The Crazy-Tiny Next Generation of Computers 104
An anonymous reader writes University of Michigan professors are about to release the design files for a one-cubic-millimeter computer, or mote. They have finally reached a goal set in 1997, when UC Berkeley professor Kristopher Pister coined the term "smart dust" and envisioned computers blanketing the Earth. Such motes are likely to play a key role in the much-ballyhooed Internet of Things. From the article: "When Prabal Dutta accidentally drops a computer, nothing breaks. There’s no crash. The only sound you might hear is a prolonged groan. That’s because these computers are just one cubic millimeter in size, and once they hit the floor, they’re gone. 'We just lose them,' Dutta says. 'It’s worse than jewelry.' To drive the point home, Dutta, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, emails me a photo of 50 of these computers. They barely fill a thimble halfway to its brim."
Losing Your Computer (Score:5, Funny)
Great. There are some days where I forget where I've put my smartphone. So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
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Re: Losing Your Computer (Score:3, Informative)
Didn't you see the two golden buttons in the pic? The left is for ones, and the right for zeros. This literally is a computer for ants...
But a bit more to the point, the power issue is explained in TFA. Couldn't see anything on IO, but my first thought was something similar to RFID.
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Of course you can. You just need a $10M wirebonder to connect the IO to the computer.
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TFA shouldn't really call them computers, they are embedded platforms based on a system-on-chip and having some support hardware like a power supply and antenna in the same package. They could potentially be useful in things like medical data logging applications where you might coat one in something protective and swallow it. Maybe combine it would some kind of energy harvesting and it could live indefinitely under your skin.
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So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
Now we know where Skylink will actually start - in the waste and landfills, full of vacuumed-up micro-computers.
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Skylink?
You're most likely thinking of Skynet [wikipedia.org], but you could also be reffering to Sky Lynx [tfwiki.net] of Transformers G1. Despite what Sky Lynx's ego would say, you're probably referring to Skynet.
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Great. There are some days where I forget where I've put my smartphone. So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
Today we have computers collecting dust. In the future we will have dust collecting computers.
Imagine! (Score:3, Funny)
a [drool] beowulf cluster of these!
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not after you droll on them
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How drool.
Re:Imagine! (Score:5, Funny)
With tiny fiber-optic networking it would be a Beowulf hairball of those.
Rule number 1 (Score:2)
Never never, undock your computer!
Private IoT reporting for duty! (Score:2, Interesting)
"Such motes are likely to play a key role in the much-ballyhooed Internet of Things..."
Yes, yes of course. I'm sure they are.
"Private IoT reporting for duty, Sir!"
"Hello Private! I would ask why you are here, but apparently the rest of us don't really have a fucking clue either..."
Funny how we're already labeling their role as key when we don't even really know what the mission of IoT is anyway, other than driving capitalism through PT Barnum marketing ideology.
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Apparently they charged him $80 an hour to fix his washing machine.
Re:Private IoT reporting for duty! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's *one* IoT... but how does that relate to my lightbulbs that track me around the house or my garage door opener that lets me open it remotely from my Apple Watch after seeing who's standing outside?
The IoT is about networking commodity hardware and aggregating telemetry and sensor data remotely. For some reason, it seems to have significant overlap with Cloud Computing such that we really have a CloT with access control nightmares.
Funny thing is, vending machines were on the Internet almost 20 years ago. This was useful for the parent's illustration (service tech knows what to restock and when, and if the machine's out of service / bil cartridge is full / etc). But we didn't call it the IoT back then; just the Internet. That was part of the original vision, before .com got involved and morphed it into some sort of a "display your web browser banner here" place.
In other words, the IoT is closer to the original concept of the Internet than what most people have thought of as "the Internet" for the past decade or so. A bunch of internetworked hardware talking to each other and to humans, all around the world.
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My point exactly (the last one)... making the devices respond to signals, and making the concentration point "in the cloud" means that people hacking into your home computer is a thing of the past -- all they have to do is get your Apple/FaceBook/Google ID, and suddenly they've got access/control for every device you own.
Vacuum cleaner won't be chasing you, but your lights will be tracking you and your power meter might just send an extra few amps to your digital doorknob just as you go to open it....
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Or, "But Dave, you're already in the house. You came home hours ago."
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That's *one* IoT... but how does that relate to my lightbulbs that track me around the house or my garage door opener that lets me open it remotely from my Apple Watch after seeing who's standing outside?
Well, as I keep saying, the IoT is not really about whether you fridge or garage door are on the internet; these are just gimmicks to entertain you and lure you into thinking that it is 'cool' and therefore somehow OK. And I'm not sure there is all that much intent to spy on people, in most cases - it is more that these devices are becoming easy and obscenely cheap to produce, and it is very easy to persuade yourself to thinking "what's the harm?" in incorporating them into all kinds of every day objects -
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Point. Said more generally, does IoT mean that the most common failure will be some malfunction in the "I" part of the device? That more complexity inevitably leads to more points of failure?
Will this be a pattern similar to that followed by CFLs? Early IoT devices will be buggy, but the bugs will be ironed out, followed by a short Golden Age, where the prices have fallen and the devices essentially last forever, followed by the inevitable Value Engineering, after which things fail randomly and often, wi
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Hopefully with the IoT we'll get cheap, simple things designed to do one little task well instead of something considered important enough to be designed to look like something else and fail as a result of the compro
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>The CFL hate here confused me until I got one that was designed to look like a bulb instead of long weird loops that just did the job. The early stuff was fine, the later stuff where marketers decided it needed to look like an incandesent bulb were the pieces of shit that took ages to warm up.
"Hate" is such an overused term.
I was an early adopter of CFLs, and of the three I bought around 1996, the first stopped working in 2005, the second a couple years later, and the third is still working in 2015. Bu
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But entirely descriptive of many of the posts about CLF here over the years.
As for the reduced life that's where "just good enough" starts to dominate a market that had been established via reliability.
It took me more than ten years of using CFL bulbs to find one that explained the hate that had been expressed on this page, and that's because fashionability had a greater role in it's design than function. If IoT devices can avoid that criteria there may be more hope, but I
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IoT is not over the Internet. It's always (for those I've seen selling it) a private network of things. NoT. And that's what you should think of it. When they start pushing for actual open connections to the things (everyone has 1M IPv6 addresses at their house, and every door knob, appliance and widget in the house has a unique static IP that the owner (or anyone else) can connect to), then it'll be an Int
What? (Score:2)
No Beowulf clusters yet?
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Too expensive. Cost you an arm.
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Not revolutionary, very custom (Score:2, Insightful)
I read about this a week ago. I was not impressed. Basically a lot of marketing bullshit and no huge breakthroughs.
Strip any small CPU of it's plastic and guess what you have? Well, a tiny silicon die.
They will release the blueprint so that anyone with a $50 million lab can build them? How nice...
And they think these things are going to measure the real energy costs of my house? I have news for you. The energy costs of all houses in the world have probably doubled only because of all the projects to measure
This is finally the year! (Score:3)
Re:This is finally the year! (Score:4, Funny)
Replicator (Score:2)
Here the comment about them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
Next step entire world dominition.
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These need power though. Sure, a small as a mote of sand, but the battery will be relatively very large. Watch battery sized or larger most likely. And absolutely not a consumer toy that you plug in to recharge every night.
Still vapor (Score:3, Informative)
That article is all about the miniaturization process they went through. Wake me up when the hardware specs are available: CPU speed, amount of RAM, wireless connectivity and range, etc.
I have serious doubts that these things will become popular anytime soon (if ever), especially if their per-unit cost is more than a few cents. Their size, coupled with the "if you lose sight of it, consider it lost forever" joke (read: warning), makes them seem impractical.
They should scale it back up to the size of that quarter.
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Vapor implies humidity. We can call this dustware...
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I'll be really excited when they've scaled it down to the size of vapor. Then we can have REAL "cloud computing!"
However, this isn't really a computer, as it still needs a power source and I/O. It's just a small wafer of etched silicon until it has those things.
If they used this as the basis for an environment-powered computer and it contained bluetooth and/or WiFi capabilities as well as decent storage, this could be interesting. Get a bunch of these self-powering in a mesh network and you've got someth
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That octagon functions as a transmitter/receiver for I/O and Power. Only needing ~40nanowatts of power to operate means it can pretty much run off ubiquitous stray wi-fi/radio, as whatever frequencies and harmonics that antenna can receive.
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I have serious doubts that these things will become popular anytime soon (if ever), especially if their per-unit cost is more than a few cents.
I can't wait for a computer to be embedded in every ball bearing to store rpm, load, and vibration data or wirelessly upload it.
Massive amounts of money could be saved with preemptive maintenance and defect analysis if we had ubiquitous sensor data.
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Whatever the price is now, you can expect to be less in the future. Ten bucks each (just an illustrative number, I really have no idea) right now because they're made by hand? Could be in 10 or 20 years you'll get 10k units for your ten bucks as they roll off a mass-assembly line.
Moore's Law and all.
Don't think of this as a consumer oriented coin-sized desktop with a popular brand's logon on it that you
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Add an RGB LED, add wireless power, sell em for 10K per buck and stick em on the wall as a screen.
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MCU looks to be an ARM Cortex M0, but flash or SRAM aren't stated. I would guess 8k to 64k of flash and 2k to 8k of SRAM which is typical for low-end MO's. There also seems to be a 900 Mhz wireless option, but no range specified. Not too shabby. I expected a lot less capable MCU for the 1st generation. Even just a few feet of wireless range could be very useful for some interesting applications.
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I expected a lot less capable MCU for the 1st generation.
The ARM Cortex series can be easily modified for the newest semiconductor processes. That makes for a smaller and less power hungry device than an older MCU made on an older process.
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I will show you DOOM in a handful of dust.
Or would you prefer Wolfenstein?
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How about medical applications? 1mm^3 is actually small enough to be put in a pill and go through your digestive system. Cover it in some glass coating to avoid acid from melting it, swallow a bunch over a number of time intervals, have sensors on the surface that measure whatever can be measured and you may have some interesting results. It is still too big to be injected into your blood stream, need to shrink it another 10-100 times to do that I guess, but it is an interesting way to develop computing b
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Get yourself glasses. That's a nickel. Quarters have scores all the way around, like dimes.
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For what it's worth, those 'scores' are called reeding [wikipedia.org], placed there originally to prevent the 'shaving' of coins.
OBLIG XKCD (Score:5, Funny)
You knew [xkcd.com] there was one.
What? (Score:2)
Where the hell do you plug in a keyboard and mouse? Wheres the display port? Where's the network connector?
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
God damnit Apple. Quit changing your fucking connector specs every fricking new device. I'm getting really tired of having to buy all new cables Every. Single. Time.
WMD (Score:2)
"Smart dust"? "Motes"? (Score:2)
Vernor Vinge [wikipedia.org] wrote a novel in 1992 that referred to technology like this as dust motes.
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Even earlier than that: in his 1960's novel "The Invincible".
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H Plus?
Who is David MacNeal? (Score:2)
He's going to get a lot of notes.
Oh oh.... (Score:1)
Revolution anyone?
Security... (Score:2)
We just lose them
This will be great for security. /sarcasm
A little more info (Score:2)
http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs... [terraswarm.org]
incorrect attribution (Score:3)
The concept of smart dust is much older than Pister and the 1990's. Stanislaw Lem used the idea already in the early 1960's in his stories.
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Thanks for pointing this out, that this seems to be mostly forgotten rubbed me the wrong way, too.
Especially since Lem really gamed out how this will change warfare.
Bad news (Score:2)
Obligatory 2.0 (Score:4, Funny)
Photo? (Score:3)
And just to annoy everyone reading my article, I didn't even bother to include that particular photo in it.