Bomb Squad Comes to Sagrad
We have a pretty good story for today, a once in a life time experience.
Today one of our engineers was working on a new communication system we have just started working on for rail road safety.
This system has a long range communications and must communicate for one year on batteries while transferring safety information over 1 mile in distance while laying on the ground. It has large batteries, and a small size and a small antenna.
We are in the testing phase. Testing this system requires separation between the two units. One of our lead engineers setup the transmitter behind our company down an old abandon road about .75 miles. He had placed it in the side of the road in full view, just in case someone drove down the road.
This system had 6 batteries, a circuit board, and a small antenna. There are some wires going to the battery pack. This system is a prized system, worth several tens of thousand of dollars in development, so he had gently placed the unit on small Styrofoam base he had found in the shopping and receiving department. This kept the unit off the ground and he felt this was a smart idea (it was) as the road was not used at all and very dirty. The Styrofoam base was about the size of a shoe box. We used the base because the mechanical housings are not yet ready.
He made the trek back and worked on the receive system in his office. His focus was working to optimized the software on the RX system. everything was going well, and he was making exciting progress. Rapid changes were being made, and he was very thrilled about his progressed.
About 3 hours into the testing he noticed the signals were fluctuation considerable. He struggled thinking his code and test system was not working properly.
He continued to work with it searching for the problem. We had given birth to this unit no more than 7 business days prior to today, so the search space was pretty wide. How could his prized project behaving so wildly, the testing previously had been very consistent and stable. What had he done to degrade the performance. He began back tracking the changes and updates he had made. After a while and he had review a multitude of issues, frequency offset, lo stability, output power, receiver modulation, and other RF issues. His frustration grew as the performance got worse and worse still. What could be going wrong. He was really confused and it was not turning out to be a good day for progress. There was more in store for him.
He kept at it for another 30 min searching for the source of the communication issues. Then suddenly the signal stopped altogether. Dredding the walk back down the road he continued to work on the receiver for a while. Finally, deciding there was no other option it just simply had to be to other side he reluctantly got up and started to make the trek down the road to the test site.
As he approached his very prized (only have 3 in the world) test system. He started to notice a commotion. As things came into view, two patrol cars, then three, then a large van became clear. A host of people were around and all kinds of official looking people were engaged in conversation. Our employee suddenly realized as he got closer the big van said bomb squad on it and the people had their attention towards where he had stowed his test system. He suddenly realized what was going on. He was stunned for a short bit. Facing the music and manning up, and he drew up to the cars and began to engage with the officials who were discussing the situation. I am sure an instant suspicion was thrown on our employee.
Immediate Q/A ensued. The man in the 90 pound bomb suit was cleaning up and taking off his suit. After some discussion it became clear the bomb squad had "disarmed" our test system. It turns out our system was so good looking, the police were hoping to keep it as a "show" and tell system. Being the good sports they were and knowing this was all an miss understanding they returned the unit for our use.
We were told that they had considered exploding our unit to disarm it. Lucikly for us the bomb expert, and clearly a professional noticed the foam package we had put it on did not have any connectivity to the radio, and had located the "red" wire and cut it. Yes its true we always use red wires, and those are the ones to cut. (unless your a fan of princess brilde). Cutting the wire had stopped our testing.
We are happy to have such a professional group of people on staff in our great city protecting our citizens. Truly these guys could be risking their lives. We had no intention of creating this scare and felt bad about inadvertently creating this unnecessary scare.
However, after the explaining, and apologizing, there was nothing else to do but laugh at the situation and the confusion that was created over a simple misunderstanding. Knowing what the unit was, we had no idea someone else would take it as a threat. An inspection of system shows its pretty clearly presenting all the key components.
How to fix this? More testing is planned. We considered writing "this is not a bomb" on the side. But this may have given it more suspicions. Our testing tomorrow will have our business cards taped on it so that this event does not repeat its self.
All of you developers out there saving lives be careful what you deploy, you may attracted the bomb squad and I am sure they have enough stress. We recommend adding contact info to your hardware, no matter how small it is or how remote you think you are.
You read about things like this happening. We hope nobody nominates us for a Darwin award.
Here is few photos of the offending system as it was deployed (after recovery). We have to admit it does look pretty close to those items you find in the movies. I am wondering if movie producers will want to purchase one, we can confirm our system appears to be real to the professionals and therefor is authentic. We can also confirm, there is nothing to be concerned about should your run into a test system like this in the next few days near our fair city.
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