Subject:
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Re: Air transportation of RCXs etc
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 1 Jan 2003 23:35:08 GMT
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Original-From:
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Steve Baker <SJBAKER1@AIRMAIL.NETantispam>
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Viewed:
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923 times
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Nick Tarleton wrote:
> > > I think as long as nothing is on, it will be fine. You may
> > > have a problem
> > > with corrupted firmware though - will there be a computer
> > > there to upload
> > > new firmware/programs if needed? The radiation may flip some bits and
> > > change everything. I'm not sure how this would affect the ROM though.
> This is probably what would happen. Still, silicon chips are delicate, and
> the CPU could probably be damaged.
That's just nonsense.
I've put my Laptop, PDA, digital camera, USB memory stick, digital watch,
calculator/alarm-clock and my kid's Game Boy through the airport scanners
dozens and dozens of times without harm. Many of my co-workers fly
more than a couple of times a WEEK with laptops and PDA's - and I've
never heard of an airport scanner killing any of them.
I don't see any way that you could *damage* the chips that way.
The most vulnerable part of modern electronics to security equipment
is magnetic media - disk drives, floppy disks, data tapes. The X-Ray
equipment contains some pretty big magnets - so you could see how that
could be a problem.
However, the guys who design these things are not idiots - and they
try to keep the magnets as far from the cargo belt as they can.
In the early days of airport scanners, when the X-ray energies were
much higher and so few people carried magnetic media around that the
designers didn't take much care to avoid wiping them, I'd carefully
avoid putting floppy disks through the scanners. But over the past
10 years, I've stopped bothering and I can't say I've seen any
problems (although floppy disks are pretty unreliable - so it's
possible that disks I've had fail were induced by airport scanners
- but not as a routine matter).
Hard drives seem immune to problems - so long as they aren't running
when they are scanned...that *could* be bad.
I guess there is a vanishingly small chance that a RAM memory bit
could get flipped by a random X-ray. The *MOST* that could do would
be to corrupt the firmware or the program(s) you have loaded into the
RCX - however the long term effect of that is no different from removing
the batteries. Make sure you have a way to reload the firmware
and your programs and you'll be fine.
However, even that chance seems very small to me. The probability
of an X-ray scrambling a memory bit increases with the density of the
memory chip (both because in a denser memory chip, there are more bits
to scramble - and because the amount of electical charge representing
each bit is smaller so it takes less X-ray energy to flip it.)
The RCX is pretty low-tech - it has only 32Kbytes of memory. My PDA
has 64Mbytes of memory (2,000 times as much as the RCX) and it goes
through X-Ray equipment regularly without problems. The chance of
an RCX memory bit getting scrambled is at least 2,000 times less -
and probably a lot less than that.
So - IT'S *NOT* A PROBLEM!
---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | RE: Air transportation of RCXs etc
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| (...) Why? If you make it clear that it's *not* a bomb.... A demonstration should be sufficient. (...) This is probably what would happen. Still, silicon chips are delicate, and the CPU could probably be damaged. (...) (22 years ago, 1-Jan-03, to lugnet.robotics)
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