Depending on the age of your car, it might contain a round 12 V power outlet in the dash, or possibly in the elbow compartment. And depending on your own age, you might know that as the cigarette lighter port. Whereas this thing used to have a single purpose — lighting cigars and cigarettes via hot coil — there are myriad uses today, from charging a phone to powering a dash camera to running one of those tire-inflating machines in a roadside emergency.
But how did it come to be a power source inside the vehicle? And how long will it stick around? With smoking on the decline for several decades, fewer and fewer people have the need for a cigarette lighter than do, say, a way to charge their phone. How long will the power source survive in this configuration?
The automotive industry is subject to frequent product recalls, as manufacturers correct defects in their vehicles that reveal themselves only after some use. While such events may be embarrassing for a marque, it’s not necessarily a bad thing — after all, we would rather put our trust in a carmaker prepared to own up and fix things rather than sweep their woes under the carpet.
There’s one recall that’s been going on for years which isn’t the vehicle manufacturer’s fault though, and now it seems Toyota are the latest to be hit, with some vehicles as old as two decades being part of it. Long time Hackaday readers will probably recognize where this is going as we’ve covered it before; at its centre are faulty airbag charges from Takata, and the result has been one of the largest safety related recalls in automotive history.
An automotive airbag is a fabric structure inflated at high speed by a small explosive charge when triggered by the sharp deceleration of an incident. It is intended to cushion any impact the occupant might make upon the car’s interior. The problem with the faulty Takata units is that moisture ingress could alter the properties of the charge, and this along with corrosion could increase its power and produce a hail of metal fragments on detonation.
Our colleague [Lewin Day] has penned a series of informative and insightful investigations of the technology behind the Takata scandal, going back quite a few years. With such relatively ancient vehicles now being recalled we can’t help wondering whether it would be easier for Toyota to run a buyback scheme and take the cars off the road rather than fix them in this case, but we’re curious as non automotive safety engineers why the automotive airbag has evolved in this manner. Why is one of very few consumer explosive devices not better regulated, why is it sold with an unlimited lifetime, and why are they not standardized for routine replacement on a regular schedule just like any other vehicle consumable?
PCI and PCI-X are not directly compatible, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that means you’re out of luck if you need to use a PCI-X card in a machine that only has basic PCI slots. And yet, that needn’t be the case. As [Peter] shows us, you can work around this with a cheap hacky hack. Our favorite kind!
[Peter] had a PCI-X RAID card that he wanted to use on his Socket 7-based computer. The 3ware 9550SX PCI-X card is 3.3 V only, and doesn’t fit in a typical PCI slot. It’s not compatible mechanically or electrically. Enter a PCI-X riser, which gets around the missing notch that would normally not let the card sit in the slot. Other than that, it just took masking off some pins to avoid damage from the 5 V rail. Throughput is good, too, reportedly sitting at roughly 60-70 MB/s.
The hard part is probably finding a PCI-X riser; PCI-Express stuff is far more common. Few of us need to deal with PCI-X anymore, but if you’re working on some ancient industrial hardware or something, this hack might just save your beans from the roast pot one day.
The gyroscopic system for gyro monorail trains that Brennan developed. (Credit: Primal Space)
Everyone who has ever handled a spinning gyroscope found themselves likely mesmerized by the way it absolutely maintains its orientation even when disturbed. Much of modern technology would be impossible without them, whether space telescopes or avionics. Yet during the early 20th century a much more radical idea was proposed for gyroscopes, one that would essentially have turned entire trains into gyroscopes. This was the concept of the Gyro Monorail, with Louis Brennan being among those who built a full-sized, working prototype in 1910, with its history and fate covered in detail by [Primal Space], along with an accompanying video.
At first glance it may seem rather daft to have an entire train balancing on a single rail track, using nothing but gyroscopic forces to keep the entire contraption level and balanced even when you feel the thing should just tip over. Yet the gyroscopic system that Brennan created and patented in 1903 turned out to function really well, and reliably kept the train on its single track. Key to this was the use of two gyroscopic wheels, each spinning in an opposite direction, with a pneumatic system linked to a gear system between the two wheels that used the gyroscope’s precession in corners to quickly establish a new balance.
Despite this success, investors were unconvinced, and regular trains were already firmly established, and the system would also require that each car had its own gyro system. Even so, the idea of the gyro monorail never truly died, as evidenced by the recently created German MonoCab-OWL project. This targets converting single-rail sections into dual-rail, bi-directional service with no infrastructure investment required.
Imagine you’re a commando, doing some big secret mission on the continent in the midst of World War II. You need to hook up some wires to your explosive charges, and time is of the essence. Do you bust out the trusty Weller and see if those petulant Axis chaps will let you plug it in somewhere? No! You use a pyrotechnic self-soldering sleeve, as [Our Own Devices] explains.
Like so many British inventions during the war, the sleeves really are ingenious. They were developed by the Special Operation Executive, an organization charged with sabotage and subversion operations in then-occupied Europe.
The soldering sleeves were designed to make electrical connections between detonators and firing wires for explosives. The sleeves consist of a copper tube through which wires to be joined are fed, with a lump of solder in the middle. The assembly is covered in pyrotechnic material with a safety match-style starter chemical dosed on top. Using the sleeves is simple. First, two stripped wires are fed into either end of the copper tube. The starter the sleeve is then ignited using the box, just like striking a match. The pyrotechnic material then gets red hot, melting the solder and making the connection.
It’s well worth watching the video to see how these field-expedient devices actually work. We’ve explored the use of more-typical solder sleeves before, too. Video after the break.
This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site.
In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more!
Building a 3D motor printed motor is one thing, but creating a completely custom servo motor with encoder requires some significant engineering. In the video after the break [365 Robots] takes us through the build process of a closed-loop motor with a custom optical encoder.
The motor, an axial flux design, uses a stack of 0.2mm PCBs with wedge shaped coils clamped in a 3D printed body. It’s similar to some of the other PCB motors we’ve featured, but what really sets this build apart is its custom optical encoder, which was a project in its own right. The 4-bit absolute position encoder uses IR LEDs to shine through an PCB disc with concentric gray code copper encoder rings onto IR receivers. This works because FR4, the composite material used in PCBs doesn’t block IR light.
The motor’s body was printed from ABS to withstand the heat during operation. [365 Robots] didn’t skimp on the testing either, creating a 3D printed closed-loop test stand with load cell and Arduino. Like other PCB motors it produces very little torque, roughly 2% of a typical NEMA17 stepper motor. Even so, the engineering behind this project remains impressive.
