Interesting approach. I have a feeling that this is intended for sparsely built houses (the typical american housing maybe?) since in a dense European city I’d imagine it would pick up tons of cell phone signals from other people in their own homes or, say, from people visiting the downstairs coffee shop terrace.
> Our service is ideal for detached homes, where our calibration (small, medium or large homes) lets the sensor distinguish between mobile phones on your property and those nearby. It is not suitable to homes (e.g. apartments) that share walls with other homes.
The 'fix' for that (applicable in some areas, not so much in others) would be to remember phone ID's and focus on numbers (and strength) of new ID's during the rental period.
A downstairs coffee shop would be a semi periodic flux of a particular size, a party would be a surge over and above that flux and persisting outside of coffee shop hours.
Again, pattern learning is only applicable in some scenarios .. but effective enough in those.
Phones randomize mac addresses so that probably wouldn't work. Presumably you can get a read on how many devices are scanning at once, but not track them long term.
One could safely assume that such a tool would likely be illegal in the EU, anyways, since that’s rather a lot of data collection activity to expose a homeowner to.
You can but it isn’t efficient. You lose (V_in - V_out)*I_led Watts to heat if you use a linear regulator.
You might ask why not connect them in series and get the voltage difference as small as possible. But the “forward voltages” of LEDs are highly temperature dependent and car battery voltage is (somewhat) engine rpm dependent (might swing between 12 and 13.8V between no rpm and some rpm. It’s kept flat at 13.8V)
They might turn off/block egr which reintroduces exhaust gasses to intake to reduce combustion temperature. The upside of this system is that it reduces NOx emissions, the downside is that you’re bringing a lot of soot inside the engine. They are abrasive.
Combine egr with pcv, which directs positive crankcase pressure into the intake, you get an oily sooty mixture caking inside the intake.
Combine this with swirl flaps, which create a small tornado at lower engine speeds for better combustion, you get caking on the flaps and your intake becomes halfway clogged.
These are my annoyances. But to be honest, it didn’t require cleaning even after 250.000 kilometers of driving. I saw the caking while doing some other work, but the engine was running fine
But there’s also the dpf, and the adblue stuff. Dpf is an issue only if you use wrong kind of oil and clog it. I’m assuming people remove the dpf to run coal, as it will get clogged extremely fast if you detune your engine. It might also be an annoyance if you want to mod the engine, but not sure on that front. And adblue is yet another thing to fill every now and then. No experience with that, but I assume it might annoy some.
When you start "rolling coal" all the "gains" by removing the EGR and PCV will be negated since you will be lining your valves with tar and ruining the oil.
Pretty benign until an idiot holds a small piece of sheet metal in one hand and drills it with the other. Guess how I know :)
To my defense, I put a bit of wood between the metal and my hand to prevent drilling my hand but little did I know how the drill catches the steel on the very last part of the cut.
I use both kinds very frequently so I can comment on this. The main difference is that SLA strength is more uniform and FDM strength is very directional.
And the strength of the output is highly dependent on the material for both printers. The typical resin is extremely brittle, but rather heat resistant. But you can get flexible or tough material which are both less brittle but also less rigid.
So to answer your question: not necessarily :) nylon-like SLA materials are pretty good for usable everyday items if you don't mind the slight fidelity losses (still better than FDM)
We have multiple form 3 printers at work too, and they are very slow! It takes an hour to automatically fill the resin tank (which I cheat by pouring myself) and supply costs are ridiculous. But I really like the rather consistent output quality and their software is awesome.
My comparisons are against my own printer, anycubic photon mono. I can get a new printer with the same price of a bottle of formlabs material :)
Yeah, you can't fill that guy without pouring it in. It just isn't happening with a new vat. The supply costs are indeed the worst part, too. However, we've had FAR from perfect, repeatable results with it. The Elegoo Saturn is DEFINITELY more consistent and repeatable. And yeah - lower end machines are kinda nuts. One moving part, etc. It's funny - they're a superior technology. How do we know? Form themselves went to mSLA on the 4 as compared to the SLA of the 3 with the complicated optical carriage.
Part of the reason is the compliance requirements. You need to pay quite a bit of money to USB-IF if you want to make anything USB and this is recurring as far as I know. There's also the other things like tests for EMC and ESD and whatnot. It either needs a big player to step up (you can use the same USB-IF membership for some tens of thousands of devices) or there should be a big enough market to support a smaller scale designer/manufacturer.
There’s also the self discharge aspect of things: cells lose energy even if you draw no current at all. This is dependent on many things including chemistry, quality, buildup, temperature and whatnot. I am not including lithium batteries (not bare cells) which need to have some kind of protection circuitry that also draws a bit of power.
It's not a chemical battery. The energy comes from the nuclear desintegration of radioactive nickel. So the charge is inmmune to most of the usual problems.
On the other hand, I don't know how strong are the layers that aborb the radiation and cretes the electricity.
The throttle feeling of a cable operated throttle is more about how much air the engine wants to breathe. I’d say it’s kinda still related to rpm, but it might be a completely different feeling on a turbo engine, that I haven’t experienced.
On most turbo engines these days they are electronically operated and have no linkage anyway. That's even the case in most modern petrol cars where people think there still is a linkage. And that trend has been going on for at least 20 years.
Right, but how does the changes in engine wanting to breathe manifest through the throttle pedal feel? Changes of vibrations? Changes of resistance? Changes in lag from pushing the pedal to the engine responding? Perhaps on the direct throttle car you could simply hear the engine better?
It changes resistance. My dad had an old, full mechanical/hydraulic automatic car and it was an extremely visible feeling from the throttle pedal when it changed gears or when it engaged the extra clutch (it had torque converter and some extra clutch on top of it for fuel efficiency)
The sound of the engine also changes greatly depending on the throttle position and engine load but for me it was more audible and I couldn’t feel it from the throttle. Modern cars are pretty good with sound insulation from the engine, but I’ve heard some “sporty” cars direct the intake sound to the cabin for giving the noisy sports car experience to the driver without being obnoxious with the exhaust side.
Two things; modern HID or laser or LED headlights should have the auto adjustment, so just jump to the second paragraph if you have one of these. But halogens can be adjusted usually from inside. They tend to have adjustment buttons to compensate for load (situation might be different for US cars, I’ve seen this with EU cars). This could be easier place to get started.
The manual adjustment is also very easy :) there are some screws on your headlight assembly that you need to rotate. It is different for different cars, though. So I’d suggest referring to YouTube for your own car’s adjustments.
