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To: Openurmind
I'm retiring on June 8th after 11 1/2 years at PacBell and 33 1/2 years at my current employer. Most of it has a software developer/system admin. The railcar work and Wingcast required doing a mix of EE component level design and device drivers. UNIX kernel device drivers as well for HP-UX, Linux, BSD UNIX. I'm finally getting time away from custom deadlines to pursue things of interest.

The anglecock actuators had bi-directional motors and limit switches on each end. Brake piston position indicator was a simple limit switch. Handbrake was bi-directional motors and two limit switches. Cut-lever was a single-action solenoid and an indicator for "open/closed". Temperature sensors ran the range from -20F to about 300F. Principally watching for a bearing burn-off. Accelerometers on the bearing adapter had a range of +/- 80g up to 100 KHz. In practice, I sampled at 100 KSPS and had an interest in the frequencies between 8 KHz and 20 KHz for purposes of bearing defect detection. Using known defective bearings, I had signatures for 55 common defects. The tri-axial accelerometers were mounted on the "bolster" and each end and assessed ride quality in vertical, lateral and longitudinal axes. If I had a little more time, measurements of roll, pitch and yaw would have been interesting to assess. The GPS provided speed and position. A 1xRTT cellular modem provided connectivity to the network using TCP/IP to upload data to the server in Fairfax, VA. More details are present in my paper delivered at the 10th International CAN Conference in Rome, 2005. It was a fun project. Lots of embedded software on PIC18F devices. More on the PC104 CPU where everything was coordinated.

I'm going to pull in the Reticulum references to the Fedora 42 server this evening and see what is necessary to get some code up and running with that API.

35 posted on 05/23/2025 7:47:15 PM PDT by Myrddin
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To: Myrddin

I find that extremely interesting that you were experimenting with frequencies. Absolutely, heat and cold changes frequencies. And with the right equipment set up you can accurately measure something like the temp of a truck or Bolster bearing. Absolutely fascinating and thank you for sharing that! I actually understand it all because of my own experience...

“I’m going to pull in the Reticulum references to the Fedora 42 server this evening and see what is necessary to get some code up and running with that API.”

Please share!!! And thank you for being interested! Hopefully we can connect and make it work! That would be huge for me!


36 posted on 05/23/2025 7:57:03 PM PDT by Openurmind (AI - An Illusion for Aptitude Intrusion to Alter Intellect. )
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