[K0balt]

No, really, good for them.

But don’t be talking down on my car. That’s just not cool.

That beast is the workhorse of the farm and it gets the job done.

None of the windows roll down though and it’s hot as hell inside, so it discourages unnecessary use, saving the planet.

It rarely sees pavement but it drags what needs to be dragged and it pulls the utility rigs out after they deliver to us.

[DanHulton]

And that's all well and good, but maybe introspect here for a second? You're upset that your accomplishments aren't being respected, immediately after discounting the accomplishments of others.

The point is that your car's modifications and the university's are similar, but different, particularly in scale and broad robustness, which adds difficulty in ways you may not be appreciating.

$1.2 million may sound like a lot to you, but to pay a team of people to work on, and provide materials for them to work with (especially cars, which generally aren't cheap, especially used cars right now!)... Well, it likely doesn't go as far as you think it does.

[fdr]

The professor did gloss over briefly the difficulty in making the system work for a large number of vehicles, before arriving at a viable "signature" idea, as the article describes. Sounds like an area with a lot of false starts (heh) and time consumption, and dead ends.

[dghlsakjg]

The professor should have seen that he could send a signature over the airwaves to his relay since that is even more universally compatible… plus, you can buy that exact device for about $20 at the online retailer of your choice.

[K0balt]

Vectorising the power profiles makes this a no brainier. I’ve done it, and I have no brain.

[dghlsakjg]

Did you see the picture of what they built? I wouldn’t describe it as refined or particularly professional.

It sounds like his system is more refined than the academic one. It certainly has more features.

[ModernMech]

$1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.

[totoglazer]

No way. Half goes to overhead. 600k/4 people/4years = 38k/person/year.

[xwdv]

That seems extravagant. By my calculations it should fund approximately 6 or so years.

[neuronerdgirl]

Cover the two PhD students at the NIH payscales for PhD students on a standard training grant[1] ($43,894 not including benefits) and you've used up over a quarter of your budget on less than half the salary needs, completely ignoring any research costs that need to be covered on top of the much higher payscales of the professors. Plus a large number of PhD students in this kind of work make more than the states stipend above. Not extravagant.

https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....

[lasfter]

Where are you seeing $44k? The link you gave shows payscales for postdocs, and points to another page [1] showing that predoctoral trainees get $27k.

Also, in my field and in my region, $27k is massive funding. I don't know anybody who makes that much, let alone $44k, and we also don't get tuition or benefits covered. Our TA/RA union is currently striking because it's essentially impossible to live off of funding alone.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-23-0...

[neuronerdgirl]

I'll give you that I misread bullet 2, so the total is a little over 31k. But grants that fund salaries for predoctoral scholars don't just fund the salary itself, they also cover the additional funds listed on that page. You can't partially fund a trainee on a grant. In any case, this wildly misses the forest for the trees - 1.2 mil in grants does not cover 6 years of salary plus research costs for 2 trainees and 2 professors full stop.

[xwdv]

This was my conclusion as well. Will wait to see what the response is here.

[K0balt]

I’m not disparaging their work. It is probably really cool, and they probably published some great information that will be useful to many. I don’t doubt it was challenging for them, but I do doubt that the problem was fundamentally challenging from en engineering perspective.

As for my “work” it is literally insignificant tinkering by a bored old fucker with nothing better to do than chat on hacker news.. I don’t even respect my work, and anyone who thinks more of it than digging a ditch is just wrong and has obviously never dug a ditch.

But, just calling it like it is, the “signature “ thing they are working on is something that is already solved for decades and if it took anyone more than a week they may not have a clue what they are doing. I have implemented a version of it myself in a technically adjacent application.

In case anyone cares enough - and you probably shouldn’t- feel free to read my incoherent ranting that follows:

In my case I use load vector analysis it to detect and characterise loads on our microgrid. We have several buildings and houses, and we run 100 percent solar on an off grid system.

Using an esp32 and a current transformer coil on each of the three phases, with some good 16 bit ADCs, we monitor and characterise loads. Each of the refrigeration compressors has a somewhat unique starting and load profile. Each water pump in our utility system similarly has a unique startup and load profile. Same with air compressors, fans, and other equipment.

The profiles are programmed into the esp32 by putting it in calibration mode and switching the load off and on 10 times. It’s a pain in the ass because you have make sure no big changes happen in the power system in the meantime, but it works.

The MCU saves the signature as a vector and assigns it a number if it doesn’t sit too close to any existing vector signature.

It is really good actually, even being able to discriminate between identical pumps on the system because of their supply impedance and loading.

I’m not a data scientist or an actual engineer so I adapted some vector code from a DSP project, and the whole thing took me about 2 days using the Arduino IDE (please kill me)

I’m basically an idiot. Anyone who does this for a living should be able to do it in less than half the time.

There are still some rare false negatives because a grid can be quite chaotic, but in general it’s very accurate. In a simple D.C. system like a car in the off condition with predictable loads I would fully expect 4 nines discrimination.

What they did was cool, but it wasn’t hard. Not saying it wasn’t hard for them, and maybe they learned a lot, but I’m pretty sure that 1.2 million to solve the problems described in the article is two orders of magnitude off of reasonable.

From the provided description, If a single engineer with decent tools could not have this from zero to a production ready GERBER file with masks, stencils, and the works to send off for automatic assembly inside of a month they should probably look for another line of work.

Of course, if they work like I do which is to say they don’t, very much, and they mostly drink coffee and fuck off all day, then I’d give them a month and a half knowing full well they did all of the actual work in a week of panicked thrashing, creating months of technical debt in every line of code to build the glass house that somehow works without passing any of the tests but that’s fine you just rewrite the tests.

Of course certification and things like that are a whole different beast, but this was a CORE research grant.

[Gordonjcp]

Given that it's an idea that has been in production vehicles for 40 years, I doubt you'd need to spend $1.2M to "develop" it.

[seemack]

1 line barely acknowledging the criticism, 4 lines defending the car whose feelings I can assume have been mortally wounded. The defensiveness around the car is ironic given how casually you threw out your needlessly negative hot-take.

[K0balt]

Nah, you can’t hurt pure evil. It just sits there, awaiting its next victim.

I hate that beast, but it’s my beast to hate.

You can’t just talk shit about it from your comfy chair, or sitting on the toilet with no circulation to your feet, or whatever — that’s something you earn.

You earn it with mild first degree burns on your right leg and tinnitus like the rest of us.

If I seem abrasive and unnecessarily combative, it’s probably just the incessant itching of my leg and the trauma from driving that thing.

[spell-slinger]

He sounds like a monster of a vehicle. Loyal and strong. The goodest of cars.