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Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

arstechnica.com

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Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#341

Post by XorNot »

da_chicken wrote: post #282
alisonkisk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making practical tradeoffs to get what's important is engineering reality.

"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 ou…

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.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#342

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

eyegor wrote: post #327
kortex wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either…

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.

Considering most of humanity lives within an hour's drive of the ocean, it's not a bad assumption.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#343

Post by swiley »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #308
swiley wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not like 4g hotspots and old cell phones don't overheat either.

I have yet to see cellphone towers shut down because the summer is too hot.

I have yet to hear about the starlink spacecraft going into thermal shutdown in Arizona.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#344

Post by ummonk »

zaroth wrote: post #231
tyingq wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 a…

They didn’t need that size, they could have gotten by fine with a smaller size just like every other car company.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#345

Post by babesh »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #294
babesh wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 a…

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.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#346

Post by mmmBacon »

blhack wrote: post #154

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.

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.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#347

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

kortex wrote: post #260
jrockway wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

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 0°F. If you need to design a system which needs to sit in an aircraft in Deadhorse, Alaska, you either…

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.

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#348

Post by shakna »

0xTJ wrote: post #252
tyingq wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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...

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#349

Post by nr2x »

kortex wrote: post #279
MichaelApproved wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We rolled, and it turned out fine. Who is “we”?

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 dozen…

Sounds like a fun job!

Re: Starlink dishes go into “thermal shutdown” once they hit 122° Fahrenheit

#350

Post by judge2020 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #346
blhack wrote: post #154

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.

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.

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....

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