'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand Welcome once again dear reader to yet another Monday and of course yet another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers confess the times when they perhaps weren't quite so on the ball as they might have been. This week, for instance, meet "Major Tom" – not his real name – who was inspired to write in after last week's tale …
My university had its own small wafer fab. One day it suddenly burned down. The building was completely destroyed. Supposedly a hydrogen leak IIRC. Miraculously no-one was harmed.
I said to one of the heads of the school outside the smouldering ruins of the building this is terrible etc. He said don't worry, the insurance will cover it. We'll rebuild it and we'll be better than MIT!
I maintain that The Mythical Man-Month should be required reading at one's first job. I read it in a management class at Data General...they were pretty good at offering internal development courses. Though I remained an individual contributor until my recent retirement (from another company), it's always useful to know how the "other half" thinks...
That is the kind of thing that guarantees a management meeting, a revue of procedures and some serious changes to who can do what and how to communicate the change.
Not that it would be very useful, all in all. I mean, one guy did something while the other wasn't paying attention to that. There is no procedure that can cover that and just saying that you should talk about what you did to your colleague at the end of the shift won't be enough. You would have to go through a checklist and validate each item, but the tethering of the helmet might not be on the checklist, so . . .
In any case, I'm sure people were a lot more careful with the next helmet model.
By the way, would that helmet have been for the F35 ?
Just wondering.
I cant help but to think that this is the kind of situation that LOTO (lock out, tag out) was invented for. The carriage shouldn't be physically able to move when someone is doing something to it; whether he's in the path of movement or doing something else that could be affected by the movement (such as holding a tethered-but-not-attached head-mounted display unit). LOTO would have prevented this. (But then again, aren't we all lazy and make assumptions?)
"But then again, aren't we all lazy and make assumptions?"
You're so right. Only this morning I realised I'd bought 4500 of MCP6001R op-amps instead of the usual MCP6001 with no R assuming it was an industrial temperature range or something (they were a bit cheaper at the time).
Oh no, the R means the power pins are swapped, so if I use them on existing designs they short the supply. I'll have to redesign some boards to use them. Durrrr.
When you do redesign the board, make sure to add some solder-blob or zero-ohm links so that you can use either chip in the future. That will save a subsequent board redesign and associated scrap costs when chips are lost or damaged in production.
And I know this because I too have been there, endured the product recall **, and had to put things right.
** The inspection stage missed the tiny writing on the SMT chip. The test stage didn't have 100% coverage, and the lady in goods-inwards missed one digit in a 20 digit product code.
The new AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) machine cost me £40k, Test jigs a further £5k and finally £50 for a pair of glasses in stores. It was a great learning experience if nothing else ...
Not anywhere like at that level, but, we mistakenly assumed that the Tapo (TP-Link) extra chimes we bought for our new Tapo doorbell ( having exited Ring sharpish) would actually ring. Apparently not. They don't specify in the doorbell documentation that there's a specific model chime you need and so I assumed that any of their chimes would work.
I only worked it out I need a different chimer with some very careful reading of the specifications of both models, after Tapo support had sent me instructions on how to connect my chimer to my doorbell, but which actually referenced the other model, but not the one I'd told them I had.
Tapo are possibly one of the poorest communicating companies I've ever dealt with. It's not that they don't communicate. They do. They're very quick to answer the phone or get back when you email them. Fair play to them on that. It's like they have no clue that the user doesn't already know what they know. They give incomplete or ambiguous instructions (like in this case which chimer the door bell links with) in initial set-up or direct support ( we have a few other Tapo bits so I'm used to puzzling out what you actually need to do to get them working). And they don't seem to notice key details in what you send them if you ask for help. not helped by the first line support struggling to understand the purpose, i.e. that a doorbell might need an extra chime or two, round the house, so it needs to communicate with the extra chimers. When I phoned I specified that I had the H100 chime, Then they sent instructions to install the chime. These were a series of steps, but they weren't a full explanation, there were vague bits and ambiguities, which made following them difficult, so that I didn't realise at first that they might be only for a different (H200) device. Which is when I went back and looked at the tiny print in the descriptions of the chimes. H200 had my doorbell in the middle o some tiny print, and H100 didn't.
" It's like they have no clue that the user doesn't already know what they know"
This goes for pretty much every one I have ever encountered in any technological scenario whatsoever.
Having extensive knowledge about a subject seems to confer on any given human the automatic assumption that everyone else has that knowledge, it takes a particular mentality to get over that hurdle and be able to explain things to those without the knowledge.
I'll freely admit that I suffer from it myself, and often find it very difficult to "think down" to the level required to explain complicated things without sounding incredibly patronising.
A PS. After speaking to TAPO about 4 times it turns out that;
1) Neither of the hub-chimes will work as chimes via the WiFi because the bell can only accept one hub,even though one is "compatible" with the bell. I guess you use it instead of the better one it already comes with.
2) Both hub-chimes can be made to work as stand-alone chimers (which is a bit of an overkill if the WiFi part can't be used)
3)To do this you have to set up a script, called an "automation", in the app, which is totally undocumented.
My concern isn't the money, but the fact that if a one-of-a-kind prototype gets destroyed, everything grinds to a halt until it's replaced/rebuilt.
And there are many reasons you might not have two. Of course they're expensive hand-built items. Or the progress is moving so fast they know the second one will be totally different based on the experience from the first one. And sometimes the one of a kind item is made with one of a kind tools by this one guy and he can only go so fast, and it takes months to make one. Or sometimes it's made of unobtanium and you've just used up the year's production.
Now you've got a testing/development program dead in the water.
We have that problem - very long lead items, very short runs, specialist small business running "balls out" to make the stuff, and scope for seemingly innocuous events to cause delays on a £B project. Ouch.
That's why we appear to waste enormous amounts of money testing things that we "know"* will work, because we don't need to "know"* they'll work, we really need to be able to say "it WILL work".
* You know the thing, we've seen the design, it's based on something we know works, there's nothing really to go wrong. So in our minds we "know" it'll work, but until it's tested ...
Reminds me of how I found out I had a weird blood pressure oddity.
I was having a routine checkup as part of a voluntary "collect some data" thing. The medic attached a cuff to my arm attached to a fancy automatic tester thingy. "Just stand there while it takes your pressure".
Ok. Closes eyes and relaxes. Oooo, that feels oooodddddddd.....
CRASH! Wake up on floor surrounded by fragments of fancy tester thing that I'd yanked off the table as I passed out.
A few years later as a pre-op checkup, I mentioned this to my doctor as he prepared to take my blood pressure with, yes, another automatic thingy. "I think I'll pass out if I'm not sat down". No, it'll be fine.
CRASH!
It's now highlighted in my medical notes: patient must be seated when BP taken. I've no idea why they previously asked me to stand as my home test kit specifies sitting, and whenever I've seen BP taken in films and wotnot with the old stirrup pump and valve kit, the patient is always seated.
.
"a pitot tube (how a physical, non-GPS/Radar altimeter works)."
As far as I'm aware the pitot tube measures airspeed.
The altimeter is basically a pressure gauge/barometer (adjusted so the current atmospheric pressure at ground level corresponds to an altitude of 0 ft).
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