OT Toyota and NASA

http://www.space.com/news/nasa-joins-toyota-probe-100330.html

Kind of curious as to what they find out thought it may peak some interest

well if anyone knows how to beat the **** out of a computer it is NASA

Thing that suprised me was that the Transportation Safety Comminsion only has 2 electrical engineers on staff. You would think that as the number of electtronic controls on cars have increased the number of engineers needed to test them would have increased.

No wonder they need NASA to figure it out.

I heard this on the news last night. A good move, I think, since NASA does have a credibility. There's a lot of conspiracy theory related to this issue out there right now. People throwing around words and phrases they don't understand like "ghost in the machine", etc...

I have noticed that the mass media interest seems to die down after the infamous Prius incident in San Diego.

Oh, the thread I started: http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=52728

The same NASA that the current admin thought could be outperformed by private industry is now supposed to do a better job than private industry. Of course its the same govco that thinks it can do a better job than a certain other sector of private enterprise...

Didn't mean to politicize this, but the irony is laughable. ROFL!

This thread is not off topic. It can affect industrial controls too.

We have been concerned about this for a while and this problem can affect just about any modern semiconductor devices because the distance between the traces is measured in nano meters. The word we use in electronic design it "Single Event Upset" or SEU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_event_upset
Basically we must be careful do use only RAM withe ECC and the CPUs themselves must have ECC for their registers. FPGAs must also have some sort of CRC or checksum. CRCs and checksums can detect errors but they will not correct them. In this case there needs to be a way of safely restarting the controller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction

I think this is a political move more than anything. you mean to tell me that there werent any engineers that already work in vehicle design that could give a hand?

The point you mentioned on the SEU's is definetely suited to the this site. Diat150 yes its a political move however I beleive the main reason to use NASA is to have a well known third party look at the problem.