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Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)
- favorited 3y agoTitle should include (2015) or (2018)
- phas0ruk 3y agoI love Amiga
- wkat4242 3y agoGeoblocked: Content not visible outside the US :(
- jeron 3y agohttp://archive.is/1gGb7 http://archive.is/1gGb7
- dabeeeenster 3y agoHow is this still a thing? Absolutely nuts. What happened to the www.
- outside1234 3y agoGDPR, cookie popup requirements
- J_McQuade 3y agoI think I picked up a bootleg of this at a car boot sale in the early 2000s. Couldn't get it to work with my EU boiler, but it had a great cracktro.
- kqr2 3y agoRelated: Palm Pilot helps run the IMAX projector https://www.theverge.com/23801118/imax-movie-palm-pilot-oppenheimer https://www.theverge.com/23801118/imax-movie-palm-pilot-oppe...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cpach 3y agoArchive link for people outside of the US: https://archive.li/1gGb7 https://archive.li/1gGb7 I wonder if they received the funding for replacing it?
- csdvrx 3y agoWhy replace what's not broken? Amortization of costs is one possibility. The replacement parts must be hard to obtain, but are they spending over 50k/y on old amiga parts? If not, why do you think maintenance of the old system would cost more than the new system? (+ ongoing yearly fees/maintenance) Just receiving a funding doesn't imply the need to burn the money. Any replacement using wifi +- cellular and some javascript pile of dependencies is likely to work less reliably: for any budget of b=1 million it'll cost a multiple x>1 of that.
- ignite 3y agoWhy replace? So you don't have downtime. If it breaks now, everything may be off until they replace the system. That could be months of no classes, which would be much worse than spending money to replace. If you start now, and finish before it breaks, you don't have to have downtime.
- csdvrx 3y agoWhy not replace? So you don't have downtime. If it breaks now, the system is well known (30+ years) and maintained. If it's updated to something new, everything may be off until they bring back the old system.That could be months of no classes, which would be much worse than spending money to replace. If they do nothing now, instead of taking a bet the new system will be more stable than the old one (a bet against the 30+ years odd) you don't have to have downtime.
- hn92726819 3y ago> is well known No... It's known by the guy who wrote it 40 years ago that happens to still live there and want to chip in to fix it > maintained Well, they said parts are difficult to find now. I would not consider something with no replacement parts well maintained > taking a bet the new system will be more stable than the old one What? It's a gamble to leave it as it is with a bus factor of 1 and rickety old computer parts. Setting up a replacement doesn't imply this one goes away. If the new one is worse, they can have a plan to switch back to the old. If this computer catches on fire, they have to pray they can find a working replacement that the original implementor can install.
- haunter 3y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ni8gu/til_that_in_2015_19_michigan_schools_heating_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ni8gu/til_... this is happening more and more that I see something in my reddit RSS feed first, then hours later it pops up on HN Another example from today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078047 https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ncz6j/til_that_mit_will_award_a_certificate_in_piracy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ncz6j/til_...
- chayesfss 3y ago[dead]
- dv_dt 3y agoSimilarly, I'm excited that I am frequently seeing this kind of article in my Mastodon feed first and then seeing it showing up in HN.
- nuancebydefault 3y agoYour point being? "reddit got it faster"? No pun intended, I would like to understand your reasoning.
- pupppet 3y ago> A Kentwood High School student programmed it when it was installed in the 1980s. Impressive!
- sublinear 3y ago> Whenever the district has a problem with it, they go back to the original programmer who still lives in the area. It is indeed impressive, but I hope there's a contract for this. Everything else about this story sounds insanely incompetent, so I... I worry. In principle there's nothing wrong with a Motorola 68K running a system like this, but the rest of this is damned.
- jprd 3y agoYou'd probably be horrified to know what kind of systems still run most of the world's manufacturing, very much including modern chip fabs.
- doobiedowner 3y agoLadder logic, written by peasants. (signed: control peasant that prefers ST)
- snerbles 3y agoLucky you, my stakeholders would run screaming for the hills whenever they caught a whiff of written code on PLCs. All ladder, all the time.
- doobiedowner 3y agoA fart has been lofted in your direction
- WWLink 3y agoWould I? The amiga setup sounds totally fine to me. Aside from old HVAC equipment potentially wasting a lot of energy, I see nothing wrong with using a 40 year old computer to control everything.
- vaxman 3y agoJayMiner.beginSpinning();
- vaxman 3y agoTranslation: "This post on a Venture Capital website implies that the legacy of Jay Miner's greatest engineering accomplishment is running a Michigan school's heating and air conditioning system, making Jay spin(); in his grave." Moreover, this story is very old, is probably no longer true, but continues to resurface from time to time. I think a novel benefit of open source is that it shields engineers from the often fatal consequences of being on the wrong side of a billionaire. As a consequence, there are now a couple of generations of engineers who can't relate to what life in their occupation was like before the open source movement went mainstream.
- tus666 3y ago> Hopkins said the system runs on a radio frequency that sends a signal to school buildings, which reply within a matter of seconds with the status of each building. I suspect this is what would be difficult to replace. A bespoke wireless sensor monitoring and communications system, integrated into an old heating/cooling system. Modern system just would not integrate into this, without a lot of work. You would have to replace everything, probably including the actual heating/cooling systems themselves.
- quickthrowman 3y ago> You would have to replace everything, probably including the actual heating/cooling systems themselves. You wouldn’t need to replace the actual boilers/chillers/air handlers/terminal units, just the temperature controls/control wiring/control relays/control computer. There is mechanical equipment out there that is still controlled by pneumatic controls and that equipment can be retrofit to use digital controls. Replacing the mechanical units may be beneficial, condensing boilers are extremely efficient and so are newer chillers/etc.
- jhallenworld 3y agoMaybe replace it with LoRa... but what device is in each building? I doubt you have to update the heating/cooling systems, they are likely just relay closures. Also each school is probably on the net these days, so replace with some Wifi IOT device. Or Samsung "Smart Things".. but unlikely to last 30 years..
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> Or Samsung "Smart Things".. but unlikely to last 30 years.. Is there anything that actually works with it directly? I have a growing number of connected devices around me, and none of them can talk to SmartThings, except floor heating controllers that do so by half-broken integration with Tuya... Trying to figure out (without success) how to hook A/C units to SmartThings, I learned that apparently Samsung/ST is abandoning their existing "we'll figure it out for you in the cloud somehow" architecture, moving towards "please buy our hub/edge device, and run some Lua scripts on it" architecture, which actually doesn't feel like an upgrade.
- deadlyllama 3y agoYou could retrofit a more modern computer in there. Probably even reverse engineer the radio system and replace it. This would have been done by an enthusiastic high school student with both programming, electronics, maybe some RF knowledge too. Radio amateur? I find these stories kind of sad. Clever system built by someone talented, at a low cost -- replacement with a modern system costed in the millions. Those talented people still exist but they wouldn't get a look in with most RFPs.
- anthk 3y agoAsk a GNURadio hacker and it can debug the issue in minutes.
- NovaDudely 3y agoHere is Melbourne, Australia our train system used to run on I believe a PDP based system established in 1982 until the mid 2000's when they started a transition to an all new system simply because the hardware was getting too old to maintain. The intermediate step was to emulate the old systems software on Windows XP machines until all the other signal systems could be upgraded. https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040545/https://www.smh.com.au/technology/30yearold-railway-computers-take-a-byte-out-of-the-past-20131014-2vitp.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201112040545/https://www.smh.c...
- WWLink 3y agoYea, schools today don't encourage kids to screw around with computers.
- cududa 3y agoSure but what happens when the student who figured it all out graduates?
- TrackerFF 3y agoBack when I studied EE, one of our class projects (industrial automation) involved working with companies out in the industry. We found a local heating companies that provided district heating, and they had this ancient PLC running some pretty central parts of the operation. By ancient, I mean early 70s or so. But the thing had just been running for forever, doing its thing. No documentation, of course, so a metric ton of black-box testing to find out what did what. In the end we managed to design a pretty nice interface/HMI, and a API so that it could be monitored online.
- zaxomi 3y agoIt could probably be replaced by a Raspberry Pi with an Amiga emulator.
- sillywalk 3y agoNASA also used Amigas - [0] Gary Jones replied; "And Commodore was easy to work with back then. When we asked for documentation, they sent us a stack of documentation about four feet high. They were willing to tell us everything about their machine. Since we had to design some custom hardware to go inside, it really helped to know exactly how everything worked." "It just turned out that it was a good machine. The things that make a machine good for playing games also tend to make it good for processing and displaying data, because you've got some of the same problems. You need a very efficient, very fast operating system, and the Amiga has that and very little overhead too. That's what makes it nice; we don't load down the system running the overhead; we can just process the data." "Most of our customizing is hardware customizing. The Amiga operating system is flexible enough that we have to drop into assembly only once in a while to initialize some of the special boards we use, but otherwise the operating system is fine; we don't do anything unusual with it. We use it just like it is and build hardware for our interfacing requirements because we have to pull the data out of the data bus in this building, process it, and put the data back in." [0] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p...
- asu_thomas 3y ago[flagged]
- anonu 3y ago> A new, more current system would cost between $1.5 and 2 million. Man, I'll build it for $750k - will buy a few Raspberry Pis and we're good to go...
- TheRealSteel 3y agoHell, I'll do it for half a million and upgrade them to a 486.
- anonu 3y ago* article referenced on the $175m bond: https://web.archive.org/web/20150312145702/http://woodtv.com/2015/03/09/how-grps-plans-to-use-175-million-bond/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150312145702/http://woodtv.com... The 2015 bonds were approved: https://grps.org/reimagine/ https://grps.org/reimagine/ Here are the GRPS munis, issued in early 2016 totaling about 134m: https://emma.msrb.org/IssueView/Details/ES360882 https://emma.msrb.org/IssueView/Details/ES360882 Unfortunately, no luck finding any interesting tidbits on this Commodore or whether it was replaced. Maybe theres an RFP out there?
- shever73 3y agoSlight nitpick: the Amiga was released in 1985, so the system dates at least from 1986. Other sources say 1987, which is not the "early 1980s" as the article says. However, it's still cool that it's running. I love seeing old tech that's still just running. In the early 2000s, one of my clients was running a woodcutting system off a ZX Spectrum. They wanted to replace it, but the cost to rewrite their custom software would have been so much that they ended up buying a few used Spectrums as backup.
- b800h 3y agoI wonder what became of that. Of course, fast forward to now and they could migrate to ZX Nexts. :-)
- shever73 3y agoYes, me too. I'm no longer in that geographic area (or area of the industry, for that matter), so I don't know. However, I am anxiously awaiting my Spectrum Next...it seems to be inching towards a delivery date.
- b800h 3y agoI liked my first Next so much I ordered in the second Kickstarter too, so now I'm waiting for my next Next.
- b800h 3y agoI wonder if they're still running it eight years later and after Covid.
- sverona 3y agoYes. It made the news again because of the unseasonable heat up here earlier this summer.
- okaleniuk 3y agoThis just shows that we need a sustainable widely supported hardware platform for long-time operation. 30 years is not that long. I wonder if RISC-V could take this niche.
- cutler 3y ago"This content is not available in your country/region." (UK)
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago>This content is not available in your country/region. Keep it classy, America.
- da39a3ee 3y agoAgreed it doesn't look great. But to be fair, it's probably GDPR cookie regulations that drove them to it.