I don't have insurance for working on anything that might be considered medical equipment. I also don't have any idea what the formal requirements are, and I doubt that they have much to do with common sense.
So I guess I'd have gone even further than you did: I wouldn't have gone near the project with a twenty-seven and a half-foot pole.
But would I use such a board for an ancient XT-based inventory/POS system in a corner pharmacy? You betcha. I'd even use it to run a mill, though I'd probably spend a lot more time verifying proper and expected operation than on the build itself.
And thanks for this perfect illustration of the "but I didn't even follow the context!"
OP was expressing that a Volt owner driving the car less than 40 miles a day would never need to buy gas again.
Which I'm sure we can both agree is utter bullshit in practical terms.
(And, no: I didn't know that the Volt had such functionality as automatically burning off old gas. That's a neat trick, even if it doesn't invalidate anything I said. But what happens when it lives in a garage?)
And there are specialized boards that still have ISA slots for specialized gear.
Without digging deeply at all, I found this: http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html. One of them has six serial ports, one ISA slot, a smattering of PCI and PCI Express, DDR3 RAM, and a socket 1155.
Getting 16-bit software running on a modern computer is easy: This is why God has given us VMs.
Getting a hardware serial port to work properly from within a VM is not always easy. This is why God has given us serial-to-Ethernet adapters which never get bogged down in the hardware abstraction of a VM.
I've got a few Lantronix boxes that seem to work well. DIN-mount, very flexible power requirements, a pair of RS-232/422/485 ports, and a pair of Ethernet ports with a dumb 10/100 switch in between them: They can be daisy-chained.
Because you know everything about what I need, don't you?
What if I'm watching 25 FPS TV shows from the BBC? Hint: 60 is not evenly divisible by 25, but 75 sure is. Displaying 25 FPS material on a 60Hz display is always either messy or broken, or both.
What about editing film-sourced material? I'll take 72Hz over 3:2 pulldown any fucking day.
It's analog; it can be adjusted. Over the past twenty years, I've adjusted a number of monitors. A properly-working but well-used CRT display usually cheers right up with just a bit of knob-diddling, especially in terms of focus, without any tools but a screwdriver, a non-conductive diddle-stick, and a calibrated eyeball....if the monitor was worth anything to begin with.
(No, not OP, but I do miss tweaking the hell out of CRTs. My 24" 16x9 1920x1080 and 20" 1600x1200 LCD displays are nice on my desk, but absolute resolution is less on either of them than the 19" CRT I used to have....and the colors still aren't as pretty, and the viewing angle limitation still sucks, and the 60Hz maximum refresh rate over DVI is totally fucking meh. I can drive the 1600x1200 display at up to 75Hz if I want to, but only over VGA which is the worst of all worlds.)
I would guess that this would require a sea of adapters, since no single high-current charging standard actually exists: Supercharge stations are rather unique.
I'd also guess that this isn't planned to be happening anytime soon, since one of the links in TFS suggests to Tesla drivers that they report non-Tesla vehicles in the Supercharge stations by telephone to Tesla directly, presumably for removal.
All guessing aside: Whether it -can- work with other cars is not really the question, but rather whether it ever will.
And all indications at the moment are "no, not gonna happen."
Never, ever running the gasoline engine in a Volt would be a seriously detrimental thing, if for no other reason than the facts that gasoline gets a bit funky as it ages and engines are made to be run. Bad things happen to them during long periods of disuse if not properly prepared.
40 miles a day in a Volt and never buy gas again? Good luck a few years from now when you need to go 41 miles.
I filter it even before that: Aunt Tizzy does not have any of my email addresses, and never will.
Mostly my unimportant stuff is webinar training invites (which I could really not give a shit about), and commercial advertising that I actually might want to see some day -- sales at local stores, pizza coupons, and stuff like that.
(I used to filter the actually-wanted ads into their own folder, but priority sorting has made it a non-issue.)
This seems to have trained the filter to automatically tag any personal or business correspondence as important, even if it is a new contact. Which is good for me: I don't get much actual correspondence (remember, Aunt Tizzy is filtered socially), so whatever an actual human actually writes to me sure seems important enough to be alerted to.
Yes, basically: It's another spam filter. Has always worked great for me once I got past the newness-deprecating "WTF?" moment.
With minimal training and setup my "important" stuff is the only stuff that that makes my phone notify me of email, which is actually useful to me, while "unimportant" stuff can be read or ignored some time later.
All of this conspires to make email less annoying.
I've heard of these chlorinated lakes, and I gotta ask: WTF?
My small town has what was once the largest man-made above-ground reservoir in the world. Water gets pumped from the nearby river, up to the reservoir. It then sits there awaiting use.
Birds poop in it. Fish fuck in it. Boaters and fishermen use it. It's got a thriving eco system, and there's no chlorine anywhere near it.
Why should there be?
After it sits around for awhile, and before the water gets anywhere near a potable water system, it gets filtered and treated and polished and chlorinated. Then it is pumped to water towers. The water towers themselves have enough water for (IIRC) 2 or 3 days of good water, and they feed household plumbing using gravity alone.
The problem with the end-of-life signal is that you have a device that accepts random off-the-shelf batteries, but cannot reliably detect when they're near the end of their life.
I strongly suspect that it could be improved. I'm guessing that it measures open-circuit voltage, or close to it, which is the wrong way to measure a primary battery since the internal impedance can be quite high: Open-circuit voltage is a lie for all practical purposes. These things need tested under load.
So how to test it under load without destroying capacity? Simple: Presumably, the device has a transmitter that operates periodically. Near the end of each normal transmission measure the voltage while the thing is still transmitting and the battery is thus still under load.
If the voltage at this point in time is below threshold, then immediately send an EOL signal. Done. (What is "threshold"? Whatever value it is that is safe with Joe Random Battery, even if that is a UK-sourced Duracell.)
Obvious software optimizations include then setting an EOL bit in RAM and skipping the voltage check until the device is reset, and transmitting EOL as a single bit with every message thereafter.
That all said...
In the US at retail, we get three types of alkaline batteries: Duracell, Energizer (randomly-manufactured crap), and Other. (Where "other" might be Rayovac or a store brand.)
Panasonic? Nope. Even though electronics that have NVRAM still ship with Panasonic lithium coin cells, the US-centric 2025 replacement says Duracell on it.
SAFT? Nope.
Sanyo? Sometimes their batteries come as freebies in remote controls for Asian-built goods, but I can't get them here. They do seem to work forever, though...
I can order whatever I want, of course, but dealing with US-based distributors usually seems to mean that the batteries have been sitting around for eons and have self-discharged substantially by the time I get my hands on them...and directly ordering from a reliable distributor in Japan is just a bit far-fetched for the quantities that I need.
That's all fine and good, and I appreciate the input, but:
Real Duracell batteries are ridiculously easy to get. Non-fake Japanese cells are not.
And I cannot account for what seems to be a design fault in your gear: If the "about to die" signal fails, that's more a problem with the circuitry and/or logic surrounding that event than of the particular battery that is installed....no matter what particular battery is installed. (Draw yourself a flowchart.)
My mileage doesn't matter. The entire pro-sound industry is standardized on Duracell, because they always work in this application. For one show. That's all that is asked of them, and all that I claimed.
In the pro audio spectrum, new Duracell alkalines are used for wireless accessories. At the end of every show, they're disposed of (or most likely hoarded for other purposes). At the next show, new Duracell alkalines are used again.
Why not use rechargeable batteries? They wear out, inconsistently. It's difficult to tell (without a lot of human-time) what the status is, and the voltage when fresh is never as high .
Why alkaline and not heavy-duty or lithium? Because they're consistent, and there's no advantage to lithium (they're expensive).
Why Duracell alkalines? Because they're even more consistent.
Wireless microphones and such are fickle enough without having to worry about one bad cell out of a six-cell 9-volt battery ruining a show.
I was under the impression that I get way more than "enough" vitamin C just by eating an American diet. In particular, preserved foods often contain it on purpose (ascorbic acid is an extremely common preservative).
The downside to applying it to everyone is that it's a pain for me to provably track where my money goes.
A rich person hands their AmEx bill and receipt pile to their accountant, who deals with the rest of the paperwork.
Whatever. My plan is more about solving the issue of the rich person complaining about being taxed, than it is about reforming every aspect of government revenue generation.
I have an idea: Anyone "earning" more than $1 million per year pays no Federal taxes. At all.
Instead, they just have to spend at least half of their "earnings" on goods and services. Every year. I don't care what they spend it on: Could be yachts, could be Oreos. Could be Chinese-made trinkets or American-made binoculars or Italian sports cars.
Don't care: They must spend it on goods and services. Not domestic investments. Not off-shore resources. And then prove that they've done so, every year, and prove that they've received these goods and services, and that they were all sold to them at reasonable market value.
(This likely means they'll need to employ an accountant. Cry me a river.)
In exchange, they owe no Federal tax. (I'm also in favor of saying they'd owe no state taxes, but that's 50 more arguments.)
The other half of their "earnings"? They can invest it. They can sit on it in an interest-bearing account. They can buy even more goods and services. They can have the bank give them 50% of their earnings in $2 bills so they can swim in them. Give it to their children and friends. Donate it to charity. Buy small countries. [More] Hookers and blow. Don't care.
If they fall short on spending 50% in a year, then they simply owe the remainder and a 25% penalty to the general fund: If they "earn" $1,000,000.00, and only spend $300,000.00, then they'll be required to put $250,000.00 into the kitty.
Hoarding thus solved, and their contractors and retailers thus wealthy (though perhaps not rich) and paying regular taxes, the wealth disparity is thus solved.
If they don't like this gambit, they can just, you know, earn less money. And then it will still automatically be spread out much the same by market forces.
Perhaps only clever in modern parlance; there was a time where flywheels were very, very common for energy storage. (And no, I don't mean the one between the engine in your car and the transmission.)
That said: It spun at 10k RPM before launch, which also seems mighty nifty for the time until one realizes that the bearings only have to work once...
Slashdot Mirror
All of which are RS-485 or RS-422, not RS-232.
Perhaps you should understand some of the complexity of which you speak.
s/20/30/
I don't have insurance for working on anything that might be considered medical equipment. I also don't have any idea what the formal requirements are, and I doubt that they have much to do with common sense.
So I guess I'd have gone even further than you did: I wouldn't have gone near the project with a twenty-seven and a half-foot pole.
But would I use such a board for an ancient XT-based inventory/POS system in a corner pharmacy? You betcha. I'd even use it to run a mill, though I'd probably spend a lot more time verifying proper and expected operation than on the build itself.
And thanks for this perfect illustration of the "but I didn't even follow the context!"
OP was expressing that a Volt owner driving the car less than 40 miles a day would never need to buy gas again.
Which I'm sure we can both agree is utter bullshit in practical terms.
(And, no: I didn't know that the Volt had such functionality as automatically burning off old gas. That's a neat trick, even if it doesn't invalidate anything I said. But what happens when it lives in a garage?)
And there are specialized boards that still have ISA slots for specialized gear.
Without digging deeply at all, I found this: http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html. One of them has six serial ports, one ISA slot, a smattering of PCI and PCI Express, DDR3 RAM, and a socket 1155.
Getting 16-bit software running on a modern computer is easy: This is why God has given us VMs.
Getting a hardware serial port to work properly from within a VM is not always easy. This is why God has given us serial-to-Ethernet adapters which never get bogged down in the hardware abstraction of a VM.
I've got a few Lantronix boxes that seem to work well. DIN-mount, very flexible power requirements, a pair of RS-232/422/485 ports, and a pair of Ethernet ports with a dumb 10/100 switch in between them: They can be daisy-chained.
Television in the US is not 29.97 FPS, but 29.97002617 FPS.
Analog is fun: It doesn't care about decimal places.
Because you know everything about what I need, don't you?
What if I'm watching 25 FPS TV shows from the BBC? Hint: 60 is not evenly divisible by 25, but 75 sure is. Displaying 25 FPS material on a 60Hz display is always either messy or broken, or both.
What about editing film-sourced material? I'll take 72Hz over 3:2 pulldown any fucking day.
It's analog; it can be adjusted. Over the past twenty years, I've adjusted a number of monitors. A properly-working but well-used CRT display usually cheers right up with just a bit of knob-diddling, especially in terms of focus, without any tools but a screwdriver, a non-conductive diddle-stick, and a calibrated eyeball....if the monitor was worth anything to begin with.
(No, not OP, but I do miss tweaking the hell out of CRTs. My 24" 16x9 1920x1080 and 20" 1600x1200 LCD displays are nice on my desk, but absolute resolution is less on either of them than the 19" CRT I used to have....and the colors still aren't as pretty, and the viewing angle limitation still sucks, and the 60Hz maximum refresh rate over DVI is totally fucking meh. I can drive the 1600x1200 display at up to 75Hz if I want to, but only over VGA which is the worst of all worlds.)
I would guess that this would require a sea of adapters, since no single high-current charging standard actually exists: Supercharge stations are rather unique.
I'd also guess that this isn't planned to be happening anytime soon, since one of the links in TFS suggests to Tesla drivers that they report non-Tesla vehicles in the Supercharge stations by telephone to Tesla directly, presumably for removal.
All guessing aside: Whether it -can- work with other cars is not really the question, but rather whether it ever will.
And all indications at the moment are "no, not gonna happen."
Never, ever running the gasoline engine in a Volt would be a seriously detrimental thing, if for no other reason than the facts that gasoline gets a bit funky as it ages and engines are made to be run. Bad things happen to them during long periods of disuse if not properly prepared.
40 miles a day in a Volt and never buy gas again? Good luck a few years from now when you need to go 41 miles.
It is even more confusing than you think:
Yes, they're just for Tesla Model S cars.
And they're free (both in terms of libre and beer) to use, forever, for Tesla Model S cars.
AFAICT, there is no provision in place to allow a user to attempt to pay for this energy, and the Supercharge stations are unattended.
So, yeah: The crazy runs deep. And you ain't gonna plug another EV into one of these, ever.
I filter it even before that: Aunt Tizzy does not have any of my email addresses, and never will.
Mostly my unimportant stuff is webinar training invites (which I could really not give a shit about), and commercial advertising that I actually might want to see some day -- sales at local stores, pizza coupons, and stuff like that.
(I used to filter the actually-wanted ads into their own folder, but priority sorting has made it a non-issue.)
This seems to have trained the filter to automatically tag any personal or business correspondence as important, even if it is a new contact. Which is good for me: I don't get much actual correspondence (remember, Aunt Tizzy is filtered socially), so whatever an actual human actually writes to me sure seems important enough to be alerted to.
It's almost magical.
Yes, basically: It's another spam filter. Has always worked great for me once I got past the newness-deprecating "WTF?" moment.
With minimal training and setup my "important" stuff is the only stuff that that makes my phone notify me of email, which is actually useful to me, while "unimportant" stuff can be read or ignored some time later.
All of this conspires to make email less annoying.
It's been said before, but I'll repeat it:
There's lots of CCTV out there already. Much of it is totally unprotected by even a password, let alone any attempt at real security.
And now you're worried about the Feds? FFS. Where were you last week? Was your head stuck in the sand?
I've heard of these chlorinated lakes, and I gotta ask: WTF?
My small town has what was once the largest man-made above-ground reservoir in the world. Water gets pumped from the nearby river, up to the reservoir. It then sits there awaiting use.
Birds poop in it. Fish fuck in it. Boaters and fishermen use it. It's got a thriving eco system, and there's no chlorine anywhere near it.
Why should there be?
After it sits around for awhile, and before the water gets anywhere near a potable water system, it gets filtered and treated and polished and chlorinated. Then it is pumped to water towers. The water towers themselves have enough water for (IIRC) 2 or 3 days of good water, and they feed household plumbing using gravity alone.
So why would anyone want a chlorinated lake?
The problem with the end-of-life signal is that you have a device that accepts random off-the-shelf batteries, but cannot reliably detect when they're near the end of their life.
I strongly suspect that it could be improved. I'm guessing that it measures open-circuit voltage, or close to it, which is the wrong way to measure a primary battery since the internal impedance can be quite high: Open-circuit voltage is a lie for all practical purposes. These things need tested under load.
So how to test it under load without destroying capacity? Simple: Presumably, the device has a transmitter that operates periodically. Near the end of each normal transmission measure the voltage while the thing is still transmitting and the battery is thus still under load.
If the voltage at this point in time is below threshold, then immediately send an EOL signal. Done. (What is "threshold"? Whatever value it is that is safe with Joe Random Battery, even if that is a UK-sourced Duracell.)
Obvious software optimizations include then setting an EOL bit in RAM and skipping the voltage check until the device is reset, and transmitting EOL as a single bit with every message thereafter.
That all said...
In the US at retail, we get three types of alkaline batteries: Duracell, Energizer (randomly-manufactured crap), and Other. (Where "other" might be Rayovac or a store brand.)
Panasonic? Nope. Even though electronics that have NVRAM still ship with Panasonic lithium coin cells, the US-centric 2025 replacement says Duracell on it.
SAFT? Nope.
Sanyo? Sometimes their batteries come as freebies in remote controls for Asian-built goods, but I can't get them here. They do seem to work forever, though...
I can order whatever I want, of course, but dealing with US-based distributors usually seems to mean that the batteries have been sitting around for eons and have self-discharged substantially by the time I get my hands on them...and directly ordering from a reliable distributor in Japan is just a bit far-fetched for the quantities that I need.
That's all fine and good, and I appreciate the input, but:
Real Duracell batteries are ridiculously easy to get. Non-fake Japanese cells are not.
And I cannot account for what seems to be a design fault in your gear: If the "about to die" signal fails, that's more a problem with the circuitry and/or logic surrounding that event than of the particular battery that is installed....no matter what particular battery is installed. (Draw yourself a flowchart.)
My mileage doesn't matter. The entire pro-sound industry is standardized on Duracell, because they always work in this application. For one show. That's all that is asked of them, and all that I claimed.
re: Duracell quality.
In the pro audio spectrum, new Duracell alkalines are used for wireless accessories. At the end of every show, they're disposed of (or most likely hoarded for other purposes). At the next show, new Duracell alkalines are used again.
Why not use rechargeable batteries? They wear out, inconsistently. It's difficult to tell (without a lot of human-time) what the status is, and the voltage when fresh is never as high .
Why alkaline and not heavy-duty or lithium? Because they're consistent, and there's no advantage to lithium (they're expensive).
Why Duracell alkalines? Because they're even more consistent.
Wireless microphones and such are fickle enough without having to worry about one bad cell out of a six-cell 9-volt battery ruining a show.
Just sayin'.
Just because Tesla is having production issues, does not mean that they're not having problems in terms of market penetration.
The two concepts are mutually exclusive.
Please define "enough."
I was under the impression that I get way more than "enough" vitamin C just by eating an American diet. In particular, preserved foods often contain it on purpose (ascorbic acid is an extremely common preservative).
The downside to applying it to everyone is that it's a pain for me to provably track where my money goes.
A rich person hands their AmEx bill and receipt pile to their accountant, who deals with the rest of the paperwork.
Whatever. My plan is more about solving the issue of the rich person complaining about being taxed, than it is about reforming every aspect of government revenue generation.
I think it is an idea worth exploring.
Ok, so let's make the rich spend 75% of their income. Or 90%. Or whatever.
I have an idea: Anyone "earning" more than $1 million per year pays no Federal taxes. At all.
Instead, they just have to spend at least half of their "earnings" on goods and services. Every year. I don't care what they spend it on: Could be yachts, could be Oreos. Could be Chinese-made trinkets or American-made binoculars or Italian sports cars.
Don't care: They must spend it on goods and services. Not domestic investments. Not off-shore resources. And then prove that they've done so, every year, and prove that they've received these goods and services, and that they were all sold to them at reasonable market value.
(This likely means they'll need to employ an accountant. Cry me a river.)
In exchange, they owe no Federal tax. (I'm also in favor of saying they'd owe no state taxes, but that's 50 more arguments.)
The other half of their "earnings"? They can invest it. They can sit on it in an interest-bearing account. They can buy even more goods and services. They can have the bank give them 50% of their earnings in $2 bills so they can swim in them. Give it to their children and friends. Donate it to charity. Buy small countries. [More] Hookers and blow. Don't care.
If they fall short on spending 50% in a year, then they simply owe the remainder and a 25% penalty to the general fund: If they "earn" $1,000,000.00, and only spend $300,000.00, then they'll be required to put $250,000.00 into the kitty.
Hoarding thus solved, and their contractors and retailers thus wealthy (though perhaps not rich) and paying regular taxes, the wealth disparity is thus solved.
If they don't like this gambit, they can just, you know, earn less money. And then it will still automatically be spread out much the same by market forces.
Perhaps only clever in modern parlance; there was a time where flywheels were very, very common for energy storage. (And no, I don't mean the one between the engine in your car and the transmission.)
That said: It spun at 10k RPM before launch, which also seems mighty nifty for the time until one realizes that the bearings only have to work once...