trafguy
@trafguy@midwest.social
- Comment on He's more of a pottery expert. But even he can see this. 11 months ago:
I could be mistaken, but many years ago I believe I learned that plywood is generally made by spinning a log while slicing a thin veneer off the surface, then stacking multiple of those veneers into plywood. The grain on the surface would be notably different when cutting wood with this method compared to sawing planks
- Comment on Who to solicit for a small project? 1 year ago:
I’d also like to hear what your idea is. I don’t know of a platform to solicit someone building your device at a price you’ll be wanting to pay, but there are forums to help you learn how to do it yourself if you’re motivated enough.
If it’s cool enough to pique interest, you could try posting the concept in an electronics community and seeing if anyone’s interested in the challenge, or an ideas community and just floating it for people to choose to run with.
It’s also possible the device already exists and someone can suggest an easy option for you
- Comment on Why aren't advertisers (Microsoft, Facebook, Google) held responsible for allowing scammy adverts? 1 year ago:
Well, I’ll admit it might be poorly suited, but I know it supports comments, posts, and user signups. Users would sign up with a sbscriber role, you’d verify them somehow, and then you’d update their role. It would be a little janky but should work with little adjustment
- Comment on Why aren't advertisers (Microsoft, Facebook, Google) held responsible for allowing scammy adverts? 1 year ago:
Easiest? I’d say WordPress on a Digital Ocean droplet if you’re going super small. Allow people to sign up and vet them, and you have a functional standalone platform pretty much as soon as you can get users. I don’t know that it would take off or have a sustainable userbase though
- Comment on Carmakers are failing the privacy test. Owners have little or no control over data collected 1 year ago:
It’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s as unsolvable as that. Figuring out how to overcome the strategies being used to divide us could rapidly repair the damage. Education, both in and out of school, is a crucial element of that. The ones frothing over “liberal tears” clearly don’t want to find common ground, so we would need to learn how they communicate and why they won’t listen, then find a strategy to break through that barrier and help them on their way to broader skepticism. In essence, once we cure the disease, we need to vaccinate them to mitigate the next outbreak.
[one sec, looking for the article that backs this paragraph up…] There’s been some focus on this area of research. We have evidence that “strong men” rise to power by capitalizing on fear and anxiety. They set themselves up as a savior who will get rid of the scary problem by blaming someone/some group that is innocent but unknown (and therefore a suspicious stranger) to their base. They start with (comparatively) small lies and build trust among their following. Once the more suseptible slip into this form of groupthink, they’ll fall for bigger and bigger lies, and are very difficult to recover. The question is, how do we wake up they who scream of “sheeple” without an event so tragic it traumatizes an entire generation? The last few times involved massive wars or similarly harrowing events. Events so massive they dissillusioned the followers and forced them to confront the fact that they got played by a charismatic (to them) narcissist with a superiority complex.
Unless we can figure out how to snap these people put of it relatively peacefully, we’re most likely going to be in for a really, really bad time before it gets better. With any luck, at least in the US, maybe Trump will get thrown in prison and the Republican party’s leadership will turn on Trumpism or collapse before they can take control. Maybe if their chosen authority figure is imprisoned and disowned by their team they’ll be able to see clearly again.
- Comment on Continuous operation of a general purpose relay? 1 year ago:
I’m a little new to the terminology, so to clarify, the switching current refers to the amperage across the terminals other than the coil, right? I’m definitely within those limits; I don’t expect to transfer more than ~1/8 of the maximum amperage.
Is there a rule of thumb for the minimum current I should allow across the coil? The only specification I see on the datasheet for coil amperage is that it was tested to failure at 100mA. I don’t think power consumption is too big of a deal with this use case, but resistive heating sounds like it could shorten component life (and even if it’s only a secondary consideration here, I’d still prefer to minimize waste).
- Comment on Continuous operation of a general purpose relay? 1 year ago:
Thanks, that’s good to know! The datasheet doesn’t seem to include the word “duty” anywhere, so I think that must have been omitted. Ostensibly that means the maximum duty cycle is unlimited, but I don’t have enough experience here to say that with any confidence.
- Comment on Continuous operation of a general purpose relay? 1 year ago:
Thanks, I don’t think there are any external settings for the power supply, but it does provide a few more volts than I strictly need. Toggling a single relay hasn’t caused me any issues in the limited testing I’ve done. A momentary drop to as low as 5V should be perfectly fine, although, looking over the specs for my components, I see I’m getting dangerously close to the upper limits for the power supply’s current rating. I’ll have to look into connecting 2 supplies in parallel (or getting a larger supply) I suppose.
I haven’t worked with battery backups yet, so I was thinking it would be best to keep that element simple to minimize potential issues like a trickle charge draining the battery unexpectedly, or damaging the battery from overcharge. The minimum requirement is just to ensure the hardware (a motorized ball valve) returns to a closed position if power is lost. The battery needs to provide at least 9V to power the motor, so I could use a 9V (or a few smaller cells in series) to keep it below the 12V supply.
With your solution using a diode on each voltage source, would there be any risk of a trickle charge draining the battery unexpectedly if the battery? If so, in that configuration I’d need to do more research and figure out how to use a BMS, rather than an externally recharged or disposable cell.
- Submitted 1 year ago to askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de | 12 comments