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Tesla Owner Makes 'Solid Metal Snake' Self-Charging System That Elon Musk Promised (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly two years ago, Elon Musk teased us with a robotic snake that would automatically plug-in and charge your Model S. Well, many months have passed and there has yet to be an official "solid metal snake" available for Tesla owners. So, one Tesla owner decided to make his own autonomous charging station, as spotted by Electrek, that will automatically guide the Model S's charging cable into the waiting receptacle with no human intervention required. The inventor Deepak Mital posted a video showing how it works, and while it's incredibly slow, it does work. Compared to the demo video of the system teased by Elon Musk last year, this version appears much less threatening. Mital calls it the "Evtron," which is controlled with a Raspberry Pi and swings from one side to another before sliding forward to make the connection with the car.
That way we can make a Metal Gear / Solid Snake joke.
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It's fixed now, I promsie.
The linked article isn't even one year old...
For a second there, I thought I was crazy and losing track of time.
The snake design for Tesla's video is intentional, it's clearly designed for superchargers. And supercharger cables are very heavy and not really flexible, so if you attach them at only couple of points then you'll quickly get issues with wear and stress. A metal jointed snake can much easier redistribute the stress and also it can tolerate fault of a several joints.
It's about time, The are so difficult to plug in and it's so heavy.. I'm surprised most electric cars are ever plugged in the connectors are s obig and heavy and difficult to use.
I'm calling bull on it being "automatic" that video is of someone off screen driving it. you can see reflections of a person off to the left monkeying with it and you can see it being very jerky as if a person is trying to get it adjusted right.
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The article states that it swings from the side and moves forward. But can it adjust up and down to find the charging plug precisely? I'm not being silly here, a Model S has considerable adjustment in the Z axis (driving low is great for feeling sporty and improving mileage, but riding higher can be important for protecting the batteries from speed bumps or other things that could cause serious problems). While you could tell the car to adjust to the highest setting whenever it gets home, I would rather see a snake that can just plug itself in no matter what the current car height is.
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He could have gotten the price down cheaper if he just wrote it all with machine code and created his own chips by doing photolithography at his workstation.
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