Japanese boffins say they've created plastic optical fibres to reach places that might break glass Boffins at Japan's Keio University reckon they've built viable optical fibers from plastics. Optical fibers are most often made of glass and are, as attested by the awesome data-schlepping capacity of undersea cables, freaking amazing. But while boffins have made optical fibers very resilient, they've not been able to address …
I'm pretty sure the Saab 9-3 I used to have had optical fibres to the light cluster controllers at the back. One obvious solution is to have the 12V bussed around to local controllers for whatever and have optical fibres for the CAN bus to control everything. That makes the wiring loom much simpler as variants for different markets and models are a local controller change or even just a different software build.
Having been a fan of Project Binky for some years now I was amazed at how chaotic the wiring loom could get in a small car.
Also, using more plastic in an application such as vehicles that are relatively shortlived is another addition to the list of difficult or impossible to recycle materials that end up in the environment.
The amount of non renewable materials and unnecessary electronics that goes into vehicles now is absurd.
Not as daft as it sounds. Car engines themselves are a constant source of EMPs. All the electronics in a car need suppression and shielding all over the place. Replacing the signal wiring that acts as an antenna picking all this up with a fibre would help.
However I do wonder how car light bulbs and windows work if glass can't be used in cars.
Light bulbs and car windows are both hardened to be shatter-resistant (typically, side window glass is tempered while windshield glass is laminated). IINM, shatter-resistance doesn't work well with glass fibers, so using optical plastics for a car's internal data bus sounds like a plausible idea.
Also mentioned, using these in a modestly-sized data center also sounds nice. Could reduce costs, increase layout options, or both.
why on earth do you need fibre optics in a car
If it's a special fibre optic, that you can buy once in a full moon or it is serialised so it will only work with your car, then it means billions of potential profit for "authorised repair shops". If a mice take a bite of that fragile fibre, there goes your month's salary.
Tut Tut Sir. When you hit the post you appear to have slightly scratched the fibre surface and it's producing reflections so the signal is being attenuated and the auto-gear knob warmer is set to maximum when a high bmi passenger sweats near the demist sensor for the heated rear screen. That'll be a complete rip out and fibre refit at £2000 please ...
You obviously have never experienced this IRL. You couldn't sniff a replacement for that cost.
My old (few mod cons) VW GTI was totaled by the insurance company after rodents chewed through the wiring harness. The cost to install a new copper harness was $10000 (about £7500) and it was cheaper for the insurance company to buy the car.
I had an '07 plate BMW 3 series and that had a fibre optic loop connecting the elements of the entertainment system together. I'm not really sure what advantage that gave apart from making it not worth the hassle of fitting an after market system so the three previous owners hadn't ruined things with a ridiculous head unit.
as long as you have power available on copper, you can send data by fiber and it will most likely be a MUCH smaller cable, and apparently more resilient to age and even bending and vibration [using polymer], and the one thing that makes the most sense in a vehicle: LIGHTER WEIGHT (and probably lower cost).
And copper can be expensive. So if fiber is cheaper, between the window and lock controls and the car computer [for example], with a bendy cable going into the doors from the car's frame, you need to be able to handle repeated bending, vibration, moisture, heat, cold, and other things that make wires go bad. And, probably , GLASS fiber optics. But maybe not polymer.
And again, copper is expensive. And relatively heavy. So yeah.
I must be missing something here:
(1) The material surely doesn't need forward error correction, but the data transmission might become more reliable with FEC.
(2) The degradation of information as it is transmitted through a cable (fiber) is distance dependent: Errors accumulate as the path gets longer. Clearly the plastic fibers are meant for short distances, because the optical quality of plastics is usually inferior to that of high quality glass. So I would expect that for a comparable fiber lengths, the polymer fiber would accumulate more errors. Maybe they compared a meter-long polymer fiber to a km-long glass fiber? Or maybe something got lost in translation.
I'm not sure how it would affect error correction in this case, but perhaps the types of errors are different; e.g. due to the different propagation or scattering properties in the different types of fibre. All errors are not necessarily the same.
My rather non-technical understanding about transmission down fibres (and I think this applies to copper as well as optics) is that there are two distance related problems: (i) you lose intensity of the signal so eventually you can't pick it out of the noise; (ii) the signals "smear out" so that a set of nice rectangular pulses going in turns into rolling humps at the other end. These are related to absorption loss and dispersion respectively. My guess is that the Japanese have come up with a plastic fibre that's ok for one of these but not so good for the other, hence the short distance limitation. (It might well say which in the Keio U. announcement but I can't read Japanese!)
Riiiiight. Like the key-fobs still using 1990's radio technology are now only $3 a pop to replace...
No, it's got "optical fiber" in the name, so it's mystical and magical to the wrench monkeys, and hence will cost a least 10 times what the same spec cable would cost from CDW or FONetworks.
This would make for good patch cables, assuming fiber jacks ever become cheap enough to go mainstream.
Another would be scientific instruments needing extreme noise or voltage isolation.
I'm not so sure about automobile use. As others have said, the only advantage is reducing the need for EMP-safe signaling. That's not a big deal because every device still needs giant inductor-diode-resistor-capacitor power filters.
Well the evidence from the 1980's when plastic fibre made its debut is that it is as good as glass over short distances, such as those found in the telco local loop and internal to office buildings. This combined with its easy to terminate properties (simply cut with a sharp knife) would seem to make it preferrable to glass. However, for some reason it hasn't taken off.
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