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Thursday, March 5, 2015

Tesla: Please Don't Hack Your Cars

As reported by PC Mag: Tech-savvy car fans might be tempted to tinker with a Tesla's high-tech innards, but Elon Musk would prefer that you not pimp your ride.

In a new regulatory filing, Musk outlines the challenges and risks facing Tesla Motors, which is a pretty standard thing to do on such documents. But this particular list is intriguing because it covers a very modern potential problem with today's cars.

"If our vehicle owners customize our vehicles or change the charging infrastructure with aftermarket products, the vehicle may not operate properly, which could harm our business," the report said.

Pointing a finger directly at "automobile enthusiasts" often keen to hack their car to boost performance, Tesla warns that changes could place vehicle safety systems at risk.

Customers who install seats meant to elevate the driver, for example, may be placing themselves out of range of the airbag. Others who try to install large speaker systems could impact the car's electrical system, or, you know, accidentally fry their brains.

"We have not tested, nor do we endorse, such changes or products," Tesla said. "Such unauthorized modifications could reduce the safety of our vehicles, and any injuries from such modifications could result in adverse publicity which would negatively affect our brand and harm our business, prospects, financial condition, and operating results."

The company suffered some bad PR in the fall of 2013, when its electric vehicles caught fire three times in five weeks. Perhaps rewiring a Model S stereo system so you can better jam out to Kanye's sick beats could turn you into the next "Tesla disaster" headline.

Most of the other "risks" outlined in the annual report lean on Tesla, not consumers: delayed rollouts, slow suppliers, high prices, and negative publicity.

There is little the manufacturer can do about customers tinkering with their cars—a fact Tesla all but admitted in its report. But don't say you weren't warned.

Last month, Tesla was accused of padding its 6,000-strong ranks with a number of former Apple workers; the automaker hired at least 150 ex-Cupertino-ites since 2010, Bloomberg reported.

Apple is fighting back, allegedly offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increase to Tesla employees who join the tech giant.

Last year, Musk confirmed he had informal talks with execs at Apple, but denied any acquisition plans. 

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

FCC Issues New Rules on E911 Location Standards, Options Besides GNSS

As reported by Inside GNSS: New rules recently adopted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help emergency responders better locate wireless 911 callers highlight the role of GPS and GNSS technologies while boosting the use of alternative positioning technologies in indoor locations.

However, the new enhanced (11 (E911) rules, adopted January 29 and published on February 4, explicitly avoided a decision on the use of GNSS systems other than GPS.

The E911 rules were originally adopted in 1996 and underwent their last major revision in 2010, but they allowed providers to meet accuracy standards based solely on the measured performance of outdoor wireless 911 calls.

The new rules will require wireless telecom companies, referred to in FCC terms as commercial mobile radio service (CMRS) providers, to ensure “dispatchable location” or x/y location within 50 meters can be provided to 911 call centers, known as public safety answering points (PSAPs), within 30 seconds, regardless of indoor or outdoor location. Dispatchable location means the street address of the calling party, plus additional information such as suite, apartment, or similar information necessary to adequately identify the location of the calling party.

The requirement begins at 40 percent of the calls within two years and 80 percent within six years. Separate vertical location reporting requirements are also laid out in the FCC’s order. Regional mobile phone service providers have similar requirements but a more flexible time line.

“To be sure, no single technological approach will solve the challenge of indoor location, and no solution can be implemented overnight,” the FCC commissioners said in the agency’s Fourth Report and Order on Wireless E911 Location Accuracy Requirements. “The requirements we adopt are technically feasible and technologically neutral, so that providers can choose the most effective solutions from a range of options.”

The FCC pointed out that the increasing number of wireless 911 calls from indoors “has reduced the quality of location information available to first responders in the absence of compensatory technologies to enhance location. Specifically, satellite-based location technologies do not provide accurate location data for many wireless calls placed from indoor locations, particularly in urban areas here a growing number of Americans reside.”

In determining the appropriate balance to strike in its requirements and timeframes, the agency gave significant weight to the “Roadmap for Improving E911 Location Accuracy” that was agreed to in November 2014 by the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO), the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), and the four national wireless Commercial Mobile Radio Service (CMRS) providers. The FCC commissioners also relied on the “Parallel Path for Competitive Carriers’ Improvement of E911 Location Accuracy Standards” (“Parallel Path”) that was submitted by the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA).

GNSS Good and Bad
Although the FCC had come to support the use of GPS and assisted-GPS techniques in meeting its E911 goals, it did not abandon GNSS technology in adopting the indoor-oriented rules.


“We see no reason to discount reliance by CMRS providers on such successful indoor fixes [provided by assisted-GNSS or A-GNSS] in promoting our goals for indoor location accuracy,” the commissioners said. “Conversely, particularly in light of the rapidly accelerating trend toward indoor wireless calls, we do not believe these figures [on successful A-GNSS E911 calls from indoor locations] provide any significant disincentive for CMRS providers to pursue alternative solutions for indoor calls in more challenging indoor locations.  Indeed, CMRS providers have significant incentive in many indoor situations to pair A-GNSS with other location technologies.”

On the other hand, the agency was unwilling to accept GNSS E911 solutions other than GPS for the time being.

“We do not decide the issue of operating with non-U.S. satellite signals in this proceeding, which would require consideration of a variety of issues, including its potential impact on the use of adjacent bands,” the report and order stated. “Therefore, nothing in today’s decision authorizes the use of any non-U.S. satellite system in conjunction with the 911 system, including the 911 location accuracy rules we adopt today.

The FCC noted that A-GNSS technologies used to augment GPS “may increase the potential exposure of devices to interference by increasing the number of unwanted signals and the number of signals that can introduce data integrity problems.”

CMRS providers seeking to use non-U.S. satellites should also conduct testing “to ensure that operation with these signals does not inadvertently introduce vulnerabilities to the devices that could impair E911 performance or compromise data integrity,” the reported added.  For example, devices that are augmented to receive signals from multiple satellite constellations may be more susceptible to radio frequency interference than devices that receive signals from GPS alone.

Devices should also be evaluated to determine their capabilities to detect and mitigate the effects of inaccurate or corrupted data from any RNSS system that could result in incorrect location information, or no information at all, being relayed to a PSAP,” the commissioners said, referring specifically to the GLONASS system failure on April 1, 2014.

“We expect CMRS providers, at the time they certify their compliance with the Commission’s location accuracy requirements, to also certify that any devices on their network operating with foreign A-GNSS signals for 911 location accuracy have proper authorizations in place to permit such use,” the order directed. “Before incorporating foreign A-GNSS into E911, CMRS providers must coordinate plans for foreign A-GNSS signal integration with the [FCC’s] Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to confirm that signals are interoperable with GPS and that measures to prevent interference are appropriate. Furthermore, CMRS providers are expected to certify that the devices have been tested to determine their ability to detect and mitigate the effects of harmful interference.”

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Amazon Files Patent for Mobile 3D Printing Delivery Trucks

As reported by 3DPrint: There is little doubt that some of the world’s largest corporations are investigating 3D printing as a means to both make and save money across the board. Amazon, for example, has slowly been inching its way into the space, partnering with several key companies, including Mixee Labs, to offer customizable 3D printed products to their customers.

As the world’s leading ecommerce provider, Amazon seems to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to selling us anything from printer paper to giant $1 million robots. Thus far, it appears as if the company’s decision to enter the 3D printing space has paid off, as they continue to expand the program in both scale and scope.

p3
If you know much about Amazon, then you know that they obsess with getting products to consumers as fast as physically possible. In fact, they have recently launched One-Hour Delivery in Manhattan, and is pushing for delivery via drones. Usually though, the faster a product is shipped, the more money it will cost the company that is shipping it, and ultimately this comes back to the consumer.  For example, Amazon needs to stock literally millions of products at warehouse hubs as close to their customers as possible. Warehouse space is not cheap, especially when considering the millions of square feet needed by a company like Amazon.
What if Amazon could avoid same of these storage costs and get items to users even faster with the use of new, rapidly advancing technologies like 3D printing? Well, that’s just what they are looking into.

Late last week United States Patent and Trademark Office published a patent filing by Amazon Technologies, Inc. which outlines a method of 3D printing on-demand within mobile manufacturing hubs.  According to Amazon, such a setup could save the company time and money on several fronts.
“The multiplicity of items offered may require the electronic marketplace owner/operator to maintain a large inventory requiring sufficient space to store the inventory,” states the filing. “An electronic marketplace may also face the challenge of time delays related to the process of finding the selected item among a large inventory. Increased space to store additional inventory may raise costs for the electronic marketplace. Additionally, time delays between receiving an order and shipping the item to the customer may reduce customer satisfaction and affect revenues generated. Accordingly, an electronic marketplace may find it desirable to decrease the amount of warehouse or inventory storage space needed, to reduce the amount of time consumed between receiving an order and delivering the item to the customer, or both.”
p2
p1By utilizing ‘mobile manufacturing apparatuses Amazon would be able to send an STL file to a mobile unit that’s closest to a customer, providing it with instructions to print out an item which was ordered. When the item has been completed, it could then be within miles of the customer who ordered it and quickly delivered or picked up.

The mobile hubs, according to the patent filing, would include a means to both additively and subtractively manufacture an item. This could include a number of different 3D printing technologies as well as CNC machining tools, which would ultimately reduce Amazon’s reliance on warehouse space as well as the robots and employees needed to sort through these stored items.

Of course every patent that’s filed does not materialize into an actual product or service, but as 3D printing technology continues to progress and competition for delivery speed picks up, this is certainly something I could see Amazon eventually putting to use. Now we just have to wait for the drones which 3D print items 10,000 feet above the earth and can deliver items within minutes.

The Brains Inside Your Car Are About to Get Smarter

As reported by USA Today: With all this talk of co-piloted and autonomous vehicles, one question stands out. If cars gradually are taking over more of our driving chores, can they do so safely and error-free? After all, the dark side of this rise-of-the-machines scenario is a rogue vehicle that catastrophically misreads the data flooding its sensors.

Freescale Semiconductor (FSL) aims to raise the bar on the quality of chips used in increasingly sentient vehicles. On Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Austin-based company, which spun out of Motorola (MSI) in 2004 and is focusing on the booming Internet of Things space, announced a new S32V vision microprocessor. The company describes it as “the first automotive vision system-on-chip with the requisite reliability, safety and security measures to automate and ‘co-pilot’ a self-aware car.”

Translated into English, this simply means that Freescale’s new chip will to help automakers pack a new level of autonomy into future models that will require less of drivers by upping the processing power and reducing the error-rate from its onboard computer systems. 


“You don’t want the silicon (chips) running your Candy Crush game driving your car,” says Matt Johnson, Freescale’s vice president and general manager of microcontrollers. “Right now, the focus is on assisting the driver with things like lane departure and collision avoidance. But soon we’ll have a radical shift to having the car in control. That means automotive-grade silicon that can function with higher temperatures and with zero defects.”

Johnson gives the example of a car loaded with radar, lidar (laser radar) and ultrasonic sensors, information from which all needs to be aggregated by the vehicle’s computers and turned into a split-second decision about whether to act or not. But the human-cost payoff of successfully integrating tech into cars is apparent.

“Roughly 90% of auto fatalities are due to human error,” he says. “It would be great to help reduce that.”

Given long automotive production cycles and inherent regulatory testing requirements, Johnson says the new S32V chip is likely to make its way into production models by 2020.


Intel's New Chip Line Could Give Cheap Smartphones a Big Boost

As reported by WiredThe arrival of new mobile processors rarely qualifies as big news. But Intel’s latest family of chips, announced at Mobile World Congress today, are both powerful and cheap, and are sure to drive the industry trend of high-capability, low-cost smartphones to even greater extremes.

The Atom X3, X5 and X7 processors will show up in a wide range of 2015’s smartphones and tablets. The processor family is arranged much like its desktop Core “i” line, with the X3 being the lowest end of the bunch. The X3 is Intel’s previously announced Project SoFIA (“Smart or Feature phone with Intel Architecture”). It’s a cheap, entry-level system-on-a-chip with either a 3G or 4G LTE modem, Bluetooth, and x86 architecture-based application processors.

This chip is notable because it could enable much more capable phone hardware at the $50 price point, which will be a huge boon to smartphone adoption in developing nations. More than 20 device manufacturers have signed on to incorporate this chip into their hardware designs.  The first devices incorporating the Atom X3 chip (in a dual-core 3G variety) will arrive this quarter, while quad-core 3G and LTE versions will arrive by the end of the first half of the year.

The X5 and X7 series, meanwhile, are Intel’s mainstream and high-end mobile chipsets, and the first 14 nanometer SoCs for tablets. They have double the graphics capabilities of Intel’s previous-generation chips, without compromising battery life, and support features like Intel’s RealSense 3-D experience (which we checked out on the Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet) as well as its TrueKey face-recognition-based password authentication. You’ll find these two chips on Android and Windows tablets from Acer, Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, and Toshiba debuting during the first half of 2015.

Intel’s last hardware announcement for Mobile World Congress is a new LTE Advanced modem, the XMM 7360. This is the chip that connects you to your carrier’s wireless network, and with this one, Intel is promising more stable connections and faster speeds. Appearing in devices beginning the second half of the year, it’ll offer 450 Mbps down as well as something called carrier aggregation, which basically makes data usage more efficient, so users can get higher peak data rates.

You may wonder, with Intel’s huge focus on wearables in 2014, where the smartwatches at? Intel hasn’t forgotten about your wrist—company reps tell me we should expect more news on that front very soon.

Monday, March 2, 2015

NASA Astronauts Finish Spacewalk Trilogy for Space Taxis

As reported by India.com: NASA astronauts successfully ended their third and last spacewalk on March 1 to reassemble parts of the International Space Station (ISS) and create parking slots for Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) which will provide commercial space taxis in the near future.

The Expedition 42 astronauts Terry Virts and Barry Wilmore ended their spacewalk with the repressurisation of the Quest airlock. They completed installing 400 feet of cable and several antennae associated with the Common Communications for Visiting Vehicles system known as C2V2. The five-hour, 38-minute spacewalk was the third for Virts and the fourth for Wilmore.

Virts has now spent 19 hours and two minutes outside during his three spacewalks. Wilmore now has spent 25 hours and 36 minutes in the void of space during his four excursions. NASA crews have now spent a total of 1,171 hours and 29 minutes conducting space station assembly and maintenance during 187 spacewalks.

Boeing Crew Transportation System (CST)-100 and the SpaceX Crew Dragon will use the system in the coming years for rendezvous with the orbital laboratory and deliver crews to the space station, the US space agency said in a statement.

The US space agency is all set to perform three spacewalks — the first one scheduled for Saturday — to reassemble parts of the International Space Station (ISS) to create parking slots for Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) — two commercial space taxis. NASA has awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop, test and fly capsules that can ferry astronauts to and from the station.

According to SpaceX, the upgraded Dragon V2 passenger spacecraft should be ready for an unmanned debut test flight to the station in late 2016 and a crewed test flight in early 2017. Boeing plans to dock an unmanned CST-100 test flight to the station in April 2017.

SpaceX Successfully Launched Two Satellites

As reported by Forbes: At 10:50pm on Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. On board were satellites for two different customers, Eutelsat and Asia Broadcast Satellite (ABS).

The two companies jointly financed both the satellite construction and launch. The satellites themselves were made by Boeing. They’re unique in that rather than conventional rocket thrusters, they’re powered by electric propulsion. That reduced the weight of the satellites to the point where both could be launched at once. The downside, though, is that it will take the satellites months to reach geostationary orbit.

Eutelsat’s satellite will join its network of broadcast satellite, providing the company coverage to its customers from Alaska and Canada to South America. ABS’s satellite will be used to provide customers on several continents with TV signals, internet backhaul, and cellular service.

SpaceX has been experimenting with making the first stage of its rockets reusable, which the company has said could save millions in launch costs. To that end, it’s been attempting to land the first stage of its rockets after takeoff. No landing attempt was made today, however.

“Next landing attempt will be 3rd launch from now,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted. “Tonight’s flight and following one will not have enough propellant.”

Musk indicated in a separate tweet, however, that changes will be made to the next generation of Falcon 9 rockets to improve the prospects of reusability.

SpaceX’s next launch is scheduled for March 21, when a Falcon 9 will deliver a communications satellite into orbit for Thales Alenia Space and the government of Turkmenistan.