I was at CES, and I specifically asked to see one of the filament cartridges. Assuming the ones on the show floor are the same design that will ship with the printer, there are no electrical contacts on the cartridge, so likely no "chip" as is the case with ink cartridges. It looked to me like it would be fairly straightforward to reload one of the cartridges with commodity filament.
And speaking of front-ends, there's some funky stuff going on in the bladeRF's:
http://nuand.com/bladerf.pdf
C331, the receive switch blocking cap, is 6.8pF. At 300 MHz, it has a capacitive reactance of 78 ohms. Unless there's a good reason for that (e.g. RF tuning), that's pretty irregular. Typically switch blocking caps are chosen to have very low reactance at the frequency of interest, so as to minimally perturb the 50 ohm environment of the switch port. The reference curves in the switch datasheet were taken with 47pF caps.
Another oddity: the switch control lines are bypassed at the switches with 8.2pF. The bypassing itself is good practice, but again, I question the value. At 300 MHz that's not a very effective bypass. Bumping up the cap values and adding a series element, a ferrite bead or even a resistor, would provide better rejection of environmental RF. My guess is that those traces are run on the surface layer, unshielded, as well.
Okay, so most significantly what I'm hearing is superior weak-signal performance by virtue of good DSP. I'll buy that. Your point about front-ends and the "stick" SDRs is well taken. I've never taken these things seriously because I take a look at most of the front-ends and there's...nothing. No filtering, no shielding, no preselection. And to think that some of them are 8-10 bits and depend heavily on pre-converter gain management, with nothing more than a silicon VGA with a few hundred microamps at best of bias...wow. It's damn scary. I can't imagine taking any of them to a mountaintop somewhere that has 25 transmitters going full-bore on a dozen bands and having a good experience with it. Maybe I'm just an RF design bigot. Anyway, I'll look into the SDR-IQ, sounds like an interesting piece of gear.
Can you define what you mean by "performance" above? Nothing I've read about amateur SDRs has shown them to "wildly" outperform analog radios in:
MDS
Noise figure
Blocking dynamic range
Intermod
Desense
Third-order intercept
Power consumption
In fact, certain SDR architectures may include things like spurious-free dynamic range impairments that are significantly *inferior* to analog radios. I don't deny that there are many things an SDR can do that an analog radio simply can't, chief among them being accommodate new modulation schemes without hardware modification, but I think they're far from a complete replacement for analog.
"Ms. GlaDOS, I need to go to the bathroom!"
"Certainly, Chell, it's out the door and right down that chute."
I saw one just the other day on the freeway on-ramp, holding a sign that said "Will work for BRAAAAAAINS!" The article must be talking about those exorbitant consultant zombies. Man, I'll never hire one of those again...talk about unimaginative business plans.
These days we have Homer Simpson and the King of queens, et al.
Excuse me, but Mr. Simpson is a Nuclear Safety Inspector. They don't just give that job out to anyone. And he's been to space and stuff. They don't just let anyone go to space.
Oh, they certainly exist. I design small consumer electronics devices, some of which have lithium-chemistry batteries. Many of the sub-amp battery charger ICs that I've used (case in point, the Intersil ISL6292) will drop to zero charge current at the end of the charge, when current into the cell drops below a certain threshold for a given voltage. I can't speak to current design practices for laptops, but I'd guess that they do the same. Of course, charging a device that's operating is an entirely different scenario and can be a real can of worms from a design standpoint.
Did it ever occur to anyone that the author is nothing more than a publication troll, seeing what exactly he can get away with? It's possible that the joke's on the journal, not the author.
Unfortunately you left out 4) amortized development costs, 5) what the market will bear, and potentially 6) licensing costs. Consider the engineering work that goes into something like this...easily a few hundred engineer-hours. Now consider that the fully-burdened cost for a junior engineer is close to $100/hr. It goes up from there. So now we're talking in the mid-five figures before you sell unit 1. That's *just* labor. Care to add in ancillary costs? As for what the market will bear, there are LED luminaries on the market ranging in price from $500-ish to well over $1000. $800's not unreasonable there, assuming this is a comparable fixture. Finally, they may well be paying a stiff royalty to Color Kinetics. If you want to have anything to do with intensity-controlled LED lighting, chances are you're infringing on a Color Kinetics patent. They've locked up all the approaches that a reasonable engineer would consider trivial, and they defend their patents zealously. If I were these guys, there's no way I'd go near this without either paying the piper or spending considerable time with a patent lawyer (mo' money) to make sure I didn't get shut down after the first unit sold.
But you're right, it sure does look bomb-proof.
In my experience it's the other way around. I used a calculator *way* more in school (electrical engineering) than I ever have in industry in the last ten years. Why? Well, mostly because the math's much easier now...I don't routinely deal with complex or matrix math, which means a laptop with Excel is sufficient for 80% of what I do, and the remainder can pretty much be done in my head (nb: remember common logarithms and exponentials). Since my laptop is pretty much always within arm's reach, I just keep an Excel scratchpad open at all times. It's also nice to have room to spread out, or adjust various parts of the equation real-time, without having to use an antiquated and constrained interface.
Many people are unenthusiastic about their work.
