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2
Silicon Chip
Editorial Viewpoint
Trusting our lives to computers
In the January editorial, I raised concerns about the
digital security of autonomous vehicles. While two fatal
accidents relating to (semi-)autonomous vehicles have
been in the news lately, both appear to be due to failures in the sensors or software. One resulted in Uber
suspending North American autonomous vehicle testing for an indeterminate period.
Consider that in the last 12 months, around 1250 people were killed in road accidents in Australia. Let’s imagine that by making every vehicle on our roads autonomous, we could halve
that, to 625 deaths per year (without any negative effects).
This seems like it would be a good thing. But will the general public
accept software errors killing two people every day in Australia alone? Most
of these people will not have done anything wrong and there may be nobody
to “blame” in most of these incidents. Based on the reaction to the aforementioned deaths, I don’t think it would go down well at all.
And then consider the future posed by the article on flying passenger drones
in this issue. This brings us the possibility of fatal crashes involving not just
drone passengers but also (from time to time) some hapless people on the
ground, too. They could be minding their own business when, with no warning, a drone falls on them.
Yes, flying is very safe these days but commercial aviation is heavily regulated and the aircraft are well-maintained. They still crash occasionally.
And while there are a huge number of planes in the air at any given time,
there would have to be many more small drones to have a significant impact on
transportation. They’d have to come crashing down to earth from time to time.
So the question is this: will the general public get used to the idea of computer errors or hardware failures being responsible for so many deaths?
A different approach to project construction
On another topic, we have the first part of a very practical major project in
this issue, namely, the lithium-battery-based Uninterruptible Power Supply.
This is an unusual project for us because while it’s quite a large and complex
design, there’s little soldering involved.
It’s mostly built from off-the-shelf building blocks that are wired together. It
does have a custom control PCB, the details of which will be presented next
month but even this is based on pre-built Arduino and relay driver modules.
When you look at the UPS box, mostly what you see are the large batteries
and the impressive sinewave inverter.
The fascinating aspect of this project is that you could take essentially the
same design and scale it down to a tiny backup supply for a few LED lights.
Or you could scale it up to a huge device that would keep a household running for days without mains power. The design principles used would be
basically the same.
So we had some “spirited” discussions about just how best to present it
in the magazine. Is it just a UPS or is it something much more than that? We
wound up mentioning some of the many other possibilities in the article. But
there are lots of aspects of this design to be explored.
We’ll finish describing this UPS design – which has quite a few different
uses – over the next couple of issues. But we intend to revisit the concept in
the future, to flesh it out. For example, we may add solar panels to keep the
batteries charged when the grid fails. And we might increase the size of the
battery bank and inverter power. This would greatly expand its possible uses.
In the meantime, some readers may see what we’ve done and decide to expand
the design on their own. There’s certainly nothing to stop you from doing that.
Nicholas Vinen
Celebrating 30 Years
siliconchip.com.au
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