On 6/6/2015 6:46 AM, Alexander Rössler wrote: > Optical cables have different problems than metal cables. They have more > problems when it comes to mechanical stress. I am not sure they will > succeed copper wires that quickly.
With optical and wireless, there still has to be wire to both ends to provide power. If the power wires can be made to simultaneously carry high speed serial data, then there's no need for optical fiber or wireless to carry the data. Something bandied about in the 80's but AFAIK never implemented for vehicle systems was a multiplexed power+data bus that would drastically reduce the amount of wiring in a car. No more dedicated power circuit runs. Everything would simply connect to a common power+data bus with computer boxes commanding the various peripherals to turn on and off or do their more complex operations. CAN bus ain't that. The amount of wiring in vehicles has only grown and become ever more complex. Most things still have dedicated power wires, switched far from the end of the wire runs. Could have been so much less wiring if everything connected to the body/frame ground and to a single big wire running point to point around the vehicle. For adding new devices it could follow the model Texas Instruments used with their 99-4/A Home Computer. The computer didn't have to know anything about any device not built into the console. It just had locations in its memory space where it looked for new devices when turned on. The peripherals contained the Device Service Routine (what PC and Mac and Linux call a driver) in ROM which made the device available to use. Such a system for a vehicle bus would allow a new device to be patched in *anywhere* along the wire. The catch is that every device would need some type of electronics and voltage regulation and an address or ID number not conflicting with any other device on the bus. TI's expansion box could hold 7 cards (plus the interface card) but the computer had more than 7 peripheral addresses available because other devices could be connected between the console and the "firehose" cable, or a Y splitter could be used to connect two expansion boxes - if none of the cards in both boxes had the same address. What today's technology could bring to a "driverless" system is devices could be installed without an address and the host computer could program them to not conflict. DSR's could be flash updated, as they can on some 3rd party cards being made for the 99-4/A in recent years. Would've been nice if IBM had copied TI's DSR system for the 5150 PC! Computers would be so much easier to setup because there would be no drivers to find and download or go obsolete. TI had perfectly functioning plug and play 18 years before Microsoft came up with the term. They sort-of did with MCA but every card required a setup disk- but after setup there was no way anything with the operating system could foul up the hardware configuration. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
