Not sure if this counts as Zig Forums or Zig Forums, apologies in advance. Are there any basic differences between a "military grade" microcontroller and your garden variety Arduino? I can see so many ways these can be used for military applications.
Not sure if this counts as Zig Forums or Zig Forums, apologies in advance...
Andrew Anderson
Ryan Hernandez
military grade just means lowest cost from 3rd party contractor
Samuel Myers
Not completely kebab; the components will have different specs like operating frequency, physical shock resistance, operating temperature, etc.
t. Electrical engineer
Oliver Foster
Nah. It's the polar opposite. Anything painted in camo always costs more.
The main differences in "military" hardware and "civillian" hardware are:
-What it is allowed to do.
-What the safety factors are.
What it is allowed to do is simple to answer: the military uses certain encryption modes and keys, which simple civillian tools are not built to use. Not because it's impossible for something that isn't painted green to use them, but because they are not allowed to employ these technologies. Another example are removed restrictions, such as the maximum difference in position the GPS will allow before shutting down (a restriction put in place to make it less likely that someone builds a GPS guided bomb/missile/whatever using civillian parts). Such restrictions don't apply to military hardware. The producer simply has to state that the parts they are producing are for military purposes only, and only sell them to the military, and then they can do whatever.
What the safety factors are is a little more tricky, since it's not uniform at all and depends a lot on the actual hardware in question. For those who never heard the term before (I am translating from my German knowledge, so the vocabulary might be wrong): a safety factor is a factor by which the maximum amount of force, current, torque or whatever else value is multiplied that the part or the entire machine-system has to withstand. If you want a plane to fly even at 20m/s crosswinds you design it in a way that it will fly even at 30 m/s (20x1.5=30)
Your car for example has a safety factor of 2 for most of it's systems; the engine, the doors, the windows etc.
Some systems require extra safeties, like the seat-belts (x3) and some require less, like the AC (x1.5 as far as I know).
Different areas of engineering use a different base safety factors: Civilian air-planes use x1.5, space-vessels and rockets use x1.2 to x1.1 in some areas, factory machines use x2 or even x2.5, some buildings use x3 etc.
Depending on what area your hardware will be used in, there will be different safety factors. The military safety factors are all over the place. Fighters have lower safety factors than civilian air-craft to keep them light, cheap and agile, but they are expected to take much higher loads because of the maneuvers they are expected to make. Tanks use ridiculously high safety factors, simply because the engine has the power necessary to move the extra weight, and it's a vehicle that expects to get shot at anyways. Naval safety factors a whole nother thing and depend even on what type of waters you expect the vessel to operate in (ponds, lakes, rivers, coastal waters, inland sea, high seas…)
Normal electrical hardware safety factors are a specific area themselves, and it requires an actual electric-hardware engineer to give a truly educated look at that. They also depend on what area the electrical component is used in (aboard a space ship, or in your car). Military electrical hardware is even more complex of a topic.
The takeaway from all this is: Unless you have a specific use scenario nobody can list the differences between a normal civilian parts and military parts. In some situations it might be light light and day, and in others the military might use civilian hardware, and in yet other circumstances civilian hardware even surpasses military hardware in most areas because the military hasn't come around to modernizing it's equipment.
Jayden Hernandez
You sir are a gentleman and a scholar. Good looks. Have a cool looking building.
Dylan Hill
William Taylor
If I needed something super skookum and it needed a PLC, I’d use a couple arduinos as redundancies. If I wasn’t entirely sure what conditions it’d be dealing with and I couldn’t protect the whole thing, I’d put every arduino in a different casing (wax, just air, water, faraday cage, etc.).
Landon Cruz
I was an electronics tech in the US Navy for 10 years.
The military wants it's electronics to be able to take the stresses of being in a combat environment.
Things they contend with that are different are: moisture, physical shock, heat, inconsistent power, frequent handling, electromagnetic interference, and being modular for quick repairs.
Much of this is handled by how it is mounted and cased.
It's extremely rare for the military to have proprietary components; usually, you can buy the exact chips and parts the military uses on the open market.
If there is a choice between a cutting edge chip and a more durable chip, they go with the more durable
The PCB boards they use are high end, industrial boards meant to take shock and flex.
Soldering is held to a higher standard.
Connectors are usually beefier than what would be used elsewhere.
Conformal coating and salastic are used on everything to protect it.
Individual components tend to have more spacing between them.
tl;dr The differences between military and civilian electronics are in that they build everything to try and survive a bomb.
Brandon Kelly
I knew a few years ago here guys were asking for permission to use store brought radios seeing ours weren't encrypted and the civi models were lighter with longer battery life and better range.
Parker Rogers
Shit happens like that all the time. The brass thinks only about the big big shit and tend to forget about the individual warfighter. Its only once someone with their nose up a general's ass, separates himself and sees that SF boy with a Spongebob walkie talkie because it lasts all day with two double A batteries, that something happens. Usually that SF boy being punished for using equipment that works.
Jayden Perez
Yep, seen shit like that.
Sometimes it's just mundane shit like a knife when all the crap in supply is junk.
Nathaniel Thomas
Can't have stock holders seeing troops use equipment that makes the companie's version look like shit!
I'm not joking, I seriously believe that would be a huge reason. Not the official but a reason.
David Nguyen
Part of it is that there becomes an intellectual circle jerk when a bunch of "smart" guys come up with something.
Slapping them in the face with "yo shit don work, yo" is always an ego killer.
Guys in charge would rather loose people than pride.
Meanwhile, guys in the middle (field officers) who want to be at the "big boys" table will play along with the BS rather than back up the grunts getting it done.
At the end of the day, that's why I'm out.
Military Issue tends to have some really good stuff, but it's not always the best way to decide what gear is right.
Logan Lewis
Just imagine if fighter pilots could bring their own jet. Could you imagine the stock prices of Lockheed and Boeing dropping when a F-35 is ignored and a F-15e is brought in? Or the guys that brought 20 F5s and still had money for ammo to arm them three times over?
Nolan Davis
There's a balance to be struck though.
In some cases getting your own gear works but in others not so much.
First is the cost to the soldier, not everyone can afford the minimum gear.
Second, a lot of things need repairs in the field and a logistics system that has to accommodate everyone's personal taste in gear wouldn't be able to keep up.
Then there are the Glocktard types.
To hear them tell it, the Glock 17 is the greatest weapon ever made but none of them have ever used a handgun in a RL situation.
How do they really know if they will stand up in the desert for two years?
Military trials aren't perfect but they do a lot of getting junk rejected.
Finally, there's the fact that if everyone brings their own weapon you can't keep up with the ammo.
Zachary Nguyen
"Military-grade" means one of two things based on how important it is to the everyday functionality of the military:
Landon Adams
Funny you mention that, since our military hardware we build never passes the civilian market standards for what it's supposed to be to be capable of withstanding, but it mysteriously passes the military specifications needed for their general use that you're claiming are stricter than civilian market standards.
Isaac Reyes
Well said, DeutschAnon. I couldn't have worded it better. And in case anons are curious, the reason "safety factors" on certain things are so low is because the tolerances are so high that you can't realistically get the safety factors much higher without funneling a shit ton more money into it. It's a lot easier to build a swing set with a safety factor of 3 or 4 than a bolted pipeline that's under high pressures.
Thomas Morales
I know I shouldn't quadruple-post, but I did want to respond to some of this since I'm on the civilian side of building your electronics.
Can confirm. They like to use components that are 40 years old and only stored in warehouses at eight times the price too.
Not true. The specs they want for the boards are high-end, but the materials the boards are made from aren't any higher-end than standard boards. It's all fiberglass with copper embedding. The test boards we build for SAIC to test the military electronics are higher-end pieces of equipment since they're allowed to build a new revision/circuitboard with newer parts without having to make it a multi-million dollar project.
AHAHAHAHAHA!
No it's really not. Actually the stuff we solder for the military to military specifications as outlined would never pass for even class 1 soldering on the civilian market. If military soldering is high standard, than IPC standard is basically perfection. Part of this is because the military insists on thru-hole components instead of downsizing to cheaper and more rugged SMT components. We've had the company we're subcontracted for can't say the name because they only have one location and OPSEC tell us how upset they are because they want to touch up the soldering to class III specifications and the Navy won't let them.
Not really, they just have a couple extra screws to hold them in place/tighter tolerances on the spacing so they don't need to be able to wiggle as much.
As it should be for everything that isn't garbage meant to be thrown away in a couple years from corrosion.
t. NASA Conformal Coating certified as well.
Again, from what I've seen this simply isn't true. The main reason when this is the case is because of electrical interference between components caused by using oversized or thru-hole components to accomplish a job where an SMT component a quarter of its size would do the same thing just as well.
Adam Fisher
so any old joe can grab a new resistor/diode/capacitor/whatever joe dun blew up and solder in a old one in like 10 minutes. In theory at least.
To be honest it would make more sense to have whole replacement boards(which are now smaller cus smt) on hand, especially onboard a ship, due to how hard it will be for joe to troubleshoot that PCB and locate the broken component(unless ofc its smoking)
Wyatt Butler
Industrial (and probably military) hardware is rigorously tested under various operating conditions, hardened against all kinds of damage and has well defined, well documented interactions with other bits and pieces of it.
Your garden variety arduino might let the smoke out for no reason at all. You can do everything a PLC can, sure, but you can't bet your life or bottom line on it.
Jason Roberts
No, I said different just like how space spec components have different specs and I wouldn't use them for commercial applications and vice versa.
st.com
Evan Parker
Weight and material cost, Strelok. Safety factor is just (calculated failure point / actual operational limitations).
Back in the day, railroad locomotive boilers were built to a safety factor of about four. If the boiler does more than hold steam and also serves as a structural component, as in most steam tractors, that number goes up to about five. If you tried that shit in any aerospace application, it'd be too heavy to get off the ground.
Carter Bennett
"Military grade" usually means it follows NATO STANAG rules concerning tolerances about radiation bleeding, noise, electrical interference, etc…
De facto it doesn't change much compared to a civilian one as ISO/CEN norms are usually the same as STANAG, except for very specific tasks (STANAG 2895 is for example "extreme climatic condition", for which commercial stuff might not cut it so you will have purpose build stuff or a company looking to sell, I don't know, oil extraction equipment or something for said conditions, is gonna refers to "Military Standards" because civilian standards doesn't quite cut it or simply don't exist).
Carter Gray
Military grade has a certification to make it resistant to elements.
In order:
- Pressure
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Fire
- Radiation
- Particulate
- Corrosion
- Impact, scratch, shock, vibration
- Acceleration or g-stress
- Chemical stability
- Biological stability (if you crack it open you won't see a slime mold growing in there)
Keep in mind there are LEVELS to each of these, so it's possible for something to be military standard rated yet be more fragile than a lightbulb made of paper.
It's also possible to be extremely high in one level, but have no resistance in others. For example an artillery shell might be rated for 30,000g forces yet corrode very easily in contact with sea water.
Also each variable has multiple subdivisions, it's possible for something to be submerged in salt water and not rust, yet be vulnerable to salt water fog or steam.
This is why a military grade CPU is 250MHz and its considered good, whereas people throw into trash computers with CPUs under 3.5GHz.
David Evans
Whether it's a simple logic gate or a microcontroller or an actual processor, there is only two things that make military-grade components stand out against their commercial counterparts:
Military-grade ICs will almost always be in a ceramic package. This allows for greater operating temperature range, and slightly higher durability. A typical commercial 4000 series gate IC will have an operating range from -25C to +125C, while its ceramic (i.e., military) counterpart will work from -85C to +150C.
Military and aviation grade components are always documented. Which plant, which line, on which day, by which operator, using materials from which batches are always listed on a pile of paperwork that comes with each part or tray of parts.
That's it. Those are the differences. Don't pay any attention to these retards talking about encryption or whatever other bullshit. Encryption is strictly software. If there were hardwired encryption, there's two major problems: 1 is that it leaves physical evidence of the encryption methods being used, and 2 is that it can never be updated or otherwise changed.
t. electronics fag with military/avionics experience