Tekmos' Blog

Tekmos celebrated its year end get together at the Texas Land & Cattle Restaurant with a very tall Christmas tree looming over the festivities. There was a full house of Tekmos team members along with their families enjoying choices of smoked sirloin, prime rib, Cesar salads with lime cilantro dressing, creamed spinach, salmon, and barbecue shrimp. Lynn Reed wore his traditional Christmas tie and a Santa hat. Carole Reed is saluted for organizing a smooth celebratory event. The only hitch was that very large Christmas tree of which no one had control.

The Zilker Tree is located in Zilker Park just around the corner from the restaurant where Tekmos employees and family gathered. Every year the tree is lit for the holiday season and every year 400,000 plus people drive, walk, and bicycle to walk under, twirl and photograph themselves at the Zilker Tree as well as stroll through the Trail of Lights that winds through the park.

The Zilker tree stands 155 feet tall and is composed of 39 streamers, each holding 81 multicolored, 25-watt bulbs - totaling 3,309 lights. At the top of the tree, a double star measures 10 feet from point to point. The double star displays 150 frosted bulbs. This unique spiral pattern of lights was created by City of Austin electricians. At its circumference, the tree measures 380 feet. The diameter is 120 feet. The base of the tree is made up of 19 utility poles, each 14 feet tall, arranged in a circle around the Moonlight Tower.

On December 10, 1967, the first tree was lighted by Mayor Pro Tem Mrs. Emma Long. In subsequent years this honor has been awarded to the young winner of a city-wide tree coloring contest.

While the traffic slowed the arrival and departure to the Tekmos party, it also brought the spirit of the season to make the year end gathering memorable.

Throughout the past year, we have presented several articles on IoT, the Internet of Things. I was asked if I could summarize the ideas in a short couple of paragraphs. Of course, summaries always leave the writer with the issue of potentially throwing out some of the key ideas that make the topic interesting. I said I would give it a try anyway.

The Internet of Things is all about connecting diverse electronics to make them even more useful. The flow of information often starts with analog sensors, measuring almost anything one can think of, from temperature, speed, pressure, and location, to color, voice, and personal characteristics. Often the analog signals are made into digital ones and zeros and transmitted somewhere. There is often some type of processing of this information to add meaning or context. The data can then be used to inform people or machines which in turn take some action. The range of possible uses is extremely wide, from telling where your cat is to turning on air conditioning when someone is anticipated to be in the building. It can be used to automatically order replacement parts when a machine becomes aware that parts are wearing out or sensing that you are at the grocery store and sending a text reminder that it thinks you are running low on milk. But the IoT is not just a cute toy. For example, the amount of money to be saved by smart energy use is tremendous. There are predictions that the major use of IoT for the next several years will be retrofitting to make old machinery more efficient.

As one might expect, good things come at a price. As expected, there are a large number of technical issues. We talked about sensors and issues on making electronics smaller by such approaches as stacked die. The article on having someone taking over your car, while you are driving it, points out what is likely the biggest problem of all: making devices so that, either intentionally or unintentionally, the interconnectivity does not lead to major problems. While having your refrigerator send spam may be a humorous annoyance, having one's pacemaker subject to a hacker is truly frightening. During the next year, we will investigate more aspects of the IoT and some of the ramifications of implementing it. We will also look at how the technology is evolving.

On October 30th, Austin experienced a very heavy rainfall. In our area, we estimate that 15 inches fell in a 3 hour period. Tekmos is located on a small hill, so we survived without any damage other than a small roof leak.

Behind Tekmos is Carson Creek, which did flood. The waters reached our parking lot, but were still 4 feet below our floor. There is a hiking trail that runs along the creek, and has several nice foot bridges that cross the creek. That did not survive. The creek also flooded two of the three roads we use to access Tekmos, and also shut down both highways 71 and 183, which are major roads next to Tekmos.

One watershed over is Onion Creek. Onion Creek is a much larger creek, and had the worst flooding. At one point, the flow rate was measured at 120K CFS. For comparison, Niagara Falls was running at 84K CFS the same day.

This is a picture of Carson Creek just going over the roadway of the road behind Tekmos.

And here is another picture looking upstream.

Fears about nefarious use of IoT have moved from the theoretical to the demonstrated. A Jeep Cherokee, driven on a real expressway with traffic, was hacked and the engine shut down from a remote location, via the internet. This could easily be life threatening. It could make the problem of identity theft, a bad as it is, pale in comparison.

“Hackers remotely kill a Jeep on the Highway – With Me In it” was the title of an article by Andy Greenberg in Wired. Andy goes on to say:

“I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.

Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.

As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought….”