Gravitational imaging arrays using CMOS ADC pixel array methods and memory devices

I have many projects running now for the Internet Foundation, and for my personal interest in gravitational time of flight imaging arrays. I am trying to locate camera sensors that can pick up gravitational level signals, by using the entire chip as a single detector.  One pixel ADC data is useful, but it is routine to get MegaPixel and GigaPixel cameras now.  I run sensors for days, months, years and decades. Things that are too hard to track for frame time scales, can emerge from statistics on millions of frames.  Parts of the global camera industry are moving toward GigaFrames per second and even faster.  I track the nuclear and hard radiation industries, the x-ray industries for a wide range of applications and new goals.  The whole world is changing everywhere constantly.

And they all now use the Internet. So for the Internet Foundation, I try to advise countries, corporations and groups about best practices for sharing information in open verifiable formats.

But there are thousands of overlapping “global opportunities” where groups emerge to form completely new products, services and industries.  May using machine learning and AI.

I saw your PCIE cameras as an indication that the whole of chip and device level cabling and wiring and interconnects is likely to shift.  So since I wrote you the first time about “PCIE cameras”, I searched for and found many new initiatives.  You see it all the time as new protocols emerge, mature and often fade away.  I am hoping to reduce global duplication and waste, where tens of millions are reinventing things because they cannot find them, or it takes so much time to find enough information and parts to even try something.

Today I was looking at phased array beam-forming chips for 5G. These devices are often sold for cell phones and networks, but can also be used for 3D imaging. And in my very specialized area of “low cost time of flight geophysical imaging arrays that can look inside the earth or the atmosphere or the oceans — they can be used as cheap reliable ADC arrays — some times.

Early this morning I was writing to Teledyne Dalsa and their partners for linear sensors (kilopixel line detectors that can run at about 120,000 frames per second because they are 1 meter long and 1 pixel wide.  I need the physical separation to work out direction of arrival, distance and signals.  I might be able to replace their very expensive purpose build array with low cost camera chips with overlapping fields of view and multispectral capability — if there is someway to get processing, memory and communication to each small sensor.

I started about 20 years ago using the small network of superconducting gravimeters to measure the speed of gravity. That was about 18 months of hard work. Then I spent another year of effort to locate the broadband seismometers in the global seismic networks that can pick up data sufficient to image the interior of the earth with gravity (identical to the speed of light). I have written and made videos about that and found many groups working on parts of it. I try to help them work together on the geophysical and astrophysical parts of that. But in the last year or so, the AIs are changing the game a lot. So people are more willing to try complex problems – a lot because the data is more available, and now manageable where many complex models have to be combined from many different fields.

So there are several issues I see looking at PCIE camera, Teledyne Dalsa and the Internet.  I never quite know who I am talking to when I ask questions of companies.  The only open channels are usually through sales and support. The designers mostly hide somewhere. Or if they do talk to others, only in specialized and hard to access small private groups.  I am advising Google (many separate efforts), OpenAI (Microsoft), Xai (Elon Musk Grok) and trying to get them to use global open formats to share AI and human conversations for global open merging and collaborations where hundreds of millions are involved.  You might never have seen papers on Arxiv.Org where there are thousands of authors.  But I deal routinely with emerging new issues, opportunities and industries where there are hundreds of millions or billions of humans and almost as many systems involved.

I have been at this every day for the last 25 years of the Internet Foundation.  I started on Gravitational imaging and gravitational communication systems just over 45 years ago when I was at the University of Maryland College Park with people like Charles Misner, Joe Weber, and Robert Forward who were at the foundation of LIGO and now many more gravitational technologies. The atom interferometer technologies can shrink those too massive and expensive detectors down to room size and there are groups working very hard on chip scale, plasmonic, Bose-Einstein, quantum, quantum computing and massively parallel approaches that make every day, low cost devices possible.  A superconducting gravimeter is liquid helium cooled magnetic levitated test mass.  It is single axis, 1 sample per second and cost about $250K or more) The MEMS gravimeters cost $2500 or much less. Liang Cheng Tu in China was aiming for wrist watch sized MEMS gravimeters, especially after I showed that gravitational sensors can replace GPS in certain applications, plus solve for orientation – underground, under seawater, and inside shielded facilities.

There is a lot going on.  Sorry if I make your life a bit more complicated.

I just wanted to run some of those thermal cameras for a few days. That is a lot of data, so I wanted to use my Intel I7 4 core Windows 10 test machines to read the data from some camera and gather statistics for hours and days.  The signal for the sun moon tidal gravity takes days of data to get a baseline. Once the instruments are calibrated and locked to the sun moon signal, then, working with the local residual, it is possible to use it for local imaging (volcanoes, earthquakes, subsurface chemistry, water, oil etc).  And to image the atmosphere in 3D real time to calibrate local climate models.

I do not know how to request to borrow a camera, or to ask someone to save data on a drive on the Internet so I can look at a few hours of data from these thermal sensors. Each camera designer had different purposes and markets. None of them have gravity and geophysics in mind. So I have to beg and borrow and buy cheap things to even see if a particular devices is anywhere possible. Because there are outstanding needs and growing new application areas in every field, I often find that some sensor is not very good at one thing, but good at something else.  Some of the best cameras for noise studies are the early cheap ones that have lots of environmental noise. The “camera” application means that “noise: gets suppressed and eliminated, but to me it is wonderful signals about wider things going on.

When I wanted to be sure that a three axis gravimeter was picking up the sun moon vector tidal signal on all three axes, I spent months going through literally every seismometer in the IRIS.edu seismic database to run months of data from each channel of every station. I eventually found which ones would work and why. Mostly “broadband seismometers that can pick up 200 second period waves and changes. Now I go from nanoHertz to GigaHertz, except I found that most of the gravity signal is in the mm through soft s-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Until groups calibrate natural sources (like the core of the earth, volcanoes, ocean surf, ocean current, storms and the atmosphere – there will not be anyway to easily distinguish a “gravitational” source from an “electromagnetic source.  There are things possible with electronics that cover most everything that gravity does. The speed of light and gravity are identical, they share the same underlying potential.

I also looked at (still working at it) to use various types of memory chips and technologies to use the arrays as mm wave  and smaller detector arrays.  They all use the same technologies – CMOS, low noise front ends, programmable reference voltages and frequencies, GPS/GNSS and other means of global time coordination, fast wide ADCs, DMA and image to storage chips and circuits. And, my area of study – mathematical statistic and statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

You are probably not interested in my goals and hopes.  Sorry to bother you. It is such a long story and many parts it is hard to remember it all in some kinds of framework. I am trying to write an online textbook on “Gravitational Engineering”. But now the AIs need to be able to do precise calculations, so I got diverted trying to make sure all those popular AIs can also run computers, do assigned tasks, explain their work, do reliable precise symbolic and simulation scale mathematics, and more.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation