To shave weight off the 787, Boeing opted to replace the shielded copper wiring used to send data including video in the aircraft’s cockpit with optical fibers, which don’t require the same shielding that copper does. Stratos’ optical transceivers are typically used in the visualization aids of cockpit controls such as head-up displays and other navigations.
“In yesterday’s cockpit, they had dials and meters; you actually watched a little dial rotate to tell you what your altitude was and you had an arrow pointing at something mechanically to show you all kinds of other things,” says Dale Reed, senior vice president, sales and marketing for Stratos International. “Today that’s all been replaced with television screens, so they have to move a lot of video material around inside the cockpit, and video is a very different animal than normal transceivers. We have a lot of understanding of how to move video signals, and how to transceive them.”
According to Reed, the signal does need to be converted back to copper to interface with the electronics. “We’re enabling some optical to copper transceiver conversions.” The transceivers also need to be robust enough to handle the harsh environment of a plane in mid-flight. “Transceivers are no magic; they’ve been around for years in networking, but they’re not designed to go on airplanes, it’s somewhat of a harsh environment,” he says.
“In an aircraft, the emphasis is on never-fail performance, and having to be able to operate on a 100 percent up-time basis over the life of the plane and over the altitude, temperature differentials and pressure differentials; it’s a harsh environment,” says Reed.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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