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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

#351

Post by ahofmann »

ummonk wrote: post #344
zaroth wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#352

Post by brewdad »

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 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.

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

#353

Post by matheweis »

aaomidi wrote: post #176
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.

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?

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...

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

#354

Post by mahkeiro »

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.

You should work in network operation. I have seen BS go down for so many reasons…..

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

#356

Post by MobiusHorizons »

eganist wrote: post #291
da_chicken wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

+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.

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

#357

Post by judge2020 »

jonathankoren wrote: post #332
zaroth wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#358

Post by HarryHirsch »

mahkeiro wrote: post #354
HarryHirsch wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You should work in network operation. I have seen BS go down for so many reasons…..

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!

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

#359

Post by coolspot »

c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #347
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…

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.

-40C is very close to 0F (-32C) claimed above.

Update: -40F is -40C, oops, my bad, I don’t understand Fahrenheit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#360

Post by wumpus »

rootsudo wrote: post #266
murgindrag wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

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.

Starlink is marketed to the military, but so far they've been testing it with the antennae they normally use.
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