On 12/11/14, 9:54 AM, Brian Lloyd wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jim Lux <[email protected]> wrote:
Actually, I think my point was that the problems I face at JPL are
essentially identical to the problems we face at home. I'm not in the time
and frequency group (and I don't know that they actually are better off..
although they do have rooms full of good clocks), so in our areas, we tend
to have little point solutions to problems.
Has anyone there noticed the amount of time and money spent recreating the
same thing over and over? Sure, individually it is cheap but when you do
the same thing hundreds of times, it is no longer a tiny amount. Clearly it
is a common needed service/device that your IT (or whatever) dept could
provide for nearly nothing. Sheesh.
Nothing in an institutional environment is provided for nearly nothing.
The *actual cost* to provide a network drop is very close to the
$30/month my project gets charged (there's armies of auditors checking
this stuff).
There's also the phenomenon (applicable to hobbyist and business alike)
of "different kinds of money and resources". As a hobbyist, I pay for
hardware, but my time is (sort of) free, at least in the sense that I
don't have to write a check to myself for the time I spend. I do pay an
opportunity cost in the sense that time I spend stringing coax across my
roof to the antenna is time that I can't spend on something else which
potentially is remunerative.
Similarly, in business, there's a difference between "project funds" and
"infrastructure funds". Likewise, a big difference between "capital"
and "expenses", and local situations and project stuff might push one
one way or another. For NASA, each year stands alone, too, subject to
the vagaries of Congress and the Executive Branch: just because you have
funding this year does not mean that your project will be funded next
year, even if it's a multiyear project.
A 50k project isn't going to be able to buy a $100k Vector Network
Analyzer; they're going to rent one for a few thousand a month. A $10M
project lasting 3 years might say, hey, we'll spend 100k in the first
year, rather than 100k spread over 3 years as monthly rental fees.
Or, more timenuts-ish.. Do I buy a $5k box from MicroSemi, put it in the
rack and go? Do I buy $500 in parts and $1000 in student intern? Do I
spend $3000 in facilities costs to run a fiber drop to my lab from the
maser, the purchase costs of the local cleanup loop and buffers, and
then pay whatever the monthly fee is to keep that fiber alive and my
share of the maser cost? (I actually don't know if the maser cost is
shared by the users, or paid for by an institutional support account..
But for things like network drops, clean rooms, antenna ranges, ESD
inspections, you pay as you use it)
It kind of depends on what my needs are. There are relatively few
things I might do that need the maser, and I might just drag my test
article up the hill to the frequency and timing lab for a few weeks and
pay the labor costs of the FTL folks to do it, and for the rest of the
time when all I need is "reasonably clean quartz oscillator that is
disciplined" I use my local GPSDO (whether XL-GPS or homebrew).
that's why lists like this are so useful.. Homebrew is more common than
some might expect in a research lab environment. And there's an
undeniable benefit in "rolling your own" to develop the skill sets.
I am MUCH better suited to making the make/buy/rent decision because
I've had practical experience getting a GPSDO working, using a truetime
box, and hooking up that cleanup loop from Wenzel to the maser spigot,
and subsequently trying to make ADEV/Phase noise measurements with all
manner of equipment.
So some of that "do it over and over" rather than "institutionally
provided" might be viewed not as paying too much for the ultimate
service, but as a training and educational expense.
This is particularly important as the folks coming out of school are
increasingly specialized (due to the increasing breadth of what might
get covered in a EE or CS degree), and many may not know which end of
the soldering iron gets hot, just because it's not something they ever
had to do.
Which is exactly what we do at work.. Lots of old PCs doing something, but
there's that "what do we do when the PC fails" question. Just like at
home, you've got a limited budget and time available. Do you stock a
couple extra BBBs or RPis? That costs money, and you need to have a place
to store them where you'll be able to find them.
Why not? The freakin' things are down to about $35 for an RPi and $55 for a
BBB. And the price for this is going to go down again. (Well, eventually
fabbing the board and soldering the nearly-free components is going to
define the lower bound in price but the performance can't help but
increase.)
But you also need to stock all the other parts, the GPS receiver, etc.
So you're really looking at something like a few hundred bucks/copy.
And that's a box that has to find a home on a shelf and have someone
remember where it is and what's in it, and to make sure that those spare
parts aren't scavenged for some other project.
And that there is actually the physical room to store them. Every year,
we have to justify the existence of such boxes, because we're all total
pack-rats, and you never know when you might need that old slotted line,
or that piece of unistrut, or that odd shaped piece of waveguide.
While there's not an actual dollar price associated with storage space,
if we were left to our own devices, we'd have no room left in the labs
because the shelves would be overflowing with 40 years of spares.
So we try only to keep things that might get used in, say, the next 10
years, or for which there is a specific use anticipated.
This kind of thing applies to my garage as well as work, except that at
home, I get to be the sole decision maker of "keep vs throw away",
constrained only by the physical space available. If I have that shoebox
with the RPi and GPS receivers in it, do I throw away that S-100 serial
port card to make room for it?
Or do you hope that when it fails 5 years hence, you'll have time and
budget to rebuild?
And in 5 years there will be equivalent or better hardware at the same
price point. Stay in and eat beans for dinner one night to pay for your new
NTP server.
But you'll need to redesign for that equivalent or better hardware. It
is *unlikely* that it will be a drop in replacement, which is sort of my
point.
You're depending on either a speculative future development/porting
expense, or that the kindness of strangers will provide a cookbook
solution that you can assemble.
Essentially, you want the equivalent of a Microsemi (Symmetricom/TrueTime)
XL-GPS with the right options for, say, $500 or less.
Well, it is looking like I can do this very nicely for about $250 including
the BBB or RPi, LTE-Lite, and a 1U rack-box. Yes I have to build a buffer
for the 1pps and 10MHz output but that has been covered here very nicely.
Yep... and that's way cool.
I do too.
But I'm also not under any illusion that when my homegrown unit fails that
I'll be able to fix it, or rebuild it for the same price. It will depend
on someone having done the redesign using whatever is available then, and
published the cookbook.
I'm still thinking that the spare RPi or two tucked into the box with the
OS already loaded and configured will go a long way toward making sure I
can recover and keep going for many years. I have a BBB with Debian running
NTP that has been running for about 5 months now without a reboot as just a
local NTP stratum-3 server for my local machines. Works pretty well so I am
satisfied that it is stable to do the job. Once it is started I don't
expect to be doing a lot of OS upgrades. If it only runs NTP and all the
other services/daemons are turned off, it is going to be pretty difficult
to exploit. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
How do you know it's the RPi that will break? Do you also spare the
LTE-Lite? and the buffer amplifier?
So it starts to add up.. An extra $250 today (plus storage space) in
exchange for some speculative redevelopment and $250 in a few years?
My own preference, today, is for the latter... I'd rather learn about
the new technology when the time arises
(My wife, the MBA, would probably say, "put the $250 in some investment
vehicle and in 5 years you'll have enough to pay for the new hardware
AND to pay for someone to hook it up")
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