There's gotta be some happy medium. I agree with the author that visiting the Nokia website is hopeless; I did that a few years ago and came to the conclusion that Nokia makes 10 times as many models as they ought to. But they could make, perhaps, 4 models and have a broad customer base.
Motorola used to be just as bad with their early cellphones' screws. I encountered one (the famous big "brick") whose Torx screws were left-hand threaded! They also used house numbers on the parts so you couldn't find replacements easily.
I was wondering when someone would point that out. Nearly all screw heads with a funny outer shape and straight sides (unlike Phillips, which is a 45 degree angle) can be opened with a slot screwdriver of the correct blade width. Security post screws are sometimes easier to open than the non-security type, since the screwdriver blade can use the center post as a support point. However, it's prone to break off, after which you can use a non-security type hex or Torx driver.
Although I had to laugh and buy three sets when I saw the cheap Chinese security hex driver pack at Ace for four dollars.
Woz wasn't the only person to abuse the 6502. Don Lancaster took advantage of the address bus behavior or the chip when executing NOPs to make his cheap video display (the TVT 6-5/8) board. He basically used the processor as a 16 bit counter that could be loaded under software control during the horizontal blanking time. So the CPU chip became a video chip.
Just imagine if the same effort that went into minimizing the 6502's transistor count back then were to be applied to a modern CPU. It would take decades from concept to tapeout!
This schematic also looks like it was reverse-engineered from the chip. Not that I would expect the original schematics to be available to the world, since all that stuff is considered to be quite proprietary by the manufacturers. It would be a lot more useful to see the original logic design.
It's a band comprised of one guy and several robots, started because he tired of the shortcomings of human bandmates. However, the robots give him just as much (if not more) trouble.
He has a guitarist that has two necks on his guitar, one for bass and one for lead. Here they are.
A crazy guy cut off the top of some TO-5 can style ROMs for the HP-35 calculator and extracted the bits by taking photos and doing some image processing. Film at 11
I don't know why this isn't modded up. We tried this idea in the late nineties, and Enron turned it into a disaster. Yes, they were a fraudulent company, but they managed to get control of the California electricity sources and effectively exert monopoly control without monopoly regulation.
In case any of you don't remember, they discovered that the more power generation facilities that they shut down for "preventive maintenance" in the heat of summer, the more they could charge for electricity from the remaining online plants.
The Thing-O-Matic has the ability to produce many items, one after the other, while running completely unattended. So you can start it up on Friday, come back Monday and have a big pile of custom objects waiting for you (if it doesn't go haywire, that is).
That's what is new. Not even the $10k industrial machines offer that ability.
Linux keeps changing, since it's written by people who like to change things frequently and are allowed to. If you write kernel drivers, you know that Linux driver interface changes very often, sometimes maddeningly so. The Windows driver interface, on the other hand, changes once every 8 years or so.
You can't quite do that, since he's got both upper and lower case. Besides, he's playing with the RGB subpixels, which makes it trickier. Of course, the early computers like Apple ][ pushed the capabilities of NTSC color TV sets to the point that white pixels would pulsate in blue or yellow due to the chroma subcarrier phase shift (look that up), so they were sorta working at the subpixel level.
I spent a good bit of time designing 5x7 fonts back then, since I was heavily into display hardware back when it took a board full of TTL to make a 256 x 128 pixel text display.
The number of people who will use this thing for other than its intended purpose will be in the thousands, not the millions. So what are they worrying about?
Think of this product as something similar to the DARPA autonomous-vehicle race series: the first one was a total failure, and the second one produced spectacular results.
They can continuously improve the firmware to make it quite a usable product. This stuff takes many iterations, and the more units out there, the more feedback you get.
I think you're way off in the power requirement. Cars are more efficient these days than the old 1962 Impala that needed that much power to move down the road; that's how a Prius can get 50 MPG while driving at highway speeds. Keep in mind that some small cars only make 30-40 HP total - the Volkswagen Bug was 32 HP for many years, and its aerodynamics sucked.
I may have been optimistic by a factor of 2 or 3, but I think you're being pessimistic by at least as much.
Yeah, I don't have one of those at my house. but I can conceive of a fuel tank that could fill a car's gas tank in one go. This car, assuming that it really can absorb 150 kW, will need a charging station with a few megawatts of electrical service. It's not something that the average person can wrap their heads around.
I guess the point is that gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space, and replacing it with electricity requires changing the way we think about electricity.
I agree. A couple numbers go a long ways towards allowing the user to make sense of the gizmo at hand.
A range of 375 miles at 55 mph is seven hours of driving at speed. Six minutes is 0.1 hours. So they have to feed at least 70 times as much power into the battery as the car consumes to hold 55 mph. If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed, then they have to feed 150 kW through that thin charging cable.
I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?
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There's gotta be some happy medium. I agree with the author that visiting the Nokia website is hopeless; I did that a few years ago and came to the conclusion that Nokia makes 10 times as many models as they ought to. But they could make, perhaps, 4 models and have a broad customer base.
Motorola used to be just as bad with their early cellphones' screws. I encountered one (the famous big "brick") whose Torx screws were left-hand threaded! They also used house numbers on the parts so you couldn't find replacements easily.
Are they more open now?
I was wondering when someone would point that out. Nearly all screw heads with a funny outer shape and straight sides (unlike Phillips, which is a 45 degree angle) can be opened with a slot screwdriver of the correct blade width. Security post screws are sometimes easier to open than the non-security type, since the screwdriver blade can use the center post as a support point. However, it's prone to break off, after which you can use a non-security type hex or Torx driver.
Although I had to laugh and buy three sets when I saw the cheap Chinese security hex driver pack at Ace for four dollars.
Woz wasn't the only person to abuse the 6502. Don Lancaster took advantage of the address bus behavior or the chip when executing NOPs to make his cheap video display (the TVT 6-5/8) board. He basically used the processor as a 16 bit counter that could be loaded under software control during the horizontal blanking time. So the CPU chip became a video chip.
By the time it's not so proprietary, it's obsolete and of no interest, so they toss it in the dumpster.
Just imagine if the same effort that went into minimizing the 6502's transistor count back then were to be applied to a modern CPU. It would take decades from concept to tapeout!
This schematic also looks like it was reverse-engineered from the chip. Not that I would expect the original schematics to be available to the world, since all that stuff is considered to be quite proprietary by the manufacturers.
It would be a lot more useful to see the original logic design.
It's a band comprised of one guy and several robots, started because he tired of the shortcomings of human bandmates. However, the robots give him just as much (if not more) trouble.
He has a guitarist that has two necks on his guitar, one for bass and one for lead. Here they are.
A crazy guy cut off the top of some TO-5 can style ROMs for the HP-35 calculator and extracted the bits by taking photos and doing some image processing.
Film at 11
I don't know why this isn't modded up. We tried this idea in the late nineties, and Enron turned it into a disaster. Yes, they were a fraudulent company, but they managed to get control of the California electricity sources and effectively exert monopoly control without monopoly regulation.
In case any of you don't remember, they discovered that the more power generation facilities that they shut down for "preventive maintenance" in the heat of summer, the more they could charge for electricity from the remaining online plants.
Don't think that it couldn't happen again.
The Thing-O-Matic has the ability to produce many items, one after the other, while running completely unattended. So you can start it up on Friday, come back Monday and have a big pile of custom objects waiting for you (if it doesn't go haywire, that is).
That's what is new. Not even the $10k industrial machines offer that ability.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/prestonlee/sets/72157625613518344/show/
'Cuz they know the server will collapse within minutes.
AdBlock Plus will ensure that I don't see them.
Linux keeps changing, since it's written by people who like to change things frequently and are allowed to. If you write kernel drivers, you know that Linux driver interface changes very often, sometimes maddeningly so. The Windows driver interface, on the other hand, changes once every 8 years or so.
You can't quite do that, since he's got both upper and lower case. Besides, he's playing with the RGB subpixels, which makes it trickier. Of course, the early computers like Apple ][ pushed the capabilities of NTSC color TV sets to the point that white pixels would pulsate in blue or yellow due to the chroma subcarrier phase shift (look that up), so they were sorta working at the subpixel level.
I spent a good bit of time designing 5x7 fonts back then, since I was heavily into display hardware back when it took a board full of TTL to make a 256 x 128 pixel text display.
True fact. I work on telescopes, and it's all C, except for the microcontrollers that use assembly language and the vintage FORTRAN code.
The number of people who will use this thing for other than its intended purpose will be in the thousands, not the millions. So what are they worrying about?
By node id pwugged up.
My brother has way too many old PCs and software. Here's a page with screenshots of all the old Widows stuff: http://www.selectric.org/winhist/index.html
Think of this product as something similar to the DARPA autonomous-vehicle race series: the first one was a total failure, and the second one produced spectacular results.
They can continuously improve the firmware to make it quite a usable product. This stuff takes many iterations, and the more units out there, the more feedback you get.
It's a prototype. The finished dongle ought to be less than one inch across, if the guy designs it reasonably.
I think you're way off in the power requirement. Cars are more efficient these days than the old 1962 Impala that needed that much power to move down the road; that's how a Prius can get 50 MPG while driving at highway speeds. Keep in mind that some small cars only make 30-40 HP total - the Volkswagen Bug was 32 HP for many years, and its aerodynamics sucked.
I may have been optimistic by a factor of 2 or 3, but I think you're being pessimistic by at least as much.
Yeah, I don't have one of those at my house. but I can conceive of a fuel tank that could fill a car's gas tank in one go. This car, assuming that it really can absorb 150 kW, will need a charging station with a few megawatts of electrical service. It's not something that the average person can wrap their heads around.
I guess the point is that gasoline packs an awful lot of energy into a small space, and replacing it with electricity requires changing the way we think about electricity.
I agree. A couple numbers go a long ways towards allowing the user to make sense of the gizmo at hand.
A range of 375 miles at 55 mph is seven hours of driving at speed. Six minutes is 0.1 hours. So they have to feed at least 70 times as much power into the battery as the car consumes to hold 55 mph. If the car takes 3 HP (2 kW) to drive at highway speed, then they have to feed 150 kW through that thin charging cable.
I don't know anyone with a 150kW electrical service to their house. Do you?