Hacker News: extrapickles

New comment by extrapickles in "Glubux's Powerwall (2016)"

extrapickles — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:53:17 +0000

They keep the power pack in a shed away from anything too flammable. They could lose the shed, but it would be unlikely to take the house with it.

New comment by extrapickles in "Going Nuts over NIST’s Standard Reference Peanut Butter (2016)"

extrapickles — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:58:26 +0000

In some industries companies regularly test their biggest competitors for compliance, then complain to the government if they don’t meet requirements.

New comment by extrapickles in "What happened to the US machine tool industry?"

extrapickles — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:41:41 +0000

The lathe ways (the guides/support for each axis) do wear out, but you can re-grind them to be flat again.

Usually you sell the machine at this point to someone who doesn’t need the precision and get a new machine.

New comment by extrapickles in "IKEA sensors for doors and windows, motion, water leaks"

extrapickles — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 17:59:35 +0000

Hue bulbs by default emulate a dumb led bulb. This is configurable so you can have them be “dumb” in a way that you prefer, eg: customize color, brightness or do whatever you told them last.

I have several that some of the time I use a regular light switch to turn on/off and you wouldn’t know they weren’t standard led bulbs.

New comment by extrapickles in "Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating"

extrapickles — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:41:52 +0000

Toner cartridges generally last a few thousand pages and are much more tolerant of infrequent use than ink cartridges. Unlike Ink cartridges, laser cartridges don’t dry out or need to waste ink priming. The image drum does need to be occasionally replaced (not often, 10k+ pages), though if you tolerate defects in prints it can last longer.

How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of the cartridges and others it’s a simple page counter.

The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be duplicated for each color.

New comment by extrapickles in "Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes"

extrapickles — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 22:56:24 +0000

It primarily has to do with the physical construction of the magnets, in a toroid the inside of the toroid effectively has more windings per meter of circumference than the outside causing uneven containment.

With mobius strip you regularly flip between inside and outside, so the plasma particles get more even force applied.

New comment by extrapickles in "Replacing the bad flyback transformer in Apple's Studio Display 17""

extrapickles — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 06:11:05 +0000

If the discharge circuit is not present/functional, it can be months[1], even if the capacitor was discharged at one point.

When working with high voltage/power equipment, its best practice to keep the capacitors shorted while you are working to keep dielectric absorption from “recharging” the capacitor to 1-15% of its rated voltage.

[1]: https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/dielectric-abs...

New comment by extrapickles in "Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983"

extrapickles — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 17:34:53 +0000

If Baumol was solely the reason for increased prices, I expect the increase to be more in line with the increase in prices for hiring tradespeople or other professional services.

New comment by extrapickles in "Leaked audio reveals US rail workers were told to skip inspections"

extrapickles — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 19:19:22 +0000

They don’t need to even do that, just occasionally send the train past a thermal camera and look for wheels that are warmer than average.

New comment by extrapickles in "The cold hard truth about electric vehicles in winter"

extrapickles — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 02:03:49 +0000

It’s more than twice as losses are lower boosting 220v to the 400v or 800v the pack actually needs.

As an example, a charger in some EVs is 87% efficient when charging from 120v and the same charger is 94% efficient when charging from 240v.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:39:45 +0000

Nope. If your car lost power for whatever reason, the system would scavenge power from the inertia of the car and the brakes would still operate as they do when the car is operating nominally. The 1-10w needed to run the braking system is a rounding error in comparison to the 4-10kW of wind/rolling resistance at freeway speeds.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:14:38 +0000

To lose local regen braking derived power requires a failure of the cars systems similar in nature to one that would cause loss of hydraulic fluid or air in a traditional braking system.

Edit: made more concise.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:33:39 +0000

Having no power would be hard as the brake system can easily generate power to operate itself if the vehicle is moving (and if its not moving that is what the parking brake is for). This is more of a scenario that occurs when there is a catastrophic failure in the braking system, such as the motor control electronics getting damaged.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:20:41 +0000

That would be the default of this system if the brakes are still able to communicate with and provide power for the brake pedal. Basically if the brake system lost external power, it would get the power needed to run via scavenging it from the motors. Once the vehicle came to a stop, it would then loose power and the parking brake would then engage.

The slam on brakes case would only trigger if there was gross damage to the braking system, where you might have bigger things to worry about.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 13:14:05 +0000

Most EVs have permanent magnet motors of some flavor right now (some have both a PM motor and a pure induction). I would assume that if you were having the motor be the primary braking system, and it was induction, there would be a tiny cheap magnet installed in it to generate bootstrap power to prevent exactly this scenario.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 12:55:21 +0000

That is easy to accommodate as you can design the electronics such that when there is no power they cause maximum braking force and dump energy into the braking resistors. This can be done completely with power taken from the motor itself and if it’s not turning to generate power, then I would expect the parking brake system to engage, eg: a spring defaults it to “On” and power is used to keep it disengaged.

New comment by extrapickles in "Why car wheels are so flat these days"

extrapickles — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 12:36:10 +0000

I could not find anything that would prevent this in my brief skim of FVMSS 105 (US car brake regulations). The regulations are mainly about the performance of the braking system (eg: needs to stop car 10x from 60mph in under a specific distance) and only care a little about the specific technique.

You should see what you propose on cheap cars if motor pricing becomes less than the cost of regular hydraulic brakes.

FVMSS 105: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2011-title49-vol6/pd...

New comment by extrapickles in "iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS"

extrapickles — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 21:06:57 +0000

Downloading the orbital parameters can be done via the internet rather than at the 50 bps that the satellites broadcast them at.

New comment by extrapickles in "NASA can now reliably produce a tree’s worth of oxygen on Mars"

extrapickles — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 21:19:33 +0000

They have also been the cause of fire[0] on the Mir space station. They make for a reasonable emergency oxygen supply (no working infrastructure required), but you don't want to use them regularly due to the fire risk they represent.

[0]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/25-years-ago-fire-aboard-space-...

New comment by extrapickles in "Lenovo’s Glasses T1 let you bring a private big screen display with you"

extrapickles — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 16:56:47 +0000

The Valve Index does 1440×1600 per eye and it probably needs to be at least double that before artifacts become hard to notice.