These are electric cars run by a computer. Knowing how to make the battery explode by software just might come in handy for someone who would like to leave a car thief with a very unpleasant experience.
Kidding around aside, please don't diss the batteries too much. I've blown up a few lithium batteries myself. Tow were intentional. I wanted to get an idea of just what it would take to make them lose their temper. Two were unintentional. But I did learn a lot from that. I was just happy I had the foresight to have used an old toaster oven for my battery pack test chamber. Lithium battery fires are nasty. Nothing I could do more than take the toaster oven out to the parking lot and let it exhaust itself.
One learns from their mistakes. There are several things I am not going to do again. Ever.
My neighbor's car caught fire a couple of years ago. He was lucky enough to catch it in the act and pushed it out to the middle of the street. The problem turned out to be the fuel injection system, which somehow did not shut down with the rest of the car. But being fuel injection is old technology, it did not make the news.
Fisker's exploding battery did.
I hate to diss technologies because of a misunderstanding of how to use them. There was a helluva lot of airplane accidents before we got that one pretty well nailed down.
Lithium batteries are dangerous. Very dangerous. So is gasoline.
I have noted some MR16 LED's I bought run hot. The "Shoe Palace" at the local mall installed this same kind of lighting and I notice about 10% of their emitters are now dead. It is my belief that the LED's were sold on their initial appearance of being very bright, not for their longevity. So the marketers overdrive them to make the specs look good for a quick sale.
I bought mine for outdoor illumination, but after examining them, it appears they are very poorly sealed against moisture. Not the LED, rather its the inverter electronics that appears quite vulnerable to condensation which would be expected in an outdoor application, much like you would expect same in a bathroom application.
I have been looking at those 10-watt LED chip arrays from China, which look like they would survive outdoors as long as I ran them substantially below their rated power due to not having them heat sunk very well. They still need a driver, but in this case, I will put up with the inefficiency of using a ballast resistor in order to get the reliability and robustness against moisture that I do not believe I can get from a buck ( switching ) converter.in a wet environment.
I definitely wanted the outside lighting to run on 12 volts ( DC, full wave rectified, minimal filtering for voltage spikes that would destroy the LED ), I considered the 12 volt 20 watt MR16 halogens unsuitable because their current draw demanded heavy expensive wire, I wanted to run my lights with repurposed CAT5 cable ( which I have lots of) snaked in old garden hose as a direct burial conduit. Obviously, the ends are exposed to water, kids and pets, so line voltage is definitely out. I can get 10 ohm 25 watt ( 1 volt per 100 mA ) ballast resistors pretty cheap, and run them way under rating so they barely run warm. They are well sealed, so if they get wet, no big deal.
You may have seen a lot of indicator type LED's and small flashlights and think these things are the ideal cold light source. When I played with higher powered LED's ( 1 watt and up ), I was quite dismayed with how much heat I was going to have to deal with. Incandescents make even more heat, but the heat does not destruct the lamp like heat will shorten the lifetime of a LED.
I have several UltraFire WF-502B flashlights I bought so I could re-use the lithium 18650 style cells I recovered from "spent" power tool and laptop battery packs. I was doing some research on how to build charge equalizers with the cells and later fell in love with the lithium cell technology. These are quite nice high powered flashlights which deliver an unusual amount of light. The flashlights are made from machined aluminum, and they are the first flashlight I have ever had that ran noticeably warm after it has been turned on for a few minutes. They have about a 5 watt LED in them, on a massive block of aluminum heat sunk to the aluminum body of the flashlight. Yes, a beautiful design, and it also illustrates well that high power LED's will heat up.
I know our Government is doing all they can do to ram Fluorescent and LED technology down our collective throats. It is still my firm belief that those technologies are downright dangerous in the bathroom, where condensation wets the innards of the thing, then when you turn it on, ka-blooie! By their construction, incandescent bulbs are extremely resistant to condensation ( and if they are on, no condensation will happen because of the heat ).
Yes, there are some good bulbs out there. There is also a lot of junk. I do not want to diss the new stuff, but in my book, its too early to retire the legacy incandescent.
I have seen the color changing ones where one can custom mix red, green, blue, white LED outputs to make almost any desired hue, and they have their application. I do not know if I really want it all that bad, but maybe it would be good for things like mood lighting. I know I highly prefer my light around 2700K, ( quite yellowish ), but others may want the higher temperature 6000K ( downright cold bluish ) light.
Its not paying the three cents that concerns me so...
What concerns me is sharing my banking info. I am doing everything in my power to limit the amount of charge numbers floating around I am responsible for. Some joker gets a list of those numbers, and I end up seeing unwarranted charges showing up and I am faced with either having to spend valuable time trying to straighten up the mess or let it ride. Its not the three cents.... its the irritation of supervising yet another financial obligation where others can incur charges against me that can easily take hours, if not days or weeks of my time to recover misallocated funds.
There are many "businessmen" out there who have figured out clever ways of getting one's banking info ( Call Now! We will send you one FREE!!! - Just pay shipping. )
I am far more open to giving them a dollar cash than giving them my charge card numbers.
I am not giving anyone my banking info for three lousy cents!
This problem of WiFi leeching is far greater than one guy losing some of his bits... rather now it is wide open that WiFi is not all that secure.
Copyright Infringement... How are the courts to assign guilt to anyone for violating copyright on the net if it can not be proven, with forum discussions like the one you are reading right now, that one is the perpetrator of internet mischief?
The ones that should be most concerned is the MAFIAA. All the lobbying of politicians to pass their carefully crafted laws is moot if it is shown in courts of law that the wifi routers themselves are compromisable. It will be hard, if not impossible, to place without-a-doubt liability on anyone for what went through their system.
I am sure this entire forum will be copied off and presented to the Judge as evidence that it cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the copyright violator indeed did what the MAFIAA alleged he did.
If the battery management board was doing its job right, it would not have made any difference if they had miswired it that way. That is what "smart battery" technology is all about.
Smart battery technology enables the controller to look at every cell individually. No two cells are identical. They will leak charge at different rates. And won't have identical capacity. Especially over time.
A "smart battery controller" keeps track of the state of charge of each cell of the battery pack and allocates charging energy accordingly, likewise it supervises the rate of charge and allowable rates of discharge, including shutting down battery discharge as any cell approached its low charge level limit.
A miswire to the pack should not make it catch fire; however the miswire may well lead to unexpected behaviour, such as the battery "going dead" unexpectedly or failing to charge properly. In my expectations, a properly designed battery management device will have the capability of blowing open a fuse if necessary to completely disable the battery in the event of a severe failure or miswire - especially in the case of lithium chemistries which are intolerant of abuse.
I highly respect lithium cells for their performance, but also am highly aware of their response to being mistreated. They are very intolerant of being either overcharged or overdischarged. These things must be supervised.
Those "idiot MBAs" landed a comfortable retirement plan.
The "perfectionist engineers" were laid off.
What used to be the crown jewels of the company, the core competencies, are now commoditized for lowest cost overseas manufacture.
Most of our core corporations have been reduced to a cadre of highly paid salesmen selling a branded product, of which one can purchase identical generic equivalents. The last vestige of holding onto power is by keeping the generics out of the market by legal maneuverings of copyright and patent law.
When I read of it, I felt more vindicated than surprised.
During my tenure in aerospace, I had witnessed more and more of a disregard for detail work. What used to be a good thing called "attention to detail" started being regarded negatively as "being a perfectionist".
The devil is in the details. Thousands of things work perfectly. One does not. This is the inevitable result of overlooking just one detail.
I have posted a lot here on Slashdot. Lots of rants.
I did visit Dice.com after my layoff from the aerospace industry, but in all honesty, I had a hard time perceiving Dice.com as being a serious site, as it seemed keyed more to bureaucratic needs of collecting information rather than actually connecting me with someone who could benefit from my capabilities and experience. Here I am trying to hold an intelligent technical discussion about electronic design with a HR type? I might as well be a molecular biochemist trying to discuss DNA coding with a construction foreman.
It did not take long before I realized they were "fishing with dynamite". They gave me little indication I had anything of value to offer - as they were after people with very specific certs and previous experience... bottom fishing with a net... trying to find the cheapest solution for filling a opening for yet someone else. I am not good at that kind of salesmanship. Neither am I good at writing resumes with wording reminiscent of television ads tailored to sell subperforming goods for a premium price.
I fail to see Dice.com as a viable employment site. All I can say is just do your thing and try to hang around other people who are also doing your thing. Eventually, they will need some help and you will be on the top of the invite list.
My thing is analog circuit design ( power, CPU interface, microvolt and picoamp stuff ), microcontrollers ( mostly now all arduino but some u/COS ), and of all things... refrigeration. My employment came from personal contact with others doing this kind of stuff. I do not think anyone on Dice could probably even discuss thermal energy transfer to shaft work, or how to guard a picoampere measurement circuit with me. It is frustrating to me to deal with it. Extremely frustrating.
I figure they are more of a bunch of power suits and ties, lots of money, and no need of the guy with the tools.
I hate suits with a purple passion, mostly because when I am wearing one, I am so concerned with messing it up that I do not get any work done. I can't even bend my arms properly or sit comfortably, and have to be aware of every snagging object. For me, they are a ostentatious display of having far more wealth than is needed. Kinda like the guy who buys the fancy little car to get to work, but can't take a load of tools in it for fear the tools will scratch it up. Or can't take it to the beach.
If there has been anything in my observation that has ruined companies, it was when they were overfunded to such an extent they started hiring people to fill openings for other people.
I insist on talking directly to the person I will be working for, not his gofer-guy. I hate the damn politics I have to go through in the Corporate environment.
Note how compact an OS can be if all the "consumer fluff" is not included and the OS simply concentrates on the task to do and what resources it has to allocate.
The hobby cells bring out a connection point between cells for both cell voltage monitoring and charge balancing. You will find charge balancers as well at most hobby shops dealing with lithium cells. Every lithium pack I have run across so far has either had an in-pack balancer or a connection for an external balancer.
My interest in battery packs was piqued about a dozen years ago when I had numerous Makita Ni-Cd battery packs fail after sometimes no more than three usages. I disassembled the packs to find the cells damaged by overcharge, each pack having one or more cells that had grown a filament ( whisker ) inside which prevented one cell of the series stack from taking a charge. The charger, trying to establish stack voltage, charged and charged and charged to no avail. The cells vented and vented and vented until there was no electrolyte left.
It was the way I was using the cells. As a homeowner, I charged the pack for a use, used maybe 5 percent of the energy in the pack, then left the tool alone for a month or so. The cells had uneven self-discharge rates and some would not have any charge at all. When I picked up the tool, sometimes I would try to use it again, but the leakiest cell already could not hold its own and the stronger cells rammed current through the weakest one in reverse, ruining it and causing it to grow a whisker inside, shorting it out. The destruction of the remaining cells happened when I tried to charge the pack.
So, to combat this, I redesigned my charger to trickle 30 milliamperes through the pack at all times, and left the pack in the charger. Never had the problem again.
Later, I got a good-sized box of spent lithium laptop battery packs from a recycle kiosk at a local store. The owner was kind enough to let me have at them before sending them on. I disassembled every one of them to discover what killed them. Most were simply cycled to death, but several had some quite interesting failure modes involving the charge management board built into the packs.
One benefit I got was a nearly unlimited number of perfectly good 18650-size lithium ion batteries for use in flashlights and for powering all sorts of other little gadgets I make in the lab. There are all sorts of electronic things made in China that use the 18650 cell.
I intend to use some quite large lithium cells for off-grid power backup, but being they are expensive and dangerous, I took it on myself to design a system for charging and monitoring the cells to make sure, and I mean damn sure, that nothing goes wrong. I ended up making a DC-DC converter that draws power from the whole stack, yet uses the power to charge each cell individually. No- this is not a scheme to get power for free, rather it is my way of equally redistributing all power available in the entire battery pack equally among all the cells of the pack. If some cells are weaker, the stronger cells are "taxed" more to provide supplemental charging current to the weaker cells. "Electronic communism" if you please. All cell voltages are forced equal by the charger. The microprocessor running the battery management board keeps track of each cells ability to supply or need of charge, as well as stats such as cell impedances, temperatures, and rates of parameter changes. The data is made available as a web-page on a 192.168.xxx.xxx addy, same kind of page as a setup page in a router. Simple HTML with graphics driven by sizing a colored pixel.
I saw another write-up where Boeing has been having problems of this same ilk. What they are going through is precisely what I am trying to avoid.
The charge management circuit is what has me concerned. I have messed with plenty of failed power tool batteries, dissecting each, and finding common points of what caused the whole assembly to fail, and every time it has been the concept of cells in series.
The cells do not have identical leakage, so some cells tend to overcharge to compensate for the other cell in the stack which leaked its charge away.
This phenomena shows up after the cells have been in service for months to years.
The older chemistries I have worked with have been relatively tolerant of overcharge, converting the excess energy either to heat or hydrogen gas, which was silently vented. Lithium ion cells are not nearly as tolerant to overcharge as NiCd, LiMH, or Lead-Acid cells. Overfilling a lithium ion cell seems like overfilling a propane tank. Once it tops off, there is nowhere for the excess energy to go and POP goes the weasel.
If you are charging based on stack voltage, you will overcharge the hell out of a good cell as you try to bring the terminal voltage of a weak cell up. You will detonate your good cell in the process.
I am currently playing around with a lithium battery pack monitor with which I have individual chargers for each cell. There is no way I would consider charging all cells in series as is commonly done in the earlier packs. With the DC isolation I can easily get from high frequency inverters, it is quite easy for me to get matched voltages from multiple windings. I use supplemental converters to additionally charge individual cells that leak a bit more than others in the pack. I also have switched cell monitors which rapidly switch each cell onto a measurement buss along with three tightly controlled reference voltage sources. This results in a signal stream which indicates terminal voltage of every cell in the pack, cell by cell. This feeds a digitizer which constantly tracks each cell voltage and is instructed to terminate battery function if any cell shows over or under charge. If a cell simply needs a little help, the individual cell inverters kick in to boost the weaker cell and such activity logged.
A supplemental benefit of the serial analog data stream is that I can use any oscilloscope to see all the cells at once... I can sync to cell 0 which is the reference voltage. ( three references because this is so critical that if I have a reference drift I will have two others that hopefully are providing reliable data. Bad data = explosion; false trip=expensive downtime ).
Lithium batteries have a lot to offer, but they are also quite a bit more volatile than other chemistries I have worked with. Even YouTube has quite an assortment of videos of overcharged lithium cells igniting. Like a propane tank, they are quite useful if not mistreated, but can really take you to the cleaners if you do.
How much stuff have we seen already - absolutely ludicrous - yet it sells?
I am sure you, like me, have seen lots of stuff advertised that could not possibly work as advertised, yet someone sells it, making a mint doing so.
My neighbor bought last year some miracle thing that cooled his whole house off the ice in his fridge. Yeh. Cooled by how much?.0001 degree kelvin? And how much heat did his fridge pump into his house to make the ice? Unsaid. But most people, being the sheeple they are, open their wallets for what the microphone man is hocking. Geez, its gotta be true -doesn't it? It was said through a microphone!
Much of what I have seen coming down the pike for the last few decades I considered a joke. Other people took it seriously. And made money.
Some people do indeed have the sales skill to sell ice to eskimos. I go through almost any store and know my marketing skills are useless. The store seems mostly stocked with utterly useless junk - but someone buys it.
So a real joke got mixed up with all this junk. Can you blame 'em for not distinguishing the real joke from the crap the marketing people push today?
What I would like to know is why is it I am expected to pay full price during service lapses?
If I paid someone to mow my lawn, but he couldn't get his lawn mower started, am I still obligated to pay for a mowed lawn?
All this AT&T style "up-to" talk frustrates me. Imagine an airline selling tickets for seats "up to" 40 inches wide, only to find out upon boarding you get a seat four inches wide... and sometimes do not get a seat at all. How many people would settle for "AT&T talk" for airline seats?
Ok, I do like to rant on Slashdot on things that frustrate the hell out of me. Sometimes I think its futile, but it is my hope that some executive might actually read this forum to get buzz directly from the customers instead of paying some high-priced market research firm to tell him what he wants to hear - even though it seems many companies executives are well enough off they don't have to concern themselves with how their companies appear to the public.
Bottom line, I highly resent legal maneuvering to force people to pay for stuff they don't get. I consider it just as unethical as if a person got a company's contract, reworded it, signed it, then when the company accepted it ( without rereading all the altered fine grey print on the back ) legally tried to hold them to that contract.
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
OK. It tastes good. Not all that good for you, just sugar and indigestibles, no nutritive content at all from what I can tell. But pleasurable to ingest. OK, at least I know what it is and make my decisions accordingly.
( incidentally, their coffee is made with some topping which is completely indigestible to me. I found out during a bout of flu. It all came out, processed, but untouched. Lots of it. I think it was sweetened and foamed Olestra.
Same with the horse meat. I will consider it no big deal if it is accurately represented on its bill of contents. It can be ground up worms for what I care. If it is biologically compatible with me and it tastes good, I'll go for it.
Personally, I am far more concerned with pesticide and other biocide remnants in my food. I am far more concerned with genetically modified stuff than things that have been in the food chain since life began. I do not know how well I or others may metabolize sheep designed to put spider silk proteins in their milk or corn designed to make its own pesticide. I guess time will tell.
Yes... it would be answered prayer for me if we progress to a point ( both technically and legally ) that I could draw up something and take it into Kinko's and have a custom part made to that drawing in my choice of materials. God knows how many perfectly good things I have had to throw away because I broke the little doohickey off the plastic thingamabob that held the battery in.
I have several almost perfectly good Gardner-Denver wirewrap tools... the black bakelite ones, I hate to throw such beautiful tools away. They are right at fifty years old, run on Sub-C Ni-Cd cells which I can still readily get today, and I have all the fittings for them for all kinds of wire...
And every darned one of them has a broken nylon clutch.
I see the day coming I can draw up the clutch part that broke, have Kinko's run me off a dozen, and let me put my tools back into service.
I have long wondered what it would take to recycle soda bottles, being they are all made with the same high quality plastic that withstands the pressures of carbonated water ( sometimes heated carbonated water ) without exploding.
Yes, it would be worth it to me to clean the bottle if I could feed the bottle into some sort of machine which would reform the plastic into a more usable form.
It would make a market for used soda bottles, and get them off the street and out of our landfills. Our congress would also have to set the framework for original bottling to make sure all bottlers used the same plastic formulation so the reformers could use it.
I can well see the day when darned nearly anything plastic, especially things like pipe and fittings, could be made to order on the spot. Plastic things no longer wanted could be offered as feedstock to make something else.
Can you see going to Home Depot for some half-inch irrigation pipe and be able to pay for it in either dollars or recyclable plastic... and having them set their machine to extrude what you wanted right on the spot?
Well, currently I'm a doctor. So I work on people-thingies.
Thought of using these things as healthcare assistants and live-in care for invalids? If they had strong arms, they would be able to help invalids into beds, wheelchairs, assist with bathing, food prep, and cleanups - especially the messy kind people hate to get their hands in. They could also radio in for help when the situation warrants it.
God knows how many live-alone elderly could use one of these as a help-mate.
If you are running a website targeting engineers and designers actively integrating products into new designs, take my parent post into consideration before considering all sorts of fancy window-dressing programming which requires java, javascript, pop-ups, etc to be enabled before content is displayed.
Businesses having lack of foresight who hire webmasters who implement finicky programming techniques isolate themselves from engineers trying to research products to be designed into other products. How many times has one tried to obtain product info only to be met with all sorts of script programming demanding java be enabled? Some business types will still pay a good salary to have prospective customers abandon their site because it is so difficult to use.
I do a lot of research for businesses in the design phase, and often this research is quite confidential. That is why they have me involved. I am not supposed to reveal the company name or even what it is they have me researching.
Business question: How much would you pay to have a script written that discouraged the engineer from your site, so your product was never considered in the design phase? How much would you pay for someone who would hire someone that writes this stuff? The answers to these questions will have a large influence on your future sales.
If I could process the digitizer output, I would use the same stenographic techniques used to inject hidden content in image files.
To the eye, an image with encoded input just looks a bit grainy. To the ear, a voice with encoded input would just sound like a bit of background noise,
Alternative views of world news is very welcome to me. The more signal I get, the more I can integrate the noise out. There are ways newscasters "spin" the facts that trying to figure out the truth getting it from only one party is next to futile.
They want to buy used videogame and destroy it, taking it off the market. For good.
Now, the customer of that game is forced to buy, at full price and royalties to author, another full licensed version, instead of buying the recycled one, from which only the reseller, not the author, profits.
This maximizes the profit for the author of the despised works.
Slashdot Mirror
These are electric cars run by a computer. Knowing how to make the battery explode by software just might come in handy for someone who would like to leave a car thief with a very unpleasant experience.
Kidding around aside, please don't diss the batteries too much. I've blown up a few lithium batteries myself. Tow were intentional. I wanted to get an idea of just what it would take to make them lose their temper. Two were unintentional. But I did learn a lot from that. I was just happy I had the foresight to have used an old toaster oven for my battery pack test chamber. Lithium battery fires are nasty. Nothing I could do more than take the toaster oven out to the parking lot and let it exhaust itself.
One learns from their mistakes. There are several things I am not going to do again. Ever.
My neighbor's car caught fire a couple of years ago. He was lucky enough to catch it in the act and pushed it out to the middle of the street. The problem turned out to be the fuel injection system, which somehow did not shut down with the rest of the car. But being fuel injection is old technology, it did not make the news.
Fisker's exploding battery did.
I hate to diss technologies because of a misunderstanding of how to use them. There was a helluva lot of airplane accidents before we got that one pretty well nailed down.
Lithium batteries are dangerous. Very dangerous. So is gasoline.
I have noted some MR16 LED's I bought run hot. The "Shoe Palace" at the local mall installed this same kind of lighting and I notice about 10% of their emitters are now dead. It is my belief that the LED's were sold on their initial appearance of being very bright, not for their longevity. So the marketers overdrive them to make the specs look good for a quick sale.
I bought mine for outdoor illumination, but after examining them, it appears they are very poorly sealed against moisture. Not the LED, rather its the inverter electronics that appears quite vulnerable to condensation which would be expected in an outdoor application, much like you would expect same in a bathroom application.
I have been looking at those 10-watt LED chip arrays from China, which look like they would survive outdoors as long as I ran them substantially below their rated power due to not having them heat sunk very well. They still need a driver, but in this case, I will put up with the inefficiency of using a ballast resistor in order to get the reliability and robustness against moisture that I do not believe I can get from a buck ( switching ) converter.in a wet environment.
I definitely wanted the outside lighting to run on 12 volts ( DC, full wave rectified, minimal filtering for voltage spikes that would destroy the LED ), I considered the 12 volt 20 watt MR16 halogens unsuitable because their current draw demanded heavy expensive wire, I wanted to run my lights with repurposed CAT5 cable ( which I have lots of) snaked in old garden hose as a direct burial conduit. Obviously, the ends are exposed to water, kids and pets, so line voltage is definitely out. I can get 10 ohm 25 watt ( 1 volt per 100 mA ) ballast resistors pretty cheap, and run them way under rating so they barely run warm. They are well sealed, so if they get wet, no big deal.
You may have seen a lot of indicator type LED's and small flashlights and think these things are the ideal cold light source. When I played with higher powered LED's ( 1 watt and up ), I was quite dismayed with how much heat I was going to have to deal with. Incandescents make even more heat, but the heat does not destruct the lamp like heat will shorten the lifetime of a LED.
I have several UltraFire WF-502B flashlights I bought so I could re-use the lithium 18650 style cells I recovered from "spent" power tool and laptop battery packs. I was doing some research on how to build charge equalizers with the cells and later fell in love with the lithium cell technology. These are quite nice high powered flashlights which deliver an unusual amount of light. The flashlights are made from machined aluminum, and they are the first flashlight I have ever had that ran noticeably warm after it has been turned on for a few minutes. They have about a 5 watt LED in them, on a massive block of aluminum heat sunk to the aluminum body of the flashlight. Yes, a beautiful design, and it also illustrates well that high power LED's will heat up.
I know our Government is doing all they can do to ram Fluorescent and LED technology down our collective throats. It is still my firm belief that those technologies are downright dangerous in the bathroom, where condensation wets the innards of the thing, then when you turn it on, ka-blooie! By their construction, incandescent bulbs are extremely resistant to condensation ( and if they are on, no condensation will happen because of the heat ).
Yes, there are some good bulbs out there. There is also a lot of junk. I do not want to diss the new stuff, but in my book, its too early to retire the legacy incandescent.
I have seen the color changing ones where one can custom mix red, green, blue, white LED outputs to make almost any desired hue, and they have their application. I do not know if I really want it all that bad, but maybe it would be good for things like mood lighting. I know I highly prefer my light around 2700K, ( quite yellowish ), but others may want the higher temperature 6000K ( downright cold bluish ) light.
Its not paying the three cents that concerns me so...
What concerns me is sharing my banking info. I am doing everything in my power to limit the amount of charge numbers floating around I am responsible for. Some joker gets a list of those numbers, and I end up seeing unwarranted charges showing up and I am faced with either having to spend valuable time trying to straighten up the mess or let it ride. Its not the three cents.... its the irritation of supervising yet another financial obligation where others can incur charges against me that can easily take hours, if not days or weeks of my time to recover misallocated funds.
There are many "businessmen" out there who have figured out clever ways of getting one's banking info ( Call Now! We will send you one FREE!!! - Just pay shipping. )
I am far more open to giving them a dollar cash than giving them my charge card numbers.
I am not giving anyone my banking info for three lousy cents!
This problem of WiFi leeching is far greater than one guy losing some of his bits... rather now it is wide open that WiFi is not all that secure.
Copyright Infringement... How are the courts to assign guilt to anyone for violating copyright on the net if it can not be proven, with forum discussions like the one you are reading right now, that one is the perpetrator of internet mischief?
The ones that should be most concerned is the MAFIAA. All the lobbying of politicians to pass their carefully crafted laws is moot if it is shown in courts of law that the wifi routers themselves are compromisable. It will be hard, if not impossible, to place without-a-doubt liability on anyone for what went through their system.
I am sure this entire forum will be copied off and presented to the Judge as evidence that it cannot be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the copyright violator indeed did what the MAFIAA alleged he did.
If the battery management board was doing its job right, it would not have made any difference if they had miswired it that way. That is what "smart battery" technology is all about.
Smart battery technology enables the controller to look at every cell individually. No two cells are identical. They will leak charge at different rates. And won't have identical capacity. Especially over time.
A "smart battery controller" keeps track of the state of charge of each cell of the battery pack and allocates charging energy accordingly, likewise it supervises the rate of charge and allowable rates of discharge, including shutting down battery discharge as any cell approached its low charge level limit.
A miswire to the pack should not make it catch fire; however the miswire may well lead to unexpected behaviour, such as the battery "going dead" unexpectedly or failing to charge properly. In my expectations, a properly designed battery management device will have the capability of blowing open a fuse if necessary to completely disable the battery in the event of a severe failure or miswire - especially in the case of lithium chemistries which are intolerant of abuse.
I highly respect lithium cells for their performance, but also am highly aware of their response to being mistreated. They are very intolerant of being either overcharged or overdischarged. These things must be supervised.
Those "idiot MBAs" landed a comfortable retirement plan.
The "perfectionist engineers" were laid off.
What used to be the crown jewels of the company, the core competencies, are now commoditized for lowest cost overseas manufacture.
Most of our core corporations have been reduced to a cadre of highly paid salesmen selling a branded product, of which one can purchase identical generic equivalents. The last vestige of holding onto power is by keeping the generics out of the market by legal maneuverings of copyright and patent law.
When I read of it, I felt more vindicated than surprised.
During my tenure in aerospace, I had witnessed more and more of a disregard for detail work. What used to be a good thing called "attention to detail" started being regarded negatively as "being a perfectionist".
The devil is in the details. Thousands of things work perfectly. One does not. This is the inevitable result of overlooking just one detail.
I have posted a lot here on Slashdot. Lots of rants.
... trying to find the cheapest solution for filling a opening for yet someone else. I am not good at that kind of salesmanship. Neither am I good at writing resumes with wording reminiscent of television ads tailored to sell subperforming goods for a premium price.
I did visit Dice.com after my layoff from the aerospace industry, but in all honesty, I had a hard time perceiving Dice.com as being a serious site, as it seemed keyed more to bureaucratic needs of collecting information rather than actually connecting me with someone who could benefit from my capabilities and experience. Here I am trying to hold an intelligent technical discussion about electronic design with a HR type? I might as well be a molecular biochemist trying to discuss DNA coding with a construction foreman.
It did not take long before I realized they were "fishing with dynamite". They gave me little indication I had anything of value to offer - as they were after people with very specific certs and previous experience... bottom fishing with a net
I fail to see Dice.com as a viable employment site. All I can say is just do your thing and try to hang around other people who are also doing your thing. Eventually, they will need some help and you will be on the top of the invite list.
My thing is analog circuit design ( power, CPU interface, microvolt and picoamp stuff ), microcontrollers ( mostly now all arduino but some u/COS ), and of all things... refrigeration. My employment came from personal contact with others doing this kind of stuff. I do not think anyone on Dice could probably even discuss thermal energy transfer to shaft work, or how to guard a picoampere measurement circuit with me. It is frustrating to me to deal with it. Extremely frustrating.
I figure they are more of a bunch of power suits and ties, lots of money, and no need of the guy with the tools.
I hate suits with a purple passion, mostly because when I am wearing one, I am so concerned with messing it up that I do not get any work done. I can't even bend my arms properly or sit comfortably, and have to be aware of every snagging object. For me, they are a ostentatious display of having far more wealth than is needed. Kinda like the guy who buys the fancy little car to get to work, but can't take a load of tools in it for fear the tools will scratch it up. Or can't take it to the beach.
If there has been anything in my observation that has ruined companies, it was when they were overfunded to such an extent they started hiring people to fill openings for other people.
I insist on talking directly to the person I will be working for, not his gofer-guy. I hate the damn politics I have to go through in the Corporate environment.
What if you used an image as a password?
Or hash a 1 Kilobit key from that image?
If you took the image yourself with your own camera, you can be pretty sure you are the only one in the world who has an exact digital copy of it.
NASA uses Micrium's OS ( U/COS ) on the Mars curiosity rover.
( NetBurners use the same OS )
Here's the book on it... same one I use.
Note how compact an OS can be if all the "consumer fluff" is not included and the OS simply concentrates on the task to do and what resources it has to allocate.
The hobby cells bring out a connection point between cells for both cell voltage monitoring and charge balancing. You will find charge balancers as well at most hobby shops dealing with lithium cells. Every lithium pack I have run across so far has either had an in-pack balancer or a connection for an external balancer.
My interest in battery packs was piqued about a dozen years ago when I had numerous Makita Ni-Cd battery packs fail after sometimes no more than three usages. I disassembled the packs to find the cells damaged by overcharge, each pack having one or more cells that had grown a filament ( whisker ) inside which prevented one cell of the series stack from taking a charge. The charger, trying to establish stack voltage, charged and charged and charged to no avail. The cells vented and vented and vented until there was no electrolyte left.
It was the way I was using the cells. As a homeowner, I charged the pack for a use, used maybe 5 percent of the energy in the pack, then left the tool alone for a month or so. The cells had uneven self-discharge rates and some would not have any charge at all. When I picked up the tool, sometimes I would try to use it again, but the leakiest cell already could not hold its own and the stronger cells rammed current through the weakest one in reverse, ruining it and causing it to grow a whisker inside, shorting it out. The destruction of the remaining cells happened when I tried to charge the pack.
So, to combat this, I redesigned my charger to trickle 30 milliamperes through the pack at all times, and left the pack in the charger. Never had the problem again.
Later, I got a good-sized box of spent lithium laptop battery packs from a recycle kiosk at a local store. The owner was kind enough to let me have at them before sending them on. I disassembled every one of them to discover what killed them. Most were simply cycled to death, but several had some quite interesting failure modes involving the charge management board built into the packs.
One benefit I got was a nearly unlimited number of perfectly good 18650-size lithium ion batteries for use in flashlights and for powering all sorts of other little gadgets I make in the lab. There are all sorts of electronic things made in China that use the 18650 cell.
http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=18650+flashlight&catId=0&manual=y
I intend to use some quite large lithium cells for off-grid power backup, but being they are expensive and dangerous, I took it on myself to design a system for charging and monitoring the cells to make sure, and I mean damn sure, that nothing goes wrong. I ended up making a DC-DC converter that draws power from the whole stack, yet uses the power to charge each cell individually. No- this is not a scheme to get power for free, rather it is my way of equally redistributing all power available in the entire battery pack equally among all the cells of the pack. If some cells are weaker, the stronger cells are "taxed" more to provide supplemental charging current to the weaker cells. "Electronic communism" if you please. All cell voltages are forced equal by the charger. The microprocessor running the battery management board keeps track of each cells ability to supply or need of charge, as well as stats such as cell impedances, temperatures, and rates of parameter changes. The data is made available as a web-page on a 192.168.xxx.xxx addy, same kind of page as a setup page in a router. Simple HTML with graphics driven by sizing a colored pixel.
I saw another write-up where Boeing has been having problems of this same ilk. What they are going through is precisely what I am trying to avoid.
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2020241385_787deadbatteriesxml.html
Funny thing is I used to work for a company bought up by Boeing. I got laid off in the buy-up.
The charge management circuit is what has me concerned. I have messed with plenty of failed power tool batteries, dissecting each, and finding common points of what caused the whole assembly to fail, and every time it has been the concept of cells in series.
The cells do not have identical leakage, so some cells tend to overcharge to compensate for the other cell in the stack which leaked its charge away.
This phenomena shows up after the cells have been in service for months to years.
The older chemistries I have worked with have been relatively tolerant of overcharge, converting the excess energy either to heat or hydrogen gas, which was silently vented. Lithium ion cells are not nearly as tolerant to overcharge as NiCd, LiMH, or Lead-Acid cells. Overfilling a lithium ion cell seems like overfilling a propane tank. Once it tops off, there is nowhere for the excess energy to go and POP goes the weasel.
If you are charging based on stack voltage, you will overcharge the hell out of a good cell as you try to bring the terminal voltage of a weak cell up. You will detonate your good cell in the process.
I am currently playing around with a lithium battery pack monitor with which I have individual chargers for each cell. There is no way I would consider charging all cells in series as is commonly done in the earlier packs. With the DC isolation I can easily get from high frequency inverters, it is quite easy for me to get matched voltages from multiple windings. I use supplemental converters to additionally charge individual cells that leak a bit more than others in the pack. I also have switched cell monitors which rapidly switch each cell onto a measurement buss along with three tightly controlled reference voltage sources. This results in a signal stream which indicates terminal voltage of every cell in the pack, cell by cell. This feeds a digitizer which constantly tracks each cell voltage and is instructed to terminate battery function if any cell shows over or under charge. If a cell simply needs a little help, the individual cell inverters kick in to boost the weaker cell and such activity logged.
A supplemental benefit of the serial analog data stream is that I can use any oscilloscope to see all the cells at once... I can sync to cell 0 which is the reference voltage. ( three references because this is so critical that if I have a reference drift I will have two others that hopefully are providing reliable data. Bad data = explosion; false trip=expensive downtime ).
Lithium batteries have a lot to offer, but they are also quite a bit more volatile than other chemistries I have worked with. Even YouTube has quite an assortment of videos of overcharged lithium cells igniting. Like a propane tank, they are quite useful if not mistreated, but can really take you to the cleaners if you do.
How much stuff have we seen already - absolutely ludicrous - yet it sells?
.0001 degree kelvin? And how much heat did his fridge pump into his house to make the ice? Unsaid. But most people, being the sheeple they are, open their wallets for what the microphone man is hocking. Geez, its gotta be true -doesn't it? It was said through a microphone!
I am sure you, like me, have seen lots of stuff advertised that could not possibly work as advertised, yet someone sells it, making a mint doing so.
My neighbor bought last year some miracle thing that cooled his whole house off the ice in his fridge. Yeh. Cooled by how much?
Much of what I have seen coming down the pike for the last few decades I considered a joke. Other people took it seriously. And made money.
Some people do indeed have the sales skill to sell ice to eskimos. I go through almost any store and know my marketing skills are useless. The store seems mostly stocked with utterly useless junk - but someone buys it.
So a real joke got mixed up with all this junk. Can you blame 'em for not distinguishing the real joke from the crap the marketing people push today?
So the US government is going to have a royal fit over people getting around copyright law by setting up shop in another sovereign country....
Just how long has the US government tolerated people getting around paying US Taxes by setting up shop in another sovereign country?
What I would like to know is why is it I am expected to pay full price during service lapses?
If I paid someone to mow my lawn, but he couldn't get his lawn mower started, am I still obligated to pay for a mowed lawn?
All this AT&T style "up-to" talk frustrates me. Imagine an airline selling tickets for seats "up to" 40 inches wide, only to find out upon boarding you get a seat four inches wide... and sometimes do not get a seat at all. How many people would settle for "AT&T talk" for airline seats?
Ok, I do like to rant on Slashdot on things that frustrate the hell out of me. Sometimes I think its futile, but it is my hope that some executive might actually read this forum to get buzz directly from the customers instead of paying some high-priced market research firm to tell him what he wants to hear - even though it seems many companies executives are well enough off they don't have to concern themselves with how their companies appear to the public.
Bottom line, I highly resent legal maneuvering to force people to pay for stuff they don't get. I consider it just as unethical as if a person got a company's contract, reworded it, signed it, then when the company accepted it ( without rereading all the altered fine grey print on the back ) legally tried to hold them to that contract.
You might be close.
When I inquired as to why a local fast food restaurant was selling "shakes", not "milkshakes", I found out that they could not sell them as "milk" shakes because there was not enough milk in them. They were selling sweetened sawdust ( aka "cellulose" ).
OK. It tastes good. Not all that good for you, just sugar and indigestibles, no nutritive content at all from what I can tell. But pleasurable to ingest. OK, at least I know what it is and make my decisions accordingly.
( incidentally, their coffee is made with some topping which is completely indigestible to me. I found out during a bout of flu. It all came out, processed, but untouched. Lots of it. I think it was sweetened and foamed Olestra.
Same with the horse meat. I will consider it no big deal if it is accurately represented on its bill of contents. It can be ground up worms for what I care. If it is biologically compatible with me and it tastes good, I'll go for it.
Personally, I am far more concerned with pesticide and other biocide remnants in my food. I am far more concerned with genetically modified stuff than things that have been in the food chain since life began. I do not know how well I or others may metabolize sheep designed to put spider silk proteins in their milk or corn designed to make its own pesticide. I guess time will tell.
Yes... it would be answered prayer for me if we progress to a point ( both technically and legally ) that I could draw up something and take it into Kinko's and have a custom part made to that drawing in my choice of materials. God knows how many perfectly good things I have had to throw away because I broke the little doohickey off the plastic thingamabob that held the battery in.
I have several almost perfectly good Gardner-Denver wirewrap tools... the black bakelite ones, I hate to throw such beautiful tools away. They are right at fifty years old, run on Sub-C Ni-Cd cells which I can still readily get today, and I have all the fittings for them for all kinds of wire...
And every darned one of them has a broken nylon clutch.
I see the day coming I can draw up the clutch part that broke, have Kinko's run me off a dozen, and let me put my tools back into service.
I have long wondered what it would take to recycle soda bottles, being they are all made with the same high quality plastic that withstands the pressures of carbonated water ( sometimes heated carbonated water ) without exploding.
Yes, it would be worth it to me to clean the bottle if I could feed the bottle into some sort of machine which would reform the plastic into a more usable form.
It would make a market for used soda bottles, and get them off the street and out of our landfills. Our congress would also have to set the framework for original bottling to make sure all bottlers used the same plastic formulation so the reformers could use it.
I can well see the day when darned nearly anything plastic, especially things like pipe and fittings, could be made to order on the spot. Plastic things no longer wanted could be offered as feedstock to make something else.
Can you see going to Home Depot for some half-inch irrigation pipe and be able to pay for it in either dollars or recyclable plastic... and having them set their machine to extrude what you wanted right on the spot?
Thought of using these things as healthcare assistants and live-in care for invalids? If they had strong arms, they would be able to help invalids into beds, wheelchairs, assist with bathing, food prep, and cleanups - especially the messy kind people hate to get their hands in. They could also radio in for help when the situation warrants it.
God knows how many live-alone elderly could use one of these as a help-mate.
If you are running a website targeting engineers and designers actively integrating products into new designs, take my parent post into consideration before considering all sorts of fancy window-dressing programming which requires java, javascript, pop-ups, etc to be enabled before content is displayed.
Businesses having lack of foresight who hire webmasters who implement finicky programming techniques isolate themselves from engineers trying to research products to be designed into other products. How many times has one tried to obtain product info only to be met with all sorts of script programming demanding java be enabled? Some business types will still pay a good salary to have prospective customers abandon their site because it is so difficult to use.
I do a lot of research for businesses in the design phase, and often this research is quite confidential. That is why they have me involved. I am not supposed to reveal the company name or even what it is they have me researching.
Business question: How much would you pay to have a script written that discouraged the engineer from your site, so your product was never considered in the design phase? How much would you pay for someone who would hire someone that writes this stuff? The answers to these questions will have a large influence on your future sales.
MPU
Ken's Backdoor
err...make that "steganograpic".
If I could process the digitizer output, I would use the same stenographic techniques used to inject hidden content in image files.
To the eye, an image with encoded input just looks a bit grainy. To the ear, a voice with encoded input would just sound like a bit of background noise,
Russia Today and Al Jazeera are on MHz Networks programming lineup. Some of the more heavily populated US areas are covered on Over-The-Air (OTA).
Here's a link to their coverage areas
Alternative views of world news is very welcome to me. The more signal I get, the more I can integrate the noise out. There are ways newscasters "spin" the facts that trying to figure out the truth getting it from only one party is next to futile.
Yes... not much critical thinking skills at all.
They want to buy used videogame and destroy it, taking it off the market. For good.
Now, the customer of that game is forced to buy, at full price and royalties to author, another full licensed version, instead of buying the recycled one, from which only the reseller, not the author, profits.
This maximizes the profit for the author of the despised works.