deployed in the field
| seems logical.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's sad Art Bell isn't around to test it out, he loved radio
| technology I'm sure he would have gotten a kick out of it :(
| coolspot wrote:
| It can also be that it fails not due to absolute excessive
| temperature value, but rather after some heating-cooling
| cycles.
|
| Hot summer is like 3-4 months over there, so about 100 very-
| hot-cold cycles per year.
|
| Let's see if it withstands that.
| sgaduuw wrote:
| They should ask Ubiquiti how to handle this. Their Unifi range of
| products don't start doing anything unless they're at least at
| 65degC
| squarefoot wrote:
| The problem is not the outside temperature, but the small
| difference from the inside one preventing the circuitry inside
| the dish to cool down. Also the way it is engineered doesn't
| help: it draws about 100 Watts of power, but the entire circuitry
| is enclosed in a plastic container with no way to exchange heat
| with the outside, and the heating parts are kept in "contact"
| with the metal plate working as heatsink through thermal pads
| which seem just too thick to me to transfer enough heat. The
| metal plate should be helped to dissipate all that heat, but that
| would require flowing air, which is not an option in a closed
| box. According to a teardown video, there's no way to remove the
| metal plate without destroying the device, but one can still
| reach it and that would make possible for example thermal-gluing
| a metal pipe to it, then build a liquid cooling system by pumping
| the liquid through a better external heatsink with real fins.
|
| Teardown article with photos and video:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/teard...
| sfblah wrote:
| 100 watts seems like a lot for a receiver. Any idea where all
| that energy is going? Signal amplification?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| It also has to send using a phased array as well.
| sfblah wrote:
| Oh right duh. Thanks.
| roamerz wrote:
| Maybe those that are exhibiting problems were sold to people that
| the engineers didn't design for. Sales people don't tend to care
| who they sell to $ometimes.
| trixie_ wrote:
| All the comments on the article are really extremist. So I looked
| up Zerohedge and found it 'is a far-right libertarian financial
| blog' and 'is bearish in its investment outlook and analysis' ..
| so I guess that makes sense.
|
| Not sure why anyone would be bearish of a beta product that is
| only just scratching the surface of its potential.
| kemonocode wrote:
| It may be a libertarian rag, but the article is just about what
| it says on the title: thermal shutdown hitting Starlink users.
|
| In fact, I had tried to submit an article coming from Ars
| Technica [0] but I deleted it as I saw it gaining no traction
| and I noticed this one had a sizable amount of upvotes and
| comments already.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2021/06/starl...
| vxNsr wrote:
| Appears source was changed to yours
| gonesilent wrote:
| Didn't knock my unit off in 110deg heat Red bluff California.
| rhacker wrote:
| Hello from 15 minutes to the south in Corning.
| pmontra wrote:
| I don't know anything about the engineering of those dishes but
| why do they need to put electronics in them and can't move it at
| the other end of the cable, inside the house?
| spuz wrote:
| This sounds like the perfect opportunity for Linus from Linus
| Tech Tips to show us how to watercool a Starlink dish.
| newacct583 wrote:
| Per the article, it's already been tested and works. Just throw
| a sprinkler on the thing.
|
| Clearly, though, the tolerances weren't chosen correctly when
| they designed the thing. 122F isn't actually that hot for a
| device designed to sit stationary in the sun all day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Just throw a sprinkler on the thing.
|
| Yeah, that's a brilliant plan for a part of the world that is
| severely restricted on water usage and is routinely in
| drought conditions.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Given the size of Phoenix, people don't give a fuck about
| their resource use.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I read an article some time back, maybe a link from here,
| talking about how the up tick in population of AZ/NV were
| during an unusual wet period which people thought was
| acceptable and normal. Now, it seems the area is going
| back to its more natural dry period. Mother Nature's
| perception of time is very different than human's.
| jsight wrote:
| Building a closed loop cooler isn't exactly rocket science.
| And, tbh, if I lived in an area where satellite internet
| was my only practical option, I'm not sure that I'd
| consider that particularly burdensome.
|
| Despite all the hype, this is still basically a niche
| product.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Mount it in a kiddie pool with a pump to reclaim the water.
| Starlink can sell it as a package deal: dish, pool, pump
| _Extreme Weather_ package. Complete with puncture repair
| kit for the pool.
|
| Of course there's still evaporation, so you just station a
| half dozen condensing dehumidifiers around the pool to
| capture as much as you can in the immediate area and feed
| it back into the system.
|
| And there you go: For just a few $thousand in supplemental
| equipment you get cheap broadband.
| slipframe wrote:
| Dehumidifiers are really just air conditioners, so at
| that point you might as well cut out the middle men and
| air condition the dish directly. An air conditioner will
| set you back a few hundred dollars, plus power costs.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sorry, but the voice of my dad yelling, "I'm not paying
| to air condition the outdoors" haunts this comment!
| sleepybrett wrote:
| At least they made it white, dishtv's, and others I'm sure,
| antennas are black.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Honestly a closed loop solar powered(?) water cooler sounds
| like the perfect solution.
| endymi0n wrote:
| ...is it called streaming then?
| mariushn wrote:
| Hope the fix for this will be Elon tackling climate change :)
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Fit them with fans to keep them cool. Simples.
| tidwall wrote:
| When my family moved to Arizona in 1987 we brought along our
| Pontiac Firebird. My mom loved that car. But it melted in the
| summer heat. Literally the glue that adhered the the interior
| materials could not handle the heat and stuff just started
| falling down. Goop flowing down the walls and windows.
| ineedasername wrote:
| This can't be a new problem, how do companies like Direct TV
| handle this? More robust equipment?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Receive-only dishes are usually just a curved piece of metal
| with a fairly dumb LNB mounted on an arm. The Starlink "dish"
| isn't a traditional parabolic reflector, it is a phased array
| antenna with electronics under the surface.
| cgb223 wrote:
| Weird to see a ZeroHedge article a) on Hacker News and b) even
| talking about StarLink at all
| Black101 wrote:
| 122F... lol.... I guess they forgot that we have a sun?
|
| https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/06/16/16/44302655-9692943-...
| api wrote:
| So apparently one of the downsides of Starlink is that the base
| station is an energy pig. Doesn't surprise me all that much in
| retrospect but I didn't think of it when I first heard about it.
| trixie_ wrote:
| How much energy does it use?
| slownews45 wrote:
| 110W peak usage.
|
| I've seen wifi hotspots use this much and they don't have to
| connect to space.
|
| Is this really "energy pig" level of usage for space based
| communications? My former experience was with gimbled / gyro
| pointing dishes which were very energy intensive by
| comparison. 100W and little physical movement would have been
| considered very efficiant.
|
| How do other space com platforms handle deployment / install
| of end user terminals. I've not seen ones with the spaceX
| approach (simple end user install). Perhaps the professional
| installs get the energy use down to 10W or whatever is not
| considered "energy pig" usage.
|
| As a point of reference, tesla's cars hit energy draws of
| 900,000W when driving. Their semi is likely to use even more.
| So I think worth being careful about energy pig label.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Typical satellite internet uses about 30W.
| mcguire wrote:
| Hughes Gen5 HT2000W .98m 1-watt Satellite Internet System
| (https://ispsat.com/product/hughesnet-
| gen5-ht2000w-98m-1-watt...) has a 73W power supply. Normal
| use seems to be about 40W
| (https://community.hughesnet.com/t5/Products-and-
| Plans/Gen5-H...).
|
| 900,000W? Wow, that's about 1200HP.
| southerntofu wrote:
| According to international standards, your wifi antennas
| should have a maximum of 0.1/0.2W power (up to 4W for some
| specific 5Ghz frequencies). Wifi router hardware is really
| basic, you need something as powerful as a computer from
| the late 90s... which on todays hardware runs on a few
| watts. Something like a rpi is really beefy for a home
| router.
|
| So 100W may not be a big deal if you have an abundance of
| electricity around. But on the order of energy you can
| produce yourself, it's quite a lot.
| smachiz wrote:
| No wifi hotspot is using 110 watts.
|
| 110 watts is a fair amount of power - at $0.20/kWh you're
| going to add $16 to your power bill monthly.
|
| It's similar to leaving a desktop computer on 24/7.
| slownews45 wrote:
| My Netgear R8500 was 50 watts easily I'd say. My friends
| gaming computer DEFINATELY uses more than 100W. Basic
| computer use for cryptomining seems to use a lot more as
| well. It just doesn't seem like 100W for what this thing
| does is a ton.
| rconti wrote:
| > Under load, the Netgear R8500 uses 21.5 Watts of power
| making it the most consumptive router we have tested [1]
|
| Of course a gaming computer uses more than 100w. Of
| course a crypto rig uses more than 100w. And that's not
| "basic computer use", it's the most power-hungry computer
| use.
|
| Meanwhile, my UniFi UAP-AC-Pro APs are powered via PoE
| and are using <4w.
|
| 1: https://www.legitreviews.com/netgear-
| nighthawk-x8-r8500-ac53...
| brigade wrote:
| More like 50 watts max, and 20 watts under normal load.
| The power supply can't even provide more than 60W. And
| gaming computers are more like 2-5W suspended, 20-50W
| idle/browsing, 200-500W gaming.
| mcguire wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/R8500/R8500_U
| M_4...
|
| The power supply for an R8500 gives 19V / 3.16 A DC
| maximum.
|
| And yes, a gaming PC can use a few hundred watts---that's
| why it has to have all of the thermal management and all
| of the hot air blowing out of it.
|
| P.s. https://kb.netgear.com/23003/Maximum-power-
| consumption-for-N...
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| I'm curious about the browsing figures. As someone that
| used a Surface Pro 3 for browsing, js or flash pegged it.
| I'm curious on a i7 desktop what the real average is for
| my browsing habits, and I'm going to have to test this.
| bah.
| [deleted]
| j-pb wrote:
| I have a starlink beta, and we're currenty experiencing a really
| bad hearwave here in germany ( I measured 35C in the shade ).
|
| Mine works like a charm regardless.
| neals wrote:
| German hearwaves sound cool though.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sounds like something pioneered by Kraftwerk
| marcinzm wrote:
| That's not a heatwave by US standards, that's a pretty common
| summer day for a decent chunk of the US. Arizona can get to
| around 50C.
| gspr wrote:
| I think you know that heat waves are defined relative to the
| local climate. And recall that all but the southern part of
| Germany is north of the US-Canada border. AZ should be
| considered uninhabitable (in a sustainable sense) even
| outside of heat waves.
| V99 wrote:
| A reasonably modern air conditioner to cool your house in
| Phoenix a few months in the summer is more efficient than
| many of the common ways you'd heat a house from potentially
| well below freezing in the winter in many other places.
|
| And much of our power comes from solar (which is maximally
| available at the time cooling is maximally needed) and
| nuclear, while serious heating is often literally burning
| fossil fuels in your basement.
| gspr wrote:
| I agree that your solar-powered cooling is a giant
| improvement. But the water situation still seems totally
| unsustainable.
| adamcstephens wrote:
| And where does your water come from?
| stefan_ wrote:
| Yes, if I want to be locked inside 24/7 it turns out it
| does not matter much _specifically where_ I do that.
|
| What does it take to spend a vacation day outside working
| in your garden? At 30F that's just a thick jacket away,
| what kinda clothing can make your body work at 120F and
| sun?
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I actually believe that the opposite is true. It takes
| much more energy to cool off a home with AC than it does
| to heat a home in cold weather.
| johngalt wrote:
| It is counterintuitive but A/C in general has a much
| smaller footprint than heating.
| bliteben wrote:
| I think you are confusing the efficiency of heating
| sources vs the inefficiency of A/C. However A/C just
| moves heat, it doesn't have to create it. This is why in
| climates in which they are appropriate heat pumps can be
| even more efficient than other forms of heating.
|
| I will say there likely isn't a ton of good hard data on
| this for another reason, and that is that humidity plays
| a role, both in what temperatures are comfortable and
| maybe in some forms of temperature management.
| 8note wrote:
| Huh? That hard data was half of my undergrad courses in
| mech
| marcinzm wrote:
| No it doesn't. An AC essentially transfers more heat
| energy out than electricity it consumes. Most heating
| generates exactly as much heat as energy consumed
| (electric heaters, burning fuels, etc.). Heat pumps are
| an exception but they don't work well before freezing
| temperatures.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Typical energy efficiency of heating is comparable to AC.
| The baseline solution is using waste heat from
| electricity generation and industrial processes.
| Geothermal heat pumps have become popular in the past
| decade or two, and lake/seawater heat pumps are seen as
| the future of district heating systems in dense cities.
|
| The big difference is insulation. On the average, houses
| that need heating are better insulated than houses that
| need air conditioning.
| cartoonworld wrote:
| Yeah the defrost cycle limits the heat pumps heating
| ability, but AC units have a similar limit wrt how much
| they are able to lower the temperature of the air. AFIAK
| they can do about 20 F. At this point you need to do some
| math and add additional units and run them 24/7
| nullifying this benefit.
|
| Geothermal heat pumps and good insulation solve both.
| blhack wrote:
| Starlink is in beta. The entire purpose of the beta is to find
| stuff like this. They found something, and I'm sure that the next
| iteration of this before it goes to mass market will account for
| it.
|
| You're just seeing the system work.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| You can bet the social media teams of Verizon, Comcast, and the
| rest of their ilk will be pushing this article through social
| networks hard.
| new_realist wrote:
| This flaw was known to SpaceX before the beta began; SpaceX has
| publicly said the dishes are only certified to 104deg
| Fahrenheit. Musk prefers to ship known broken products in the
| name of velocity, and out of a sociopathic contempt for the
| consumer. It's happened to me more than once.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| This is the most ridiculous characterization. It's literally
| a beta.
| Black101 wrote:
| This was programmed in... it is not a bug... it is just a
| known flaw. Has nothing to do with it being beta. Beta
| means that unknown bugs might pop up...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It also means it's not the final product and doesn't make
| promises about operating in all environments
| stagger87 wrote:
| Is it even fair to call it a 'flaw' or 'broken' if they
| advertise the limitations? Almost all electronics will have
| some operational temperature range depending on power
| consumed and cooling available. Is there even active cooling
| on the unit?
| tzs wrote:
| It might depend on whether the advertising conveys the
| limitation correctly to the consumer.
|
| I had a home router once that was cutting out in the
| summer. The operating environment section of the manual
| listed a temperature range that went up to something like
| 105 . My apartment was below 80 so didn't think that was
| the problem.
|
| It turns out that they meant 105 inside the router.
| Opening the router case and placing it so a fan I used to
| circulate room air was blowing over the router made the
| problem go away.
|
| I think it is reasonable to assume when writing a manual
| that if you tell a consumer that the device can be operated
| in an environment with a temperature range of X-Y, the
| consumer will take it to mean that if the temperature in
| their room is in that range they can use the device. If
| that's not what the range means, you should tell the
| consumer.
|
| Is the Starlink manual clear on this?
| shaklee3 wrote:
| It's a flaw because they are required to provide service in
| areas that hit these temperatures with certain SLAs. I say
| required because they want a government contract promising
| that they can do it.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| As far as I can tell it's not advertised publicly. For
| instance it's not in the FAQ on the starlink website
| (although considerations about snow are). I was unable to
| find a PDF of the booklet that comes in the box though, so
| maybe it's in that.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| I don't recall a booklet in our box, just a cardboard
| setup overlay and a weather cover. It might have been in
| one of the the accessory boxes, I'll look later today.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yes? If you advertise a flaw, it remains a flaw.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Hard to call this a flaw no product ever invented isn't
| without limitations
| falcolas wrote:
| However, products _are_ frequently created to not shut
| down in "average" summer temperatures. It's a well known
| operating parameter throughout the US - temperatures
| break 105degF even up in Canada.
|
| It's not even the hottest part of the summer yet. I can't
| imagine this problem getting better.
| drusepth wrote:
| On the other hand, products _do_ frequently shut down in
| "average" temperatures, especially in the context of
| internet dishes.
|
| The rural communities most likely to use Starlink are
| also those most likely to be relying on satellite dishes
| right now, which seem to frequently suffer from similar
| problems.
|
| My parents pay for internet from both HughesNet and AT&T
| because the former stops working whenever it snows more
| than an inch or two (even after clearing the dish
| manually) and the latter constantly drops any time
| there's thick rain, heavy winds, etc. There's dozens of
| days throughout each year where neither work and they're
| just SOL in terms of TV or internet.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| No. I said this earlier, but they won a rural auction
| from the FCC where they were given 900 million dollars
| for Starlink, which includes providing coverage in areas
| well above 100 degrees f on a regular basis. They are
| required to provide this. If they hadn't won the auction,
| they can do whatever they want. The auction had service
| level agreements that could not be met with this
| limitation. It's a fundamental flaw that has to be fixed.
| _Microft wrote:
| Do you know when they need to have started providing
| service there at the latest?
|
| They began providing service at higher latitude earlier
| because that is where the satellites "lump" due to their
| inclination, so that they needed fewer satellites in
| total.
|
| They are also required to cover Alaska and have now
| started launching Starlink satellites into (near-)polar
| orbits. If these are test sats or actually operational I
| do not know but they seem to be working on these issues.
|
| All in all they seem to be following a launch-early
| strategy.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| I believe late next year is the first real rollout, and
| the rest are scattered over 2 years. This is the reason
| they changed the inclination and altitude several times.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think you're operating from a broken definition of the
| word "flaw".
| newacct583 wrote:
| > You're just seeing the system work.
|
| This sounds reasonable, and you make excellent points. But the
| important fact we all have to remember in these discussions is
| not the details, but that SpaceX is run by Elon Musk.
| verytrivial wrote:
| Whoa. What guy? This thermal issue is critical.
| newacct583 wrote:
| And it's a failure in a beta, with a sample size of one. As
| the poster upthread points out, this is the kind of failure
| you want to find in _a beta test_ of a new product.
|
| But right right... I forgot. Musk.
| verytrivial wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. But it seems some people are
| reading my comment literally.
| newacct583 wrote:
| (HN really, really doesn't like sarcasm. But this
| particular story just absolutely drips with irrational
| hate and really deserves some. Good grief, new product
| has correctible flaw!)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Always worth remembering that HN has an international
| audience.
|
| English is terrible enough before we start butchering it
| by playing with intent.
|
| (Said with love and encouragement; I've forgotten about
| not using sarcasm here too).
| [deleted]
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Sorry HW engineer here and I strongly disagree. You don't ship
| hardware like this.
|
| 122F is only 50C. Most components can handle 85C so shutting
| down at 50C means the thermal rise is >35C. This is simply poor
| design.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Directv dishes are only rated for 140F or 60C[0]. Pretty
| close, but it clearly makes a difference in Arizona.
|
| 0: https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-
| direct....
| shaklee3 wrote:
| That is not pretty close at all. You don't get ambient
| temperatures anywhere near 140F.
| avipars wrote:
| 10C difference can be life or death
| babesh wrote:
| The link is mostly a honeypot for Elon Musk haters. I wonder if
| they have bothered looking at the operating temperatures of
| other satellite Internet dishes?
|
| A simple search will net you heating and cooling devices for
| satellite dishes. If you face more extreme temperatures, you
| need only go buy a heating and cooling unit.
|
| http://www.dishcamo.com/dish_heater.htm
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Surprisingly, the heating element built in appears to be
| pretty solid, or at least that's been the responses on
| /r/starlink.
|
| You're definitely right that people are hating on it. Most of
| the people I know in real life that knocked it have access to
| land based internet. Once you get out into rural areas where
| 4g is the basis for your internet, it's amazing.
| swiley wrote:
| And it's not like 4g hotspots and old cell phones don't
| overheat either.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You get an actual 4g router, not a phone, and they
| actually worknwell
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yes, my iPhone went into thermal shutdown sitting by the
| pool on a 90 degree day but I don't see a hacker news
| discussion on it...
| AngryData wrote:
| Your iphones primary environment isn't outside under the
| sun for half of every day of the year though either.
| [deleted]
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| I have yet to see cellphone towers shut down because the
| summer is too hot.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| You should work in network operation. I have seen BS go
| down for so many reasons.....
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Heh. But whatever it was, the impact on the end user was
| low. When I lived in Miami there would be cellphone
| trouble on weekend nights, never in the midday heat!
| swiley wrote:
| I have yet to hear about the starlink spacecraft going
| into thermal shutdown in Arizona.
| kortex wrote:
| Many of these folks are used to internet going out because
| the wind is blowing too hard, or it's raining, or snowing,
| or a cow is stepping on the fiber link.
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/how-cows-
| caused-s...
| casi wrote:
| People are always surprised when I describe how bad the
| internet connection I have is here in the UK. 3meg down
| 0.2 up. If it rains or is too windy the connection dies.
| I've spoke to bt and openreach hundreds of times but it
| never gets any better. I'm the last house on the end of a
| copper line and there is no interest in fixing it. Four
| years ago the village was supposed to get fibre, recently
| "delayed" again. I rely on the 3G signal, which isn't
| much better tbh.
|
| My Starlink arrives next week :) I'm so exited to be able
| to finally download some photos I put on google drive a
| couple of years ago.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Yeah, British internet can be fairly inconsistent. I'm in
| a rural-ish area and can get 100 megs down on a fibre-to-
| the-house connection, but when I lived in an actual town
| I would be lucky to get 2 megs down on a good day. I
| literally ended up doing everything over 4G back then
| because the fixed internet connection was just abysmally
| bad and Openreach never cared enough to fix it.
| [deleted]
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's far easier to build a heating unit than a cooling
| unit.
|
| Thermodynamics FTW
| m4rtink wrote:
| Well, in general cooling something down is much more
| complicated than heating it up.
|
| For one you need a sophisticated reverse heat engine, for
| the other a piece of wire with high enough resistance.
| catblast01 wrote:
| > For one you need a sophisticated reverse heat engine
|
| This is a very obtuse way of saying "refrigerator", which
| is a type of heat pump.. a technology over a hundred
| years old. The simplest refrigerators/heat pumps are
| pretty simple --
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
| azernik wrote:
| That's a subsystem with three major sections, a working
| _fluid_ , and its own heat rejection requirements. A
| resistive heater contains two parts - a properly placed
| wire and a switch.
| catblast01 wrote:
| Still say "sophisticated reverse heat engine" is a
| needlessly verbose way of saying refrigerator or heat
| pump. Also how sophisticated is something that is mass
| produced for devices sold under $100 in every big box
| retailer.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A refrigerator for a kitchen has drastically different
| constraints. The outside temp will always be something
| between 15-30 degC, the inside temperature will usually
| stay relatively constant unless you dump hot stuff in
| there.
|
| Cooling for active outdoor technology has extremely
| variable outside temperatures (basically anything from
| -20 to 60 degC, or more if you take direct sunshine into
| account) and a constant generation of heat to be taken
| away.
| kbenson wrote:
| The more you hype something, the more susceptible it is to
| criticism. It's not necessarily that people are Musk haters
| (although some are I'm sure), it's that it's been hyped to
| hell, by Musk and others, so problems will be hyped also.
|
| You can't have a lot of positive attention without a
| corresponding amount of negative attention when something
| goes wrong.
| babesh wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably a mix.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| That's a de-icing system. Starlink dishes have the opposite
| problem, they get too hot because they have to dissipate 100
| watts electric energy plus the heat from the sun and the
| nearby rooftop.
|
| OK, maritime outfitters will sell you a climatized radome,
| which will set you back a few grand. Proper engineering costs
| money (can't have radar fail in the middle of the Strait of
| Malacca), and that's why Elon relies on his army of fanboys,
| Elon's outrageous conduct is part of marketing.
| babesh wrote:
| What sort of magical solution is there though for the price
| of the dish? If the ambient temperature is 50 degrees C,
| you need cooling. It looks like the Hughes dish is a little
| better at 55 degrees C. Looks like the expensive solution
| is that randome irrespective of the particular dish. The
| cheap solutions seem to be myriad. Relocating it, putting
| it under shade, sprinklers, fans.
| slipframe wrote:
| > _OK, maritime outfitters will sell you a climatized
| radome, which will set you back a few grand._
|
| To be fair, isn't the maritime market a bit like the
| aviation market, where a pack of 6 disposable AA batteries
| potted in a pack will cost you $43?
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1YjGLwfYSQ&t=37)
|
| On land with a good supply of fresh water (so, not in
| drought regions) I think you could probably cool a dish for
| a few dollars of parts with an open-loop cooling system.
| I'm not sure how much water you would actually need though,
| it might be an unconscionable waste in the regions that are
| prone to these sort of temperatures in the first place.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _To be fair, isn 't the maritime market a bit like the
| aviation market, where a pack of 6 disposable AA
| batteries potted in a pack will cost you $43?_
|
| Fair point, a portable AC sets you back 150 dollars or
| so, so with outdoor proofing and all, you can build a
| passable cooling system for 250 dollars. That would be
| the proper engineering solution, but it wouldn't look
| cool, like the steering yoke in the recent Tesla.
| runarberg wrote:
| An Elon Musk hater here:
|
| Starlink provides an excellent example of a deeper problem I
| see with new technology vs. traditional infrastructure. We
| know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all over
| the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on
| infrastructure.
|
| Elon Musk (and the likes) see an opportunity to disrupt this
| simple answer and make money selling a different unproven
| solution that has the potential to be at best as good. For me
| this is bad news. If politicians get sold by the likes of
| Elon Musk, it will stand in the way of traditional proven
| infrastructure and--in the case of starlink--fast and
| affordable broadband connection for rural communities.
| extrapickles wrote:
| After investing[0] billions per year in traditional
| communications companies, we still have people where the
| only way they can get service is by laying the fiber
| themselves. States have also been trying to invest in
| expanding fiber, but traditional companies have been just
| pocketing the money and blocking anyone else from improving
| things (eg: google fiber).
|
| Starlink seems to be a very cheap option in comparison,
| even if it has LoS and overheating problems.
|
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/tag/rural-broadband/
| runarberg wrote:
| Other countries seem to be able to get fast internet
| connection with traditional infrastructure to small towns
| and communities. Why not America?
| rddbs wrote:
| It's hard to fault SpaceX for realizing a market
| opportunity here. If they can bring decent Internet to
| rural areas who don't currently have broadband access,
| that's just mutually beneficial for SpaceX and those
| customers.
|
| When (if) those customers ever get broadband access by
| additional infrastructure investment, SpaceX will need to
| find a way to provide better value. I'm not sure I
| understand how this is a bad thing.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >We know how to do broadband in rural places. We do it all
| over the planet. We simply tax income and spend it on
| infrastructure.
|
| The problem is that this view means you need politicians
| who care enough about the issue and many simply don't. I
| like there being a solution that eliminates a lot of the
| political factors that cause endless dither and delay over
| building traditional infrastructure for rural broadband,
| and for that matter my opinion of Elon Musk is still higher
| than most of my country's politicians when it comes to
| technological policy.
|
| There's also another important use-case for things like
| Starlink which is people who _can 't_ be reached by
| traditional infrastructure. These are people who live in
| remote parts of the world where governments won't consider
| investing in infrastructure on grounds of cost, and people
| who live a nomadic lifestyle (liveaboard sailors for
| example, and van dwellers depending on where they go). I
| don't think they should be cut off from the internet
| because of an overly sceptical attitude towards new
| approaches.
| babesh wrote:
| Stepping back, low Earth orbit satellite constellations
| appear to be a better solution than fiber for these
| remote locations. Then the debate becomes whether it
| should be a public, private, or private but publicly
| funded program.
|
| Amazon and OneWeb are also looking to build
| constellations. It isn't a StarLink question.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Why are you showing links to heaters? You ask if other
| manufacturers have this problem, then you provide links to
| the exact opposite problem which is freezing temperatures.
| The answer to your original question is no, other
| manufacturers do not shut down anywhere near this
| temperature.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Radomes cost over $10k at these frequencies, so that's not
| a solution.
| babesh wrote:
| I replied to my own comment with another manufacturer with
| this problem. You are right that my link was to deicing but
| another comment said that randomes are a maritime solution
| to both heating and cooling.
|
| Oh, and apparently there are heatsinks you can buy for
| satellite dishes.
|
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Tokyosat-Radiator-
| Alu...
| babesh wrote:
| https://www.highspeedsat.com/dw7000.htm
|
| -30oC - +55oC
|
| The previous link was only for heating dishes. I wonder if
| there are any products out there for cooling dishes. There
| are products out there for Dish TV receivers but Starlink has
| circuits in the dish itself. Seems more like the dw7000
| above.
| aaomidi wrote:
| If your engineering team had to wait for a product failure to
| realize an item that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going
| to get hot, what on earth else are they missing?
| matheweis wrote:
| Do aircraft engineers get a pass?
|
| > the Bombardier CRJ aircraft used on some shorter routes
| have a maximum operating temperature of 118 degrees.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
| way/2017/06/20/533662790...
| t0mas88 wrote:
| You may think this is a smart example, but you're mostly
| illustrating that you know nothing about aviation
| engineering.
|
| The temperature limit for takeoff performance has nothing
| to do with the maximum temperature for electronics or other
| components. It's about air density decreasing which reduces
| the engine thrust as well as the maximum lift from the
| wings. So the warmer it gets the lower the maximum weight
| you can take off with and the higher the speed required
| before lift-off. At some point that's not safe anymore so
| the manufacturers only publish verified performance data up
| to a maximum temperature. You can't legally fly above that.
| matheweis wrote:
| I think this particular issue might not be related to the
| safe flight envelope, although that was the hot take at
| the time... I should have added more context.
|
| About a year or so after the article I linked above was
| published, Bombardier obtained ISA+40C certification for
| the CRJ700 and CRJ900 from both the FAA and TC. For the
| flights in and out of Phoenix, AZ, this meant that those
| aircraft have since been able to legally fly in temps of
| up to 123.8F. I don't know the details of the
| certification upgrade, but my understanding is that there
| were no changes to either the aircraft or weight
| restrictions.
|
| I don't personally know anyone at Bombardier to know
| exactly why they didn't certify the aircraft for ISA+40C
| to begin with, but given that there were apparently no
| changes to either the aircraft or the weight
| restrictions, this seemed very much a case of "your
| engineering team had to wait ... to realize an item
| that's going to be outdoors in the sun is going to get
| hot".
| t0mas88 wrote:
| No. ISA+40 isn't a static temperature, it would be lower
| in Denver than at sea level. So in no way is that a warm
| electronics kind of problem.
|
| We use ISA differences (the +40 you wrote) in flight
| performance calculations specifically. Not in any
| "aircraft too warm / cold" kind of limits, since those
| would be absolute numbers not relative to ISA.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Is that plane temperature, or air temperature in the shade?
| Probably the latter?
|
| In the case of Starlink's dish, it's not clear which
| temperature they mean.
| tyingq wrote:
| They put a non-automotive grade LCD in Teslas. I assume
| because they thought they knew better. I suspect hubris is at
| play more than full-on incompetence.
| driverdan wrote:
| SpaceX and Tesla are separate companies with different
| employees. "They" did not put anything in Teslas.
| tyingq wrote:
| Separate companies with the same CEO, (some) shared board
| members, joint projects, cross sales of services and
| equipment, loans of employees, etc. Surely there's
| significant culture bleed.
| nine_k wrote:
| I wish more of the SpaceX culture bled into Tesla then.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Move faster, break more things? Tesla delivers _far_ more
| refined products than SpaceX
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes, break more things on testing grounds. Keep iterating
| until the thing works _well_.
|
| SpaceX, paradoxically, has easier time experimenting and
| partially failing, because they mostly haul machines.
| Every Tesla car, OTOH, has a human pilot.
| zaroth wrote:
| The put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model S
| because it was that LCD or nothing.
|
| The automotive screens didn't exist in the size they needed
| and they weren't at a stage in their company where they
| could design their own.
|
| They took a risk to achieve the product vision that they
| were determined to bring into the world given the technical
| constraints of the age. I'd say overall it paid off.
|
| IMO it wasn't arrogance.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > he put a non-automotive grade LCD in the original Model
| S because it was that LCD or nothing.
|
| No. It was not no LCD or nothing. It was either an LCD
| that would melt in the heat of a car on a summer day, or
| a _smaller_ LCD that wouldn't.
|
| This is just one of many decisions traced directly to
| Elon that fly in the face of established best practices.
| Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less
| safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace
| injuries, because he didn't like yellow stripes and
| beeping forklifts. And of course the intentional
| misnaming of "autopilot", and the resulting body count of
| the wide consumer release of its "beta" software.
|
| So yes, it is arrogance.
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-
| gettin...
| judge2020 wrote:
| It wasn't an unknown that the screen might yellow in high
| temperatures. A smaller LCD would have been a different
| product, and certainly an inferior product given a
| (diagonal) 17 inch non-automotive screen would have had
| to have been an (at most) 10 inch screen. It was a
| tradeoff, not arrogance (maybe arrogant for them not to
| know that jonathankoren would disapprove of it 8 years
| later).
|
| > Lest we forget, this is a man who made the factory less
| safe, resulting in higher than expected workplace
| injuries, because he didn't like yellow stripes and
| beeping forklifts
|
| I can't find any news on forklift-related incidents at
| Tesla. If you mean reducing forklifts all together,
| Amazon has also designed their warehouses around reducing
| forklift usage - forklifts are extremely hazardous
| regardless of tape and beeping.
| jsight wrote:
| Yeah, and their typical failure mode, yellowing around
| the edges, still looked better than a lot of other
| vehicles from its era.
|
| I don't like their handling of it from a warranty
| perspective, but I'm also not sure that their initial
| decision was actually the wrong one.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I agree, it wasn't arrogance.
|
| Deliberately going forward with something in spite of
| knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is
| called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.
| kortex wrote:
| It's a heckin' internet uplink dish, not a mission-
| critical piece of engineering lives depend on (if
| Starlink is your only way to call emergency services, you
| ought to have a radio backup).
| da_chicken wrote:
| I'm not taking about the dish in my comment, I'm talking
| about Teslas shortcuts.
|
| But it doesn't really help if your poor engineering only
| causes your company to fail due to recall, or gets you
| shut down for fraud or negligence, or your product is so
| bad that customers entirely leave your market. That's
| still not something to champion.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The correct order is:
|
| 1) Start a pioneering car company in the 21st century
| with many incumbent car manufacturers, dealerships and
| regulations
|
| 2) Give business advice on (1)
| Isinlor wrote:
| It wasn't designed for a car, but they did run additional
| tests on it.
| eganist wrote:
| > Deliberately going forward with something in spite of
| knowing for certain that it's not fit for purpose is
| called engineering malfeasance, not arrogance.
|
| An argument can be made for both. Malfeasance in that it
| was a significant and potentially catastrophic
| engineering tradeoff due to unknown failure modes, and
| arrogant in that the decision valued company vision over
| potential consumer safety risks as well as over the
| expertise of the component manufacturers.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| +1. This is something software engineers (of which I am
| one) often miss-understand about other engineering
| disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know
| will run into problems down the line, because you can
| reasonably expect to solve those challenges and ship
| updates before they come into play. But when you sell
| someone a durable good that is expected to last 10-20
| years (eg a car) there are a whole host of things that go
| into designing that thing that are not ok to fix later.
|
| The result is that these engineering disciplines have
| practices that are much more rigorous. If you think about
| it, a recall is essentially a hardware patch, and they
| are typically highly embarrassing and costly.
|
| There is also the whole separate aspect of professional
| licensure which certain engineers get. Licensed engineers
| are expected to hold their work to certain standards
| regardless of the business needs of the company they work
| for. Now i'm not saying what Tesla did falls in this
| category, but it certainly looks like designing a product
| below the standard expected for that product. (what most
| people would call shoddy engineering).
|
| In software we often get away with this, because we can
| put in the work later on, and also because people often
| have insanely low expectations of how well software will
| work.
| spockz wrote:
| You can still replace parts in physical products. For
| example, the yellowing screen of the Tesla could have
| been replaced no questions asked with an automotive
| version once available. It is just so more expensive due
| to logistics and assembly.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > This is something software engineers (of which I am
| one) often miss-understand about other engineering
| disciplines. You can totally ship software that you know
| will run into problems down the line ... because people
| often have insanely low expectations of how well software
| will work.
|
| I feel like this is the self fulfilling prophecy. We
| definitely didn't use to ship software we knew would
| break, because we literally shipped it on disks, and
| delivering updates was hard.
|
| The internet has been good for many many things. Software
| reliability hasn't been one of them.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Selling something you know breaks within a short amount
| of time in the lifetime of a car and then not wanting to
| replace it is fraud.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is
| engineering reality.
| rualca wrote:
| > Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is
| engineering reality.
|
| Not being aware that objects placed outdoors and exposed
| directly to sunlight easily reach temperatures above 80C
| is either a collosal design error or sheer incompetence.
|
| Let's put it this way: for anyone to draw the line at 50C
| they needed to do at least a review of environmental
| constraints and operational ceilings, and the most
| rudimentary of cursory reviews (i.e., googling and
| looking at the first search hits) is enough to show that
| white objects placed outdoors at direct sunlight easily
| get to 80C.
| da_chicken wrote:
| "The ends justify the means," is an epitaph on countless
| headstones.
|
| Edit: Here's some food for thought. Tesla was basically
| forced to admit the display issue because it was so
| pervasive, and they basically got lucky that their
| display didn't cause other problems or bigger problems.
|
| Just how lucky was Tesla? We know they're willing to take
| a gamble. Where else did they cut corners or skimp that
| we just never found out about? What else might have gone
| wrong? Automobiles are one of the most dangerous machines
| on the planet. We've also heard horror stories from
| former employees about working conditions, too.
|
| People are Tesla fans because they're excited by the
| image. By electric cars. By the idea. But they're letting
| their desire to have that image in their head untarnished
| means they're not going to be willing to accept genuine
| criticism of genuine failings. Just like Apple, and
| Linux, and so many other products, it's generated fans
| who live up to fanaticism.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is a stupid opinion. Its a display screen. Any
| engineer would look at the failure modes (and it was an
| engineer, not Elon himself) and go "we might have
| problems, but given the use case it's not really going to
| be that bad".
|
| Elon companies have plenty of issues but the cadre of
| people who are insistent _every_ issue is an unforgivable
| catastrophe are ridiculous.
|
| The display screen in my 2004 Prius had the touchscreen
| suddenly stop working as well. Was an issue with thermal
| cycling with that particular part model as well. These
| things happen.
| disillusioned wrote:
| Sure, fine. But the MCU still crashes on my (very
| yellowed screened) unit regularly, randomly. Right now,
| that doesn't cause me to crash: autopilot stays engaged.
| The car continues to function. There's even a low-level
| beep when autopilot is disengaged, even though all other
| audio fails. Blinkers still work. Etc.
|
| But the new car has removed the shifter stalk, and moved
| the controls to the screen. Now, if the screen reboots, I
| can't place the car into park or reverse. With the
| shifter, I can push and hold the parking button to engage
| the emergency brakes on the car. Can't do that if the
| screen is rebooting. The blinkers are now capacitive
| touch buttons on the steering wheel. While I imagine
| they'll stay low level and decoupled from the MCU, I sure
| hope that's the case.
|
| The yoke is possibly the stupidest thing Tesla has done,
| ever. So many people are going to end up with completely
| shattered arms as they get into accidents and have the
| airbags deployed while they're turning and have their
| arms crossed. All for what? To look cool to a 13-year-
| old? Idiotic. And I say this as someone with a MS on
| order for September which I'm desperately hoping I'll be
| able to get with the regular wheel. Still bitter about
| the stalks, though.
| postmeta wrote:
| There are park and reverse buttons on the center console
| too. (not just the screen)
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| People certainly get worked up about how Elon companies
| don't fit the traditional mold. But I think there are
| some good reasons why that is. Mostly this comes down to
| the "we'll just fix it later" mentality, but without an
| actual process for fixing real user devices when the
| "engineering tradeoffs" inevitably produce a broken
| experience long before an item of that quality should
| fail.
|
| the second issue is that the severity of failure is not
| always taken into account. In your example of the Prius
| radio, there are several important differences IMO. The
| radio of a prius has much more limited scope than that of
| a tesla. It is a pain if it breaks, but you can replace
| it with something aftermarket and everything will be
| fine. While it is still possible to drive the car with a
| non-functioning touch screen, a lot more features will be
| missing, including climate control and the reversing
| camera. Additionally these units consistently failed
| early and Tesla initially didn't fix them under warranty.
|
| A similar issue (failure of the display due to worn out
| eMMC after 5-6y) triggered a recall after pressure from
| the NHTSA.
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262072/tesla-display-
| fai...
| ummonk wrote:
| They didn't need that size, they could have gotten by
| fine with a smaller size just like every other car
| company.
| ahofmann wrote:
| This is just the wrong angle to look at this. The big
| screen was one of the features that was talked about the
| most. It was genius marketing, and also part of why the
| car felt like the future.
| rantwasp wrote:
| a lot of things can feel like the future when you don't
| have to support them through their lifetime.
| cowl wrote:
| And they could have "gotten by" with a diesel engine just
| like every other car company. that's a useless comment to
| make. We are tired with getting by. we need companies
| like Tesla/SpaceX that are willing to push the envelope
| with simingly stupid and useless ideas. After some time
| people will wander how past generations have gotten by
| without what they have just like now most of us can't go
| by without access to smart phones whereas 15 years ago
| everyone just went by fine.
| tzs wrote:
| I wonder if they are doing that for other components too,
| or just the LCD?
| rtkwe wrote:
| IIRC there were issues with the flash memory in the media
| unit (afaik that means the whole giant center screen)
| where it would fail to boot after a while because the
| flash chips were failing. They actually issued a recall
| for that one at least.
| willhinsa wrote:
| Just curious, what are the differences between normal LCD's
| and automotive-grade LCD's?
| [deleted]
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Automotive-grade LCDs don't burn out and melt at the
| temperatures commonly found in ... well, automotive
| environments. Like your car sitting in a tarmac car park
| all day in sunny weather with the windows closed.
| s0rce wrote:
| Tell that to my 2012 Suzuki SX4 radio LCD, it won't work
| when its warm out.
| jagger27 wrote:
| I've seen my 2017 Mazda LCD go into protection mode a few
| times. It also dims before that stage.
| tyingq wrote:
| Certified operating temperature range would be one.
| kosievdmerwe wrote:
| One thing that was shocking to me when I looked this up
| myself is the temperature range of a car dashboard where
| the LCD is mounted. It can get ludicrously hot in the
| summer if the car is parked under the sun[1], like 80-90
| C (180-200 F) hot.
|
| [1] https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-
| how-hot-t...
| 0xTJ wrote:
| I don't know, so this is a genuine question, but is that a
| safety-critical part in that case? If it's not it's still
| not ideal, you want to make sure that your parts will
| happily survive the car's environment, but it's not as bad.
| shakna wrote:
| > Safety concerns revolve around cars losing their
| display for rear-facing cameras (now required by law) and
| consumers complaining it's impossible to defog
| windshields with the center console inoperable. [0]
|
| > Another complaint said the failure disabled safety
| monitors associated with Tesla's driver-assistance system
| Autopilot. [1]
|
| It looks like losing access to the touchscreen does
| actually effect safety components, and driver's abilities
| to use them. (Though I'm not clear on to what extent -
| driver's might just need to crack out the manual to see
| how else to defog, for example.)
|
| [0] https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2020/06/tesla-
| investigated...
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-safety/u-s-
| probes-t...
| brewdad wrote:
| Safety critical? Who knows, but probably depending on how
| you want to define "safety critical." Tesla runs
| practically every user control through the touch screen.
| Climate control, lighting, wipers. Did they design with
| reasonable fail-safes? I wouldn't want to bet my life on
| it.
| Meph504 wrote:
| Your missing optimization engineers who come behind the
| original engineers and optimize design with a focus on
| production cost over performance.
|
| This often leads to some of the most spectacular failures,
| and unforseen issues.
|
| Or someone fucked up
| jrockway wrote:
| I doubt that everyone on the team missed the fact that
| electronics get hot outdoors in the summer. Rather, they
| probably chose to launch a product that breaks when it gets
| hot, because it's an easy problem to fix later. Now that
| _something_ is out in the field, they can debug their
| network, satellites, RF hardware, installation instructions,
| management applications, and figure out what kind of
| customers want to buy this thing -- all in parallel while
| some tiny EE team redoes the BOM to use better-spec 'd
| components. Everyone at the company now has a ton of work to
| do to produce the next version, taking into account real-
| world feedback as they do it. Would it be worth blocking all
| those projects another 3 months just so that some guy in
| Arizona gets more Internet uptime on the hottest day of the
| year? Probably not. It sucks to invest in an early product
| and have it break on you, but it's also probably not possible
| to have a company that releases a totally flawless product on
| day 1. If you demand perfection, what you are really
| demanding is for the product to never exist.
|
| (It's also completely possible that the parts simply aren't
| available. You may have noticed that there's been a pandemic
| going on for the last year or so, and that's hurt the
| availability of many electronic components, among other
| things.)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| " Would it be worth blocking all those projects another 3
| months just so that some guy in Arizona gets more Internet
| uptime on the hottest day of the year?"
|
| Umm, yes?
| nine_k wrote:
| A few hundred thousand guys from less overheated areas
| might politely disagree.
| sundvor wrote:
| Yeah and with the data they gather, they might be able to
| work out geographically appropriate versions. Eg add a
| smaller AIO water cooler to a hot climate area version,
| or some other hardening. Maybe it makes sense to apply to
| all versions? Can't know until you have some data. Sounds
| like a great and sensible beta program to me. Avoids
| premature optimisation, lets you see what actually goes
| wrong (where, and in what conditions) without a massive
| effort up front.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| For fuck sakes people this is ambient temperature, it
| does not require beta testing, it requires someone to get
| off their ass and look at over a century of temperature
| data that organisations like nasa have been collecting.
|
| I see people here hate the idea of startups or engineers
| being responsible for any kind of reliable service even
| though lives depend on it, and as this "SV spirit"
| infiltrates more of our life even coffee machines don't
| work without an internet connection, a subscribtion and
| software update.
|
| Completely prosperous
| jessaustin wrote:
| _prosperous_
|
| I think that's the idea...
| [deleted]
| Rapzid wrote:
| There is tremendous value in procrastinating that is still
| overlooked even in 2021. Fixing stuff and making decisions
| "just in time" means reaping value now and in the meantime.
| kortex wrote:
| This is exactly the whole "agile" vs traditional/waterfall
| mentality, scooters before motorcars, etc., put into
| practice. Hardware is _hard_.
|
| > It's also completely possible that the parts simply
| aren't available
|
| Fun fact: they don't make (commercially available) GPUs,
| NICs, pretty much any PC components rated below 0degF. If
| you need to design a system which needs to sit in an
| aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either pay out the nose
| for some serious engineering, or you just roll the dice. We
| rolled, and it turned out fine. That won't always be the
| case.
|
| What Spacex is doing is smart, not sloppy.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| > _We rolled, and it turned out fine._
|
| Who is "we"?
| kortex wrote:
| Company I worked for. We built an aerial multispectral
| imaging system for monitoring seals, polar bears, and
| other mammal populations. It's 3 high power rugged PCs,
| semi-affixed in a shock mount case in the tail of a Twin
| Otter. There's no hangars available at the airbases in
| e.g. Kotzebue, Deadhorse, Utqiagvik, so it sits on the
| tarmac and experiences some intense temperature swings.
|
| It's made it 2 winters and dozens of missions so far.
|
| The customer is NOAA and they really don't have oodles of
| cash to spend on this thing, so it's mostly commodity
| hardware. Initially we designed this whole crazy
| insulated case to keep it from getting too cold, but the
| aircraft engineers nixed it due to fire hazards. The
| airframe isn't airtight so it gets most of the brunt of
| the diurnal swing.
| nr2x wrote:
| Sounds like a fun job!
| kortex wrote:
| It was brilliant fun and also the most stressful period
| of my life, due to it being a bit far out of our core
| competencies at the time, delays in getting the camera
| hardware we had to interface with, limited staffing, and
| a comedy of other errors. Also the PM gets insanely
| airsick. As a result of all that, I got to go up to
| Kotzebue, AK with the PM to do the integration testing.
|
| So there I am, hacking like mad in a terminal in the back
| of this airplane over sea ice, trying to squash various
| bugs. I blame my love of travel and reading while flying
| for my resilience to motion sickness.
|
| Stressful AF. So worth it.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| Wide temperature (-40C to +85C) DIMM and SSDs are
| available.. Companies like ATP and Apacer carry them.
| Intel's Xeon D series are meant for wide temps.
| tigershark wrote:
| The starlink dish is rated to -30C so it's not that bad
| on the freezing side.
| coolspot wrote:
| -40C is very close to 0F (-32C) claimed above.
|
| Update: -40F is -40C, oops, my bad, I don't understand
| Fahrenheit. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| tedunangst wrote:
| Um, -40C is -40F.
| barko wrote:
| -40deg Celsius is actually equal to -40deg Fahrenheit,
| it's the temperature at which the two meet. 0deg
| Fahrenheit is about -18deg Celsius, did you perhaps
| multiply 0 by 5/9 then subtract 32 instead of the other
| way around?
| fnord77 wrote:
| I wouldn't want to roll the dice when it comes to
| aircraft
| kortex wrote:
| The hardware is an imaging system (see other comment). It
| does not impact flight avionics in any way, and is on an
| isolated power source. The flight engineers wouldn't let
| us roll the dice on anything mission critical. They did
| make us redo a bunch of wiring harnesses to use non-
| smoke-producing wires, for example.
| eyegor wrote:
| Along the same lines, most hardware is designed under the
| assumption that you aren't significantly above sea level.
| Tons of medium-high voltage electronics have trouble with
| arcing once it turns on at 6000+ ft.
| gugagore wrote:
| arcing involves ionizing air, right? I would have
| expected that the breakdown voltage of air increases with
| altitude, due to decreasing density of air.
| labawi wrote:
| It's actually the opposite (to a point, I think). Higher
| mean free path means more time to accelerate, then hit
| and ionize something else. That's how fluorescent tubes
| maintain discharge a meter long at measly voltages.
|
| Radiation doesn't help either, as sibling commented - it
| creates ions making the initial breakdown easier, though
| it shouldn't make a difference for a continuous flow that
| involves innumerable ions.
| unixfg wrote:
| Here ya go:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIqK45nxcTo
|
| He even explained it with balls and magnets!
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Have you heard about vacuum tubes?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Yes, and when the cathode heater burns out, they stop
| conducting, as they depend on the thermionic emission of
| electrons (and the absense of gases).
| kalnins wrote:
| I would guess that it could be due to having more ions in
| air due to higher radiation levels.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| Considering most of humanity lives within an hour's drive
| of the ocean, it's not a bad assumption.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm interested why you are being downvoted, as you bring
| up a good point that aligns with what kortex was saying
| in their post.
|
| edit: ahh, now I see it's because you're factually
| incorrect. It's only 1/3rd of humans that live within
| 100km of oceanic coasts.
|
| https://science.nasa.gov/earth-
| science/oceanography/living-o...
| devit wrote:
| You could also add a heater.
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Which is what Google does in at least one of its data
| centers.
| c_o_n_v_e_x wrote:
| Is that for condensation control or because you're
| hitting the low end of your temp range?
| birdyrooster wrote:
| It's some data center in Nordic region, and during winter
| it gets so cold the servers can't heat the place.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It'll be incase of an emergency shutdown.
|
| Can't have the servers freezing when turned off.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And, fwiw, that's exactly what SpaceX did to make Dishy
| tolerant of low temperatures (and to help it clear
| snow/ice from the dish). There's just no equivalent
| solution for high temperatures.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I used to think it was just a matter of product cost to
| do active cooling... really the problem isn't the
| temperature it's the dew point! Which I guess could
| probably be solved with enough hardware, planning, and
| cost as well... but a ridiculous amount compared to
| adding an electric heater for the opposite problem.
|
| Come to think of it does anyone know of a consumer device
| that utilized active cooling (as in would get colder than
| ambient not just fans or whatnot)?
| oceanswave wrote:
| A pump, a home depot bucket in shade, some duct tape and
| tubing would probably be sufficient.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| Thermoelectric coolers can cool below ambient. You can
| get them for CPUs, I saw one on a Linus YouTube video.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling
| duskwuff wrote:
| Sort of. Thermoelectric coolers transfer heat from a
| "cold side" to a "hot side", and generate a lot of
| additional heat in the process. They can be part of a
| cooling solution, but you still need active cooling (like
| a heat sink and fan) for the hot side -- they don't just
| "generate cold" in the kind of way that a resistive
| heater can generate heat.
| meimo wrote:
| a fridge
| zamadatix wrote:
| I mean electronic device, things in a fridge/freezer
| generally don't mind condensation or deposition.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| "Hardware is hard", I would say _Manufacturing_ is hard.
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| That expensive part is NRE and only making a few tens of
| them, no production efficiency. With the volumes spacex
| will be hitting, efficiencies will certainly be found and
| NRE exceptionally better amortized.
| foobiekr wrote:
| No, it's not. Ignoring perfectly predictable issues
| because you can't even learn from recent history
| (millions of sat tv dishes in the nineties) or from
| industry (literally millions of cellular antennas) is not
| "smart."
|
| Also your example is a poor one. Engineering a systems
| solution for 0F is far easier than engineering for
| outdoors in the sun. Heat removal is a primary
| consideration and a 0F environment makes that far easier.
| In 0F your issue isn't the cold, it's the lack of
| humidity - again, something everyone who has more than
| two years in HW knows.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They didn't wait. That's why it shuts itself down.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| There is an interesting article about this.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2021/06/starl...
|
| > Officially, SpaceX has said that "Dishy McFlatface" is
| certified to operate from 22deg below zero up to 104deg
| Fahrenheit. Temperatures reached about 120deg yesterday in
| Martin's town of Topock,
|
| > the Starlink app provided an error message saying,
| "Offline: Thermal shutdown." The dish "overheated" and
| "Starlink will reconnect after cooling down," the error
| message said.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| This is a problem when Arizona was above 100 degrees for
| 144 days out of the year last year.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I mean, the units didn't fail randomly, they shutdown.
|
| They're beta, so it could be that the thermistor was placed
| poorly in a redesign, that they intended 122degC instead of
| degF, that they shipped with a dummy value used in an older
| fw during testing, etc.
|
| All in all, a little embarrassing but not that significant,
| assuming this is certifiably not a scam.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The stated temperature range tops out at 104F so I doubt
| it's a units issue, it's just not designed to stand up to
| temperatures a good portion of the US reaches over the
| summer.
| froh wrote:
| I dont get the degC vs F one? with 122C youre covered for
| 122F. 122C = 251.6F and 122F = 50C
| nine_k wrote:
| The device detects overheating and shuts down orderly.
|
| If they planned to shut it down at 122C (which is indeed
| close to melting the solder) but by mistake made it shut
| down at 122F (not that much for most electronics), it
| would be a completely understandable blooper. It doesn't
| mean that the hardware isn't capable of operating at
| 122F.
| [deleted]
| nitrogen wrote:
| 122F is exactly 50C, so it's probably just a nice round
| number that was chosen for the shutdown temperature.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| According to the article the dish literally reported to the
| user that it had overheated, and then it worked once it had
| cooled down.
|
| Maybe not the greatest behavior, but clearly they already
| accounted for this.
| confused_corbin wrote:
| If you ever work on hardware, please talk to people who
| actually know what they are doing.
|
| Anyone with a six week internship worth of experience would
| have tested this in an environment chamber.
|
| It's bad enough when idiot "first principals" MEs and EEs toss
| this stuff over and I have to deal with it, but it doesn't
| fucking reach customers with faults that bad.
| dathinab wrote:
| 122deg Fahrenheit is not "just" hot, a lot of things will have
| problems operating normally at that degree of heat.
|
| Like in the area where I life a satellite dish reaching 50degC
| would be the rear exception. And if the alternative is not
| having proper internet at all other days, Startlink would still
| be the better option, even if there are a very few days where
| it fails during the afternoon of the day.
| alksjdalkj wrote:
| I'm not sure, it seems like 110+F is pretty common nowadays
| in parts of the US. Adding a dozen degrees if the dish is in
| direct sunlight seems pretty realistic.
|
| (not saying things won't break at that heat, just that it's
| not unrealistically high)
| slipframe wrote:
| Eh, while 122F would probably be a rare temperature in most
| areas, judged by weather reporting, I think if you consider
| hyper-local effects it might not be too rare. If a dish were
| positioned over or near tarmac, it would experience weather
| several degrees hotter than the weather channel was reporting
| for that area. You'd also want to avoid placing it near the
| radiators of air conditioning systems, and other things like
| that.
|
| Just something to keep in mind during installation I suppose,
| not insurmountable problems by any means.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is not something to find in a beta. This is a built-in
| feature and operating temperatures are not picked at random
| (they should not be, at least)
| EADGBE wrote:
| It's like when Tesla finally realized their imaging cameras
| weren't worth crap during the winter with road crust all over
| them. Proving the moderately-self driving capabilities moot.
|
| Ideal conditions during development may not replicate real-
| world use.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| The _service_ is in Beta, but they are still selling a product
| to consumers, which means they are expected to follow normal
| engineering practies. This type of mistake is simply failing to
| meet best practices. I think it is roughly the hardware
| equivalent of using 3DES encryption, storing passwords in plain
| text, or allowing SQL injection. When you sell a device to
| consumers one of the considerations you have to consider is the
| operating range of that device especially if that device is
| used outdoors. Operating ranges are somewhat standardized, and
| most components will specify their operating range in the
| datasheet precisely because this is one of those fundamental
| considerations (like power requirements).
|
| Examples: [1] The least stringent automotive standard I could
| find (AEC-Q100 grade 3) expects components to operate from
| -40degC (-40degF) - 85degC (185degF). [2] A pretty basic
| article on designing outdoor products suggests at least
| -20degC(-4degF) - 70degC (158degF).
|
| This is a standard part of the design flow precisely so that
| you don't make a mistake as monumental as shipping an outdoor
| device that can't withstand the weather at the location you
| shipped it to.
|
| [1] https://community.cypress.com/t5/Knowledge-Base-
| Articles/Mea... [2] https://suntsu.com/2017/09/15/the-great-
| outdoors-designing-p...
| DevKoala wrote:
| The reception hardware is the front end of an amazing
| aerospace engineering effort. Honestly, I am not worried at
| all, since these issues will get ironed out in new iterations
| of the hardware.
|
| I am more interested in seeing the service achieve streaming
| latencies required for video games and trading. The day that
| happens, I have no need to live near a city anymore.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| Speaking from experience in this same industry, this is the
| wrong way to look at it. They significant amount of engineering
| goes in to designing the ground systems such that it can
| tolerate all different types of environments. Currently with
| Starlink you are only seeing probably less than 5% of the
| environments that it would be rolled out in.
|
| This is mainly due to how they are targeting RDOF areas to
| appease the government from winning all that money. Heat is one
| thing, but freezing temperatures are also very difficult to
| deal with. A deicer is common on high-end antennas to melt ice
| off in subzero temperatures.
|
| I would be surprised if SpaceX changes the design at this
| point. To manufacture it antennas in the quantities that they
| need, they would have had to order a lot of the parts 6 to 9
| months ahead of time in large quantities, especially given that
| they lose money on the terminal cost currently.
| cowl wrote:
| SpaceX is known for using less than ideal products during
| test phases and working in parallel for the improved/final
| versions. it depends on what they are trying to test. and in
| this phase they are trying to test the network and will use
| the cheapest dishes that can do for this purpose.
|
| I mean they practically used a water tower to test their
| starship engines. while in parallel they worked for rocket
| design just to test the first flight/landing and yet in
| parallel another deisgn for orbital flight tests etc. It
| seems a waste but this aproach has allowed them to be years
| ahead of ULA in rocket design. In this case I think they have
| demonstrated how they work and it's fair to assume that these
| problems are not engineering miscalculations but deliberate
| "go with the fastest thing you can test" decisions.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| Current dish (manufactured and supplied in April 2021):
| { "dishGetStatus": { "deviceInfo": {
| "id": "ut01000000-00000000-0000e586",
| "hardwareVersion": "rev1_pre_production",
| "softwareVersion":
| "db6b5d22-a642-43d6-bbec-97a816e3dbd6.uterm.release",
|
| "rev1_pre_production" suggests the hardware will be subject
| to revision.
| solarkraft wrote:
| But also that it hasn't been iterated on yet, after 8
| months.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| The reason I don't believe this is they are required to start
| providing service per the FCC by the end of this year. The
| antenna lead time is long enough to where they can't change
| the design now unless it was already in the pipeline.
| awesomeusername wrote:
| Preemptive thermal shutdown at this temp doesn't mean the
| units aren't designed to handle much higher. It means at this
| stage in the beta program they aren't ready to push the
| envelope with customer deployed hardware.
|
| I always back off from the maximum limits for the gear I
| design then after years in the field and proven reliability
| you can remotely update it and push things a bit. And that's
| in production. This is beta
| shaklee3 wrote:
| You don't know that. It's highly likely that they know it
| will do damage above those temps and are doing this to
| prevent damage. We will see in a year or so.
| rini17 wrote:
| The dishes reportedly use around 100W. To safely dissipate
| such a power at higher temps, the design would need visible
| features (such as active cooling). Can't be done by just
| pushing software update.
| josefx wrote:
| Dial down throughput and reliability of the connection
| once enough people have bought into the original hype?
| Downgrading the performance seemed to be the popular
| solution for battery issues on phones not too long ago.
| rini17 wrote:
| Things standing on pavement in direct sun can reach
| 50degC even without any added internal heat.
|
| Phones aren't supposed to be used in such situations at
| all, so it's hard to carry over design lessons from
| there. Plus the radio frequencies used are new, unlike
| phones.
| mynewycombi wrote:
| I guess users would have to strap on heatsinks and fans?
| foobiekr wrote:
| This. I don't understand why people give these companies
| credit for being able to solve problems when they
| straight up ignored industry experience.
|
| It's like.. hey guys, the rest of the world has been
| designing satellite dishes for 40 years that addressed
| these problems including very low cost stuff from the
| satellite TV era. Why didn't SpaceX learn from the rest
| of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Why didn't SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry
| instead of having to rediscover it?
|
| Elon Musk famously works by ,,first principles", which
| can indeed be roughly translated to ,,discover everything
| yourself". The advantage is that it gives a clean slate
| for approaches considered impractical when the books were
| written.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 122F = 50C
|
| Means the antenna is not even outdoor rated
| admax88q wrote:
| This shouldn't even be considered "pushing the envelope"
| it's not that hot.
| unfunco wrote:
| Not that hot? It's 122deg, 134deg is the highest ever
| recorded on Earth, it's pretty hot.
| moogly wrote:
| In the shade.
| markdown wrote:
| The critical components are in the shade of the dish.
| [deleted]
| unixhero wrote:
| Fahrenheit not Celcius
| SiVal wrote:
| It has hit 122 deg in the shade in California both of the
| past two summers (not yet this year). That's in the
| shade. Put equipment on a dark roof in full sunshine and
| your dish becomes a solar cooker. Maybe they could sell
| it that way, and claim autonomous switching between two
| useful modes.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| 122F air temperature or 122F device temperature? Intel
| CPUs shut themselves down at 212F.
| mattkrause wrote:
| That's the air temperature. Dark objects in the sun heat
| up a lot faster.
|
| We have a thermometer with a black plastic sensor (why?!)
| in our balcony. When the sun hits it in mid-morning, it
| gets up to 120degF, even when the actual ambient
| temperature is more like 65degF.
| rualca wrote:
| > The entire purpose of the beta is to find stuff like this.
|
| No, it really isn't.
|
| The point of a test is to verify that the system works as
| designed, and in case it doesn't then there's planned room to
| iterate out unexpected issues.
|
| If a system designed to be operated on the outdoors is not
| designed to operate with temperatures above 50C then this is a
| collosal screwups and gross oversight, as this sort of stuff is
| well-known for decades.
|
| https://web.mit.edu/parmstr/Public/NRCan/CanBldgDigests/cbd0...
| digikata wrote:
| I've worked on multiple projects where, at the early prototype
| stage, we limped along with off the shelf generic heatsinks, or
| even no heatsinks, for a phase or two because for some reason, it
| was long lead or high expense or low priority to fit a custom
| high performance heatsink. It sometimes seems like thermal work
| is as eschewed by electronic engineers as mechanical engineers
| often avoid HVAC.
| vondur wrote:
| Sound like the heat issues with the original X-box's.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I have always had a bizarre fascination with refrigeration
| engineering.
|
| It is amazing all the things this has enabled for humanity.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Well, I've heard of preserving food and transporting
| vaccines, but as an enthusiast have you got any exotic
| examples for me?
| sfifs wrote:
| Not OP but you might find it interesting to hear the
| thoughts of one of the most successful nation builders in
| history on air conditioning :-)
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-
| yew...
| digikata wrote:
| I always wished that the acoustic refrigeration tech ended up
| working out better with wider adoption.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I've seen a teardown of one of these things, and it's sealed well
| to keep out the weather, but that also makes it hard to put in a
| cooling fan.
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| Being in direct sun in the South, I imagine that is pretty easy
| to hit. Guess there will be a market for air conditioned radomes.
| foysaluix wrote:
| I like it.
| iandanforth wrote:
| You'd think that after the fiasco of not using automotive grade
| parts at Tesla which forced them to run AC to keep them within
| operating range they would have put more thought into high
| temperature electronics.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| It should work at an extension of military temperature ranges for
| global use indoors, outdoors, and in odd semi-indoor scenarios
| like the back of a hot truck: -75 to +125 C / -103 F to 257 F.
|
| Treating it as retail consumer electronics shit isn't rugged
| enough for real use.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _Treating it as retail consumer electronics shit isn 't rugged
| enough for real use._
|
| But it _is_ retail consumer electronics and it should be able
| to handle temperatures commonly encountered for a retail
| electronics satellite dish, which includes a hot roof in
| Arizona, but does not include the back of a hot truck where a
| consumer shouldn 't expect his home dish to operate.
| Miraste wrote:
| If they make the dishes fully mobile as promised, the hot
| truck is a reasonable situation to expect and design for.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Wouldn't that go on top of the truck, rather than in the
| truck?
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Speaking of which, how could mobile phones be made to work in
| extremely hot temperatures for emergencies without shutting
| down?
| seventytwo wrote:
| It's really just comes down to thermal mass vs. power
| dissipation. Either you have to increase the thermal mass, or
| limit the power. 99.99..% of use cases are for the phone to
| be in your pocket inside, so designing in a larger thermal
| mass, or limiting performance isn't going to be a factor that
| drives design.
|
| However, since most phones are relative water resistant now,
| a good option is to use evaporative effects to cool them
| down. You could also dig a hole in the earth to find cooler
| temps and dissipate heat that way.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| I think the earth approach is a good option, even if one
| has to dig a few feet down to find some cooler ground in
| the middle of nowhere.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Mostly just by using better components and beter internal
| cooling (=thicker design).
|
| You can find same chips (=same function) made for consumer
| electronics, automative, aeronautic and military, all with
| different temperature and humidity ranges. I'm not sure about
| mobile phone CPUs/SoCs, but automotive equipment is a lot
| more resilient to voltage spikes well above the normal
| 12-14V.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Aerospace / military spec'd components would probably be
| the best way to go where possible. If it's a lithium ion
| battery issue, then maybe they should be using a different
| battery chemistry.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Well you don't leave them out to bake all day, usually.
| wumpus wrote:
| I left my Palm Pilot on the dashboard of my car one day,
| and the LCD melted.
|
| Fortunately, I had seen this before in undergraduate
| physics lab, the day our LCD experiment was interrupted by
| the room thermostat breaking, sending the temp > 100F. The
| nice thing about LCDs is that the crystals reform when it
| cools. All you have to do is wait. Probably works for most
| modern phone displays.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Even commercial-grade electronics have a higher temp range than
| this. Commercial is typically 0C-70C. It's insane that thermal
| shutdown is at 122F, considering it is specifically designed to
| be outside. You could get away with that if it's a device that
| would never leave your desk, but not for this application.
|
| Either this was a dumb oversight, or it was an intentionally
| cut corner because of schedule or MVP or something.
| [deleted]
| kcb wrote:
| What? No it shouldn't. Retail consumers want to be able to
| afford this thing and their use case is plenty "real". It can't
| cost $10,000+ per unit. Maybe in the future they can create an
| industrial/military grade unit but that's clearly not required
| for the mass market product.
| einarfd wrote:
| I've been looking at the other comments on this article, and
| there is a couple of points that I haven't seen address by others
| that I think are pertinent.
|
| 1) What was it that Starlink wanted to beta test with customers?
| It might very well be that they shipped hardware with know
| environmental weaknesses, so not to hold up other parts of the
| project. While taking a hit on the reliability in edge cases.
|
| 2) We know that there are some dishes out there that have heat
| issues, but we don't know how many dish hardware iterations they
| have done. The failing dishes could very well be early prototypes
| that have know issues. Which are fixed in later revisions.
|
| Generally speaking I don't see these reports as worrying. I've
| just come of 10+ years of working on SW on (indoor), embedded
| hardware. Having alpha and beta hardware with issues are common,
| you need some hardware to run your test and SW development on.
| Even if it is fundamentally flawed and you have to throw it away
| because of those weakness later. For those that only have
| experience of building software. What you are seeing here, is a
| view into the sausage factory, and just because it feels messy
| and doesn't line up with your expectations. Don't mean that they
| are doing it wrong.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| -
| daguire wrote:
| DITBA
| boiledrope wrote:
| The sun is hot
| mr_toad wrote:
| Not really, it's surface temperature is about 5800K, which is
| just middling for a star. Surface temperatures of blue
| supergiants can reach 50,000K.
| [deleted]
| kemonocode wrote:
| I wonder why such an aggressive thermal cutoff too, 50C ain't
| that hot even for consumer-grade electronics. Is it related to
| all that heat reducing SNR to unacceptable levels? If so, that
| frankly sounds like a pretty severe design shortcoming.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, the basiv spec for this device intended to be used
| remotely should be summer in the Saudi desert, or at least
| Death Valley (in the same US state) - with solar heating also
| expected.
|
| It's nice that they at least check & shut down to protect the
| device, but this shouldn't have made it out of the prototypes,
| nevermind Alpha or Beta testing...
| [deleted]
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