Headworx

Continuing the series on designing for longevity, a couple of thoughts on skimping on hardware.  Of course less capable chips are less expensive. They even do not need to be less costly to manufacture, but simply a smaller / slower chip is positioned to be a lower cost part in comparison to high end parts. But because most of the products today are defined by software and software upgrades, contrary to hardware upgrades, do not have negative impact on the environment, it is fundamentally important the hardware should have room to accommodate such updates for many years. Skimping on hardware is simply a false economy. Typically we are talking about sub-dollar or single-digit dollar amounts for a chip versus the costs of replacing the whole product built around that chip. One example is my (now 7 years old) Philips Android TV. It has a nice 55" 4k LED panel and a good set of speakers. Unfortunately the Android subsystem (which was already limited at the time of purchase) is complete...

Solid state electronic components seemed to me like a liberation from the problem of wear and tear. Any product containing mechanical parts has been subject to wear and the limited lifetime of those mechanical products has been something obvious and natural. Solid state has brought the new concept of "no moving parts" and to many it was like "finally these products can live forever".  Unfortunately "forever" for typical electronic solid state products means just a couple of years. And capacitors are in most part responsible for this failure. Initially I thought this problem applied only to electrolytic capacitors , which I have been regularly replacing in some of my aging gear. Recently, however, I have experienced a couple of failures of the so-called "actor" modules in my smart home system. These actors are small electronic cubes mounted in walls behind regular wall switches. They are a great way to upgrade an analog electrical installation to ...

It seems people are still underestimating the role (embedded) software plays today in delivering high performance and robust products. From the Bluetooth mesh turf I can say the common wisdom is the "stacks" are all equal and the product performance is defined by the Bluetooth specification  Actually it is quite the opposite. The specification offers a lot of room for innovation. That has always been the principle of Bluetooth SIG - make the spec such that people can go and implement the requirements and the independent products will work together. In particular Bluetooth has been avoiding so called "golden implementations" - products that all other products try to align to. Instead the specifications are tightened and polished to the level that enables many-to-many interoperability of products from different vendors. But interoperability basically means "it works", while how well it performs (throughput, scalability) and how robust it is (e.g., does it re...

The effects of longevity tend to be very often underestimated and overlooked. But this is a fundamental mechanism influencing economies, extraction of natural resources and quality of life in general. For humans longevity, known also as life expectancy, has had a profound effect with progress of medicine in the last 100-200 years. The number of people on Earth has been growing not because there are so many new births, but because we live so much longer. The life expectancy doubled or even tripled. During the early industrial era, an average life expectancy in Liverpool, England was about 25 years. Now it has more than tripled. It is not uncommon we have 4 generations alive - grand-grand parents, grand parents, parents and children. Simply speaking the same birth rate results in 3x the number of living people. The same applies to manufacturing and consumption. Businesses want to manufacture more. So the logic is simple - reduce the longevity of products. Then to have the same amount of ...