safety

112 Articles

Field Guide To The North American Weigh Station

June 26, 2025 by 38 Comments

A lot of people complain that driving across the United States is boring. Having done the coast-to-coast trip seven times now, I can’t agree. Sure, the stretches through the Corn Belt get a little monotonous, but for someone like me who wants to know how everything works, even endless agriculture is fascinating; I love me some center-pivot irrigation.

One thing that has always attracted my attention while on these long road trips is the weigh stations that pop up along the way, particularly when you transition from one state to another. Maybe it’s just getting a chance to look at something other than wheat, but weigh stations are interesting in their own right because of everything that’s going on in these massive roadside plazas. Gone are the days of a simple pull-off with a mechanical scale that was closed far more often than it was open. Today’s weigh stations are critical infrastructure installations that are bristling with sensors to provide a multi-modal insight into the state of the trucks — and drivers — plying our increasingly crowded highways.

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Open Safety In The Auto Business: Renault Shares Its Battery Fire Suppression Tech

March 7, 2025 by 31 Comments

As consumers worldwide slowly make the switch from internal combustion vehicles to lower-carbon equivalents, a few concerns have appeared about electric vehicles. Range anxiety is ebbing away as batteries become bigger and chargers become more frequent, but a few well-publicized incidents have raised worries over fire safety.

Lithium-ion batteries can ignite in the wrong circumstances, and when they do so they are extremely difficult to extinguish. Renault has a solution, and in a rare moment for the car industry, they are sharing it freely for all manufacturers to use.

The innovation in question is their Fireman Access Port, a standardized means for a fire crew to connect up their hoses directly to the battery pack and attack the fire at its source. An opening is covered by an adhesive disk designed to protect the cells, but breaks under a jet of high-pressure water. Thermal runaway can then be halted much more easily.

The licensing terms not only allow use of the access port itself, but also require any enhancements be shared with the rest of the community of automakers using the system. This was the part which caught our interest, because even if it doesn’t come from the same place as the licences we’re used to, it sounds a lot like open source to us.

Oddly, this is not the first time Renault have open-sourced their technology, in the past they’ve shared an entire car.

Wire Rope: Never Saddle A Dead Horse

December 29, 2024 by 26 Comments

If you’re into building large projects, you’ll eventually find yourself looking at wire rope. Multistrand steel wire used as antenna guy wires, bridge supports, and plenty of other uses.  The [HowNot2] team tested an old rule of thumb for wire rope. “Never saddle a dead horse”.

Click through the break for more:

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Hackaday Links: December 8, 2024

December 8, 2024 by 14 Comments

For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’s running on outdated hardware. So when we learned that part of the San Francisco transit system still runs on 5-1/4″ floppies, we sat up and took notice. The article is a bit stingy with the technical details, but the gist is that the Automatic Train Control System was installed in the Market Street subway station in 1998 and uses three floppy drives to load DOS and the associated custom software. If memory serves, MS-DOS as a standalone OS was pretty much done by about 1995 — Windows 95, right? — so the system was either obsolete before it was even installed, or the 1998 instance was an upgrade of an earlier system. Either way, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) says that the 1998 system due to be replaced originally had a 25-year lifespan, so they’re more or less on schedule. Replacement won’t be cheap, though; Hitachi Rail, the same outfit that builds systems that control things like the bullet train in Japan, is doing the job for the low, low price of $212 million.

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Retrotechtacular: The Deadly Shipmate

November 27, 2024 by 33 Comments

During World War II, shipboard life in the United States Navy was a gamble. No matter which theater of operations you found yourself in, the enemy was all around on land, sea, and air, ready to deliver a fatal blow and send your ship to the bottom. Fast forward a couple of decades and Navy life was just as hazardous but in a different way, as this Navy training film on the shipboard hazards of low-voltage electricity makes amply clear.

With the suitably scary title “115 Volts: A Deadly Shipmate,” the 1960 film details the many and various ways sailors could meet an untimely end, most of which seemed to circle back to attempts to make shipboard life a little more tolerable. The film centers not on the risks of a ship’s high-voltage installations, but rather the more familiar AC sockets used for appliances and lighting around most ships. The “familiarity breeds contempt” argument rings a touch hollow; given that most of these sailors appear to be in their 20s and 30s and rural electrification in the US was still only partially complete through the 1970s, chances are good that at least some of these sailors came from farms that still used kerosene lamps. But the point stands that plugging an unauthorized appliance into an outlet on a metal ship in a saltwater environment is a recipe for being the subject of a telegram back home.

The film shows just how dangerous mains voltage can be through a series of vignettes, many of which seem contrived but which were probably all too real to sailors in 1960. Many of the scenarios are service-specific, but a few bear keeping in mind around the house. Of particular note is drilling through a bulkhead and into a conduit; we’ve come perilously close to meeting the same end as the hapless Electrician’s Mate in the film doing much the same thing at home. As for up-cycling a discarded electric fan, all we can say is even brand new, that thing looks remarkably deadly.

The fact that they kept killing the same fellow over and over for each of these demonstrations doesn’t detract much from the central message: follow orders and you’ll probably stay alive. In an environment like that, it’s probably not bad advice.

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Curing CRT Cataracts Freshens Up Retro Roundy TVs

September 29, 2024 by 12 Comments

It’s been a long time since the family TV has had a CRT in it, and even longer since that it was using what was basically an overgrown oscilloscope tube. But “roundies” were once a thing, and even back in the early 80s you’d still find them in living rooms on TV repair calls, usually sporting a characteristic and unsightly bullseye discoloration.

Fast-forward a few decades, and roundy TVs have become collectible enough that curing their CRT cataracts is necessary for restorationists like [shango066], a skill he demonstrates in the video below. The defect comes from the composite construction of CRTs — a safety feature added by television manufacturers wisely concerned with the safety aspects of putting a particle accelerator with the twin hazards of high vacuum and high voltage in the family home. The phosphor-covered face of the tube was covered by a secondary glass cover, often tinted and frosted to improve the admittedly marginal viewing experience. This cover was often glued in place with an epoxy resin that eventually oxidized from the edges in, making the bullseye pattern.

The remedy for this problem? According to [shango066], it’s heat, and plenty of it. After liberating the tube from the remarkably clean TV chassis, he took advantage of a warm summer’s day and got the tube face cooking under a black plastic wrap. Once things were warmed up, more heat was added to really soften the glue; you can easily see the softening progress across the face of the tube in the video below. Once softened, gentle prying with wooden chopsticks completes the job of freeing the safety lens, also in remarkably good shape.

With the adhesive peeled off in an oddly satisfying manner, all that’s left is a thorough cleaning and gluing the lens back on with a little silicone sealant around the edges. We’d love to see the restored TV in operation, but that’s left to a promised future video. In the meantime, please enjoy a look at the retro necessities TV owners depended on in the good old days, which really weren’t all that good when you get down to it.

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Hackaday Links: June 30, 2024

June 30, 2024 by 14 Comments

A couple of weeks back we featured a story (third item) about a chunk of space jetsam that tried to peacefully return to Earth, only to find a Florida family’s roof rudely in the way. The 700-gram cylinder of Inconel was all that was left of a 2,360-kg battery pack that was tossed overboard from the ISS back in 2021, the rest presumably turning into air pollution just as NASA had planned. But the surviving bit was a “Golden BB” that managed to slam through the roof and do a fair amount of damage. At the time it happened, the Otero family was just looking for NASA to cover the cost of repairs, but now they’re looking for a little more consideration. A lawsuit filed by their attorney seeks $80,000 to cover the cost of repairs as well as compensation for the “stress and impact” of the event. This also seems to be about setting a precedent, since the Space Liability Convention, an agreement to which the USA is party, would require the space agency to cover damages if the debris had done damage in another country. The Oteros think the SLC should apply to US properties as well, and while we can see their point, we’d advise them not to hold their breath. We suppose something like this had to happen eventually, and somehow we’re not surprised to see “Florida Man” in the headlines.

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