Techno Babble

“To err is human, to really screw up you need a computer.” (anon)

There is much speculation about reasons for delays to the Airbus 380.

A recent discussion topic at airliners.net, talks about incompatibilites between different versions of Catia (V4 and V5 being used by different organisations in the consortium) being one of the causes.

Some of the chat centers on the wiring ( My question is “Wouldn’t fibre optics be better?” - but then again I’m not a harnessing/wiring expert)

Quote:
Some 300 of the 500 kilometers of wiring use aluminum instead of the conventional copper as the current conductor. Thus, 20 percent of the conventional weight has been saved. Aluminum itself is 50 percent lighter than copper.

The aluminum wiring technology has been used on all types of Airbus aircraft for big sections, that is wiring or cable where the cross-sectional dimension is 5 square millimeters (sq mm) or more. The A380 is the first aircraft to use the technology for small sections, under 5 sq mm. and for the connections. There are about 100,000 electrical links on the A380 compared with 60,000 on the A340.

The challenge was protection against corrosion. The new wires are made of nickel-plated, copper-clad aluminum strands. A special protection, based on composites material, has been developed against corrosion. A new specification was worked out for the aluminum connectors. The inside of the insulation material is made of hydrolysis improved polyimide tape. The outer insulaton is made of improved PTFE tape. Airbus also highlights the insulator’s resistance to arcing.

The physical arrangement of the aircraft was designed using Catia. Has the change from Copper to Aluminium caused a problem because the raceways are now too small so that the bundle no longer fits, or signal and power wires are positioned too close together, holes for the connectors to pass through may be too small etc.

There’s also an interesting article at WorldCAD Access

But isn’t the software used only a tool ?

The debate continues …

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Sketch Furniture from Swedish company Front Design claim to have developed a system to materialise free hand sketches.

Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture devices to become 3D digital files which are “materialised” using Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.

Watch the videos and you can decide for yourself whether what you see is real or not.

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The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware.

Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform , lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform.

Read an associated datasheet, Microsoft Robotics Studio DataSheet Oct06 English.pdf

You can also read an interesting article in the Redmond Magazine, Microsoft’s Future Is … Robotics? where there’s an interview with the general manager in charge of the Microsoft Robotics Studio product, Tandy Trower.

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