42: The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

One of my favorite series of books is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by British author Douglas Adams.  Fans refer to these books as a trilogy but in typical Adams fashion, there are more than 3 books.  Astute readers of this column may recall a mention of these books in a previous column (With a Brain the Size of a Planet from April 2018).

Anyway, through the twists and turns of the plot of the story; a group of aliens (or at least “non-earthlings”) decided that they needed to find out the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.  It was such a daunting task that they built the galaxy’s most powerful computer, which they named “Deep Thought”, to compute the answer.  The computer chewed on this question for a few centuries.  The descendants of the original builders maintained a devout vigil over Deep Thought throughout the intervening years. At the grand galactic celebration to announce the answer, Deep Thought succinctly indicated to the huge crowd that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything was, in fact, 42.

The elders were consulted and decided what they actually needed was the initial question to Life, the Universe, and Everything for which the answer is 42.  This required a complex bio-based neural computer the size of a planet.  The computer they built was called Earth.  Just before the question was to be revealed, the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons to make way for an interstellar spaceship bypass.

Even though it is a stretch to say that any Pulseroller product provides the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything; it cannot be overlooked that it is no mere coincidence that the latest hardware revision of our ConveyLinx-Ai2 control module is, in fact, 42.

My gentle readers who lived through the pandemic years (not that long ago, so this is most of us) will recall that supply chain shortages and general global mayhem created problems for us all.  To add insult to injury to the shortage issues, Pulseroller products were seeing a surge in demand at the same time.  Electronics were particularly volatile early on during the pandemic and our design teams met the challenge by adapting our controllers, the ConveyLinx-Ai2 in particular, to be fully functional and reliable with multiple sources of CPUs and transistor components.  We developed several hardware revisions to accommodate these multiple sources.

Today, even though the volatility in supply chains have smoothed out for the most part, our team has taken what was learned and developed for these hardware versions and converged on what we now have released as hardware (HW) version 42.

I do not want to get into the weeds on the technical details, but there were 2 main issues addressed leading up to HW42:

ESD Immunity - because each CPU presented their own sometimes unique relationship to surrounding circuit board traces, components, emission, etc.; our team devised better and for lack of a better term, more rock solid circuitry to suppress and minimize the effects of ESD particularly affecting communications.  According to our team in Europe, ESD related support calls were fairly common in prior HW revisions and have more or less disappeared since these measures were implemented

Heat Sink Changes - This item is not so much a lesson learned by our team but a recommended practice by the consortium that manages Profinet protocol.  They issued a directive that “strongly recommended” that the Ethernet switch shield be bonded to dissipating ground, such as a heat sink plate, which then should be bonded to the equipment.  So, our solution is both an internal connection and a physical change to the heat sink.  If you notice, the aluminum heat sink has been extended to include mounting holes on each side of the controller.  Prior to this change, the heat sink did not extend and the mounting holes were only through the polycarbonate housing.

One should never say never, so I will not declare that this will be the last hardware revision for the ConveyLinx-Ai2 module.  However, we believe it is pretty darn close.

Even though the answer to a robust MDR conveyor control solution may be pretty far down the list of Life, the Universe, and Everything; Pulseroller’s 42 is the answer.