|
|
|
|
|
|
by icegreentea2
880 days ago
|
|
|
Every bit of money and platform resources (rad hardened CPUs are giant, slow and power inefficient compared to even semi modern COTS) is money and resources that NASA can spend on scientific payload on the same platform. NASA absolutely does have some incentive to find savings in control hardware and software. Finally, while Ingenuity does use a non-hardened Snapdragon, many other of its critical electronics components are still rad-hardened. The FPGA and dual MCUs (that actually do the low level control and I/O I assume) are both rad hardened. In addition, the COTS components that were used where screened by NASA for their performance in radiation. The Snapdragon is really just there to control the radio, and do image processing. Critically, these are functions that have -some leeway- for timing, giving the option to just restart the Snapdragon if a watch dog detects a problem. All of this to say is that rad-hardening isn't going away, but will probably stick around in many critical niches. What Ingenuity absolutely do is validate that modern COTS processors have a role to play in radiation elevated environments, including in semi-critical applications. |
|
|
HN is dominantly a web/SW crowd plus some mobile frontend, and "it uses a Snapdragon" gives many a wrong idea. In embedded device projects a lot of time is spent planning and designing around a heavy compute element running Linux like this, especially if the device has a safety concept or other mixed criticality concerns. It will have a substantial moat around it.
On HN if you say "systems architecture" most folks go "Oh you mean like, whether we use microservices?". In embedded, while there is a lot of overlap and analogues, it's also all of the above, plus power state management and other aspects. It's not very shiny, but that profession makes all your cars, airplanes and alien planet multicopters.