Hmm, it may be sensible from a commercial point of view.
But it is another dream lost.
Why is it, that one flying dream after another is put into museums without a proper "flying dream" replacement. The next dream gone, will probably be the space shuttle. Next they will make private aviation a crime. And then all sensations of the actual "flying" feeling will be made unavailable. Oh yeah, I know: people dont look up to the sky anymore nowadays. They are afraid of it. Except, when the things in the sky are wearing Air Force markings of the country you are currently living in. Flying? They want to be transported, not flown. Concorde gone? Most dont care. Just continue your miserable lifes without dreams. Have you ever really gone flying?
We (IMS-CHIPS) work on something similar. But in our case, the pixels/photodiodes are included on the chip, which is implanted. No need for a separate camera. Very simple and elegant.
Why not go for some different coolant. There is an easily available chemical called "Galden". It is a nonconductive and nontoxic coolant medium used for high voltage equipment. In a company where I worked, we used it to cool high voltage switches. The switches were mounted in a tank, together with all the necessary electronics, including a standard fan which just happened to be mounted to one PCB. Of course, it run slower in the liquid, but was well cooled:-). None of the PCBs or boards or components were sealed. Just dump you complete mainboard into a tank with Galden in it and it will run very cool. Of course, leave all your drives out.
... but when you exchanged the ir send diode in the hp48 against a more powerful one, you could pass notes, results, formulas over 15 meters during exams.
We do standard old fashioned i-line lithography (0.35m), old fashioned proximity lithography (1.5 m), decent laser direct write lithography (0.8 m) and top of the line e-beam direct write lithography ( 100 nm). The smaller the feature size gets, the more problems do we have with particles on the substrate, causing defects. Proximity lithography is suffering from defects caused by particles that form from the direct contact between the mask and the substrate. Thinking of an embossing method for resist patterning gives me a bad feeling about generated particles adhering to the stamp-mask. Especially at 10 nm feature size. Very questionable. Also, the wall angle of the patterned resist seems far off of the desired 90 degrees. The etch behaviour of such shallow slopes is difficult to control and leads to variance in etched feature size. This is an interesting lab experiment, but I cannot imagine it for high volume chip production at all.
Don�t look for the heart - where�s the spirit?
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1
Hi,
I do not think that you can see the net as an organism. Maybe it is better to see it as a company. It started for me in 1992 like a small company where you start working and feel comfortable because very soon you more or less know all the people, you are involved with nearly everything and know where to find all the important stuff. You know how to contact the people in the tool shop, the production and the management. You get to know how and why decisions are found and understand their impact.
Then you drop out for a few years, come back and the backyard sports car manufacturer Lotus has turned into Daimler-Chrysler with a vast palette of different businesses, branches, subcompanies and products. Before, you were fifty people of ten different nationaltities and all talked to each other. Now there are thousands and small "ethnically closed" groups form and talk only to each other. Still there are small toolshops somewhere, but they are hidden and unknown to the common employee. Also, there is some company secruity nowadays, and people who stop a conveyor belt in manufacturing are seriously punished, whereas everybody only laughed when you converted the paintspraygun into a sodamachine in the old days.
But still, such a company can keep its spirit and being there can feel good, even if you know there is no heart. But I agree, the larger something is, the more anonymously it usually is.
Sometimes I start feeling homeless... and lonely... sniff...
There are already several electrically powered aircraft flying. Ok, most of them are gliders that use the engine for take off and then retract it and continue flying, gliding and gaining altitude in thermals. But there is already a powered glider, the icare, which uses solarcells to power an electric motor for take off and sustained cruise.
Conventional self launching gliders are already very sophisticated, but the engines they use, require a lot of maintenance and are sometimes not as reliable as you might wish. Well anyway, if the engine fails I land on a field, no problem there,... that is if a field is in range. Electric engines should increase reliability quite a lot. Hopefully they are available soon.
Regards, Thomas.
Re:Speeds which are dangerous
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 1
The most dangerous condition for these bikes is sidewind. Only very limited steering is possible (wheels contained in fairing and front wheel usually between the legs) and you have a large wind attack area from the side. Braking is not a problem. You are not going downhill and there is plenty of space to stop behind the timing zone. In case of a crash, the fairing will save your skin a bit, as long as it stays intact and you are not leaving the road into the surroundings. By the way, the british "blue bell" team used solid rubber tires in the late eighties, to prevent blowing tires when going downhill at more than 120 km/h. As far as I remember, there was some gravel on the road and they were disqualified because of endangering spectators due to speeding...
Chain drives have very low friction losses (usually much less than shaft drives) and as you said are easily available with many different standardized wheel sizes. Also, they are usually much lighter (especially when a switching gear is necessary) and easily allow a lot of movement of the linked components (like suspension, frame bending under stress, slightly misadjusted components,...) while in operation, when compared with shaft drives. Of course, this applies only for moderate power levels like in bicycles or when wear and tear is not a problem (like in racing motorcycles). For higher power, shaft drives or belt drives are preferable and show more durability.
different "rowing" actuating mechanism
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 1
Hi,
Incredible speeds for bikes!
I think it was in 1990 when we organized an open HPV championship in Muenster/Germany. There the conditions were quite bad (a lot of side wind), and the fully faired racers achieved a top speed of 92 km/h (ca. 57mph). The most interesting machine was a fully faired recumbent tricycle, built by a french ESA engineer (the european equivalent of NASA) for his son, a french rowing champion. He used is hands for pedaling via a special gear and had a moving seat, like in a rowing boat. So, he could use the same trained muscle groups as for rowing. Unfortunately the whole tricycle started to develop a pitching motion at high speeds due to his movings and oscillating body mass. Still, he topped out at more than 90 km/h. Thats for different powering mechanisms.
Someone also asked, how fast a "standard human on an unfaired bike" can go. Well, then many people hit top speeds between 60 and 70 km/h for the flat 200 m distance, with 1 km flat street for accellerating. As for myself, an unfaired homebuild recumbent bike easily got me up to 62 km/h without special training.
Ok, ok, dont compare it with the speeds mentioned in the article:-o
-----
"Its not the speed that kills you, its the sudden stop!"
Reply to Zeppelin NT - first paying passengers
on
Return of the Zeppelins
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hi altogether,
There were technical questions about this wonderful flying machine Zeppelin NT. I will try to remember what I know from the news and the currently defunct webpage.
1. Anchoring and pick up passengers?
It operates ca. 800kg heavier than air. It can land like an aircraft and does not float away while boarding/unboarding. It has an anchoring mast, but needs only three groundpersonell for anchoring compared to roughly 20 for a standard blimp. It can do groundoperations up to 20kts wind as far as I remember, whithout ground personal at all.
2. Maneuvering?
Three Engines, two at the sides with the ability to turn the props for reverse thrust, direct lift and even downforce, one in the rear, giving forward or upward thrust and driving an additional fan for movement around vertical axis(turning). All is completely fly by wire (hopefully NOT NT controlled...). It maneuvers nearly like a helicopter and can turn and climb or descent on the spot.
3. Only 19 passengers?
There are plans to build a larger one for 40 passengers. Buy it and convert it to your own flying luxury yacht. Also, I think there are different (easier) certification rules for aircraft up to 19 passengers (commuter category)then for aircraft with more passengers.
4. Solar / electrical powered aircraft and airships
Take a look at the following link:
http://www.isd.uni-stuttgart.de/arbeitsgruppen/air ship/
for a solar powered airship called "Lotte". It looks really cool. I work only some hundred meters away from their place and can see it flying sometimes.
Also look at
http://www.lange-flugzeugbau.de/
for the first commercial electrical powered motorglider to be certified (hopefully) next year. The engine-unit is already flying in a modified glider.
So, Zeppelin NT? The sight of any flying airship, might it be a blimp or a Zeppelin, is just cool. Especially with a huge outboard color display on the ballonett for delivering messages and fun stuff in the dark. No noise, only a little humming overhead and a large ship passing gently.
Even cooler is, to hitch a ride. Last year a friend of mine won one in another airship, and I had the pleasure to accompanny her. Two hours over Munich in Summer, with the windows down, like in a car, gently floating in the thermals at 50 kph close over the city. Just incomparable to any other flying experience I had before. A Ship, not a plane!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree totally ... ... I miss it ... sigh, yes soaring is great.
I stopped flying gliders four years ago
Hmm, it may be sensible from a commercial point of view.
But it is another dream lost.
Why is it, that one flying dream after another is put into museums without a proper "flying dream" replacement. The next dream gone, will probably be the space shuttle.
Next they will make private aviation a crime. And then all sensations of the actual "flying" feeling will be made unavailable. Oh yeah, I know: people dont look up to the sky anymore nowadays. They are afraid of it. Except, when the things in the sky are wearing Air Force markings of the country you are currently living in.
Flying? They want to be transported, not flown.
Concorde gone? Most dont care.
Just continue your miserable lifes without dreams.
Have you ever really gone flying?
Hi,
We (IMS-CHIPS) work on something similar. But in our case, the pixels/photodiodes are included on the chip, which is implanted. No need for a separate camera. Very simple and elegant.
Have a look:
http://134.2.120.19/index_en.html
http://www.ims-chips.de/home.php3?id=d0822
Why not go for some different coolant. There is an easily available chemical called "Galden". It is a nonconductive and nontoxic coolant medium used for high voltage equipment. In a company where I worked, we used it to cool high voltage switches. The switches were mounted in a tank, together with all the necessary electronics, including a standard fan which just happened to be mounted to one PCB. Of course, it run slower in the liquid, but was well cooled :-). None of the PCBs or boards or components were sealed. Just dump you complete mainboard into a tank with Galden in it and it will run very cool. Of course, leave all your drives out.
This will be a very cool PC in a bucket.
I agree.
... but when you exchanged the ir send diode in the hp48 against a more powerful one, you could pass notes, results, formulas over 15 meters during exams.
Saved me more than one time.
We do standard old fashioned i-line lithography (0.35m), old fashioned proximity lithography (1.5 m), decent laser direct write lithography (0.8 m) and top of the line e-beam direct write lithography ( 100 nm). The smaller the feature size gets, the more problems do we have with particles on the substrate, causing defects. Proximity lithography is suffering from defects caused by particles that form from the direct contact between the mask and the substrate. Thinking of an embossing method for resist patterning gives me a bad feeling about generated particles adhering to the stamp-mask. Especially at 10 nm feature size. Very questionable. Also, the wall angle of the patterned resist seems far off of the desired 90 degrees. The etch behaviour of such shallow slopes is difficult to control and leads to variance in etched feature size. This is an interesting lab experiment, but I cannot imagine it for high volume chip production at all.
Hi,
... and lonely ... sniff ...
... and my english is a bit rusty ...
I do not think that you can see the net as an organism. Maybe it is better to see it as a company. It started for me in 1992 like a small company where you start working and feel comfortable because very soon you more or less know all the people, you are involved with nearly everything and know where to find all the important stuff. You know how to contact the people in the tool shop, the production and the management. You get to know how and why decisions are found and understand their impact.
Then you drop out for a few years, come back and the backyard sports car manufacturer Lotus has turned into Daimler-Chrysler with a vast palette of different businesses, branches, subcompanies and products. Before, you were fifty people of ten different nationaltities and all talked to each other. Now there are thousands and small "ethnically closed" groups form and talk only to each other. Still there are small toolshops somewhere, but they are hidden and unknown to the common employee. Also, there is some company secruity nowadays, and people who stop a conveyor belt in manufacturing are seriously punished, whereas everybody only laughed when you converted the paintspraygun into a sodamachine in the old days.
But still, such a company can keep its spirit and being there can feel good, even if you know there is no heart. But I agree, the larger something is, the more anonymously it usually is.
Sometimes I start feeling homeless
Hi,
... that is if a field is in range. Electric engines should increase reliability quite a lot. Hopefully they are available soon.
There are already several electrically powered aircraft flying. Ok, most of them are gliders that use the engine for take off and then retract it and continue flying, gliding and gaining altitude in thermals. But there is already a powered glider, the icare, which uses solarcells to power an electric motor for take off and sustained cruise.
Take a look at the following websites:
Lange Flugzeugbau
Icare
Silent AE1
Conventional self launching gliders are already very sophisticated, but the engines they use, require a lot of maintenance and are sometimes not as reliable as you might wish. Well anyway, if the engine fails I land on a field, no problem there,
Regards, Thomas.
The most dangerous condition for these bikes is sidewind. Only very limited steering is possible (wheels contained in fairing and front wheel usually between the legs) and you have a large wind attack area from the side. Braking is not a problem. You are not going downhill and there is plenty of space to stop behind the timing zone. In case of a crash, the fairing will save your skin a bit, as long as it stays intact and you are not leaving the road into the surroundings. By the way, the british "blue bell" team used solid rubber tires in the late eighties, to prevent blowing tires when going downhill at more than 120 km/h. As far as I remember, there was some gravel on the road and they were disqualified because of endangering spectators due to speeding ...
Chain drives have very low friction losses (usually much less than shaft drives) and as you said are easily available with many different standardized wheel sizes. Also, they are usually much lighter (especially when a switching gear is necessary) and easily allow a lot of movement of the linked components (like suspension, frame bending under stress, slightly misadjusted components, ...) while in operation, when compared with shaft drives. Of course, this applies only for moderate power levels like in bicycles or when wear and tear is not a problem (like in racing motorcycles). For higher power, shaft drives or belt drives are preferable and show more durability.
Hi,
:-o
Incredible speeds for bikes!
I think it was in 1990 when we organized an open HPV championship in Muenster/Germany. There the conditions were quite bad (a lot of side wind), and the fully faired racers achieved a top speed of 92 km/h (ca. 57mph). The most interesting machine was a fully faired recumbent tricycle, built by a french ESA engineer (the european equivalent of NASA) for his son, a french rowing champion. He used is hands for pedaling via a special gear and had a moving seat, like in a rowing boat. So, he could use the same trained muscle groups as for rowing. Unfortunately the whole tricycle started to develop a pitching motion at high speeds due to his movings and oscillating body mass. Still, he topped out at more than 90 km/h. Thats for different powering mechanisms.
Someone also asked, how fast a "standard human on an unfaired bike" can go. Well, then many people hit top speeds between 60 and 70 km/h for the flat 200 m distance, with 1 km flat street for accellerating. As for myself, an unfaired homebuild recumbent bike easily got me up to 62 km/h without special training.
Ok, ok, dont compare it with the speeds mentioned in the article
-----
"Its not the speed that kills you, its the sudden stop!"
Hi altogether,
...). It maneuvers nearly like a helicopter and can turn and climb or descent on the spot.
r ship/
...
There were technical questions about this wonderful flying machine Zeppelin NT. I will try to remember what I know from the news and the currently defunct webpage.
1. Anchoring and pick up passengers?
It operates ca. 800kg heavier than air. It can land like an aircraft and does not float away while boarding/unboarding. It has an anchoring mast, but needs only three groundpersonell for anchoring compared to roughly 20 for a standard blimp. It can do groundoperations up to 20kts wind as far as I remember, whithout ground personal at all.
2. Maneuvering?
Three Engines, two at the sides with the ability to turn the props for reverse thrust, direct lift and even downforce, one in the rear, giving forward or upward thrust and driving an additional fan for movement around vertical axis(turning). All is completely fly by wire (hopefully NOT NT controlled
3. Only 19 passengers?
There are plans to build a larger one for 40 passengers. Buy it and convert it to your own flying luxury yacht. Also, I think there are different (easier) certification rules for aircraft up to 19 passengers (commuter category)then for aircraft with more passengers.
4. Solar / electrical powered aircraft and airships
Take a look at the following link:
http://www.isd.uni-stuttgart.de/arbeitsgruppen/ai
for a solar powered airship called "Lotte". It looks really cool. I work only some hundred meters away from their place and can see it flying sometimes.
Also look at
http://www.lange-flugzeugbau.de/
for the first commercial electrical powered motorglider to be certified (hopefully) next year. The engine-unit is already flying in a modified glider.
So, Zeppelin NT? The sight of any flying airship, might it be a blimp or a Zeppelin, is just cool. Especially with a huge outboard color display on the ballonett for delivering messages and fun stuff in the dark. No noise, only a little humming overhead and a large ship passing gently.
Even cooler is, to hitch a ride. Last year a friend of mine won one in another airship, and I had the pleasure to accompanny her. Two hours over Munich in Summer, with the windows down, like in a car, gently floating in the thermals at 50 kph close over the city. Just incomparable to any other flying experience I had before. A Ship, not a plane!
Justdreaminggoneflyingregards