{"id":701,"date":"2007-08-15T17:15:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-15T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=701"},"modified":"2007-08-15T17:43:22","modified_gmt":"2007-08-15T22:43:22","slug":"lasermotive-problems-and-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=701","title":{"rendered":"LaserMotive – Problems and Solutions…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest posting<\/a> on the LaserMotive blog discusses ongoing problems they’ve had with their climber’s motor controller.\u00a0 These types of problems are typical engineering ones; I’ve seen many like it during my time of gainful employment.\u00a0 It’s what the engineering process is all about, and it’s why it will take real\u00a0engineering skills\u00a0to build something that has a chance in winning the climber\/power-beaming competition (this year, or any year).<\/p>\n

One engineering “skill” is employing\u00a0testing, testing and testing some more.\u00a0 I remember when I was working at a company called InFlight Phone Corporation.\u00a0 Our product was\u00a0phone and entertainment systems\u00a0for commercial and private aircraft (my job was managing all of the software development).\u00a0 We were having a problem with the phone cord mechanism on many of our commercial plane installations\u00a0– it kept failing.\u00a0\u00a0Our new corporate owner,\u00a0MCI, brought\u00a0in a “SWAT” team of people to help us make our product more robust.\u00a0 Some of their people\u00a0were competent, some were not.\u00a0 One of the not-so-good ones\u00a0got involved with the\u00a0problem of the handset cord failures.\u00a0 He looked at\u00a0our current\u00a0solution\u00a0and soon\u00a0came up with a new one, one he was sure would solve the problem.\u00a0 He was so sure that he said it didn’t need testing – just get it out to the planes ASAP.\u00a0 Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and, over his objections, we brought in an ME to do some real analysis and testing on it.\u00a0\u00a0The ME\u00a0rigged up a mechanism that repeatedly pulled the cord in and out of its holder, simultaneously dragging it over a plastic arm, simulating the type of motion it would be subjected to on a plane.\u00a0 Within 12 hours, the new, “improved”\u00a0design failed.<\/p>\n

Testing, testing, testing – an absolute key ingredient to success…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest posting on the LaserMotive blog discusses ongoing problems they’ve had with their climber’s motor controller.\u00a0 These types of problems are typical engineering ones; I’ve seen many like it during my time of gainful employment.\u00a0 It’s what the engineering process is all about, and it’s why it will take real\u00a0engineering skills\u00a0to build something that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-entries","category-spaceelevatorcompetitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}