• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 24th, 2024

help-circle
  • Yes and no.

    Taking advantage of the very real waterproofing of the phones I have owned (past and present), I will just wash the damn thing off under the kitchen tap if it gets dirty, which I have with one of my previous phones done with a high-pressure restaurant-sink-style spray nozzle (I was making beer, and boiling the wort kicks a lot of sticky crap into the air).

    That phone was fine afterward, and continued to work for several years after.

    Also at a more basic level, it is (at least in theory) an assurance that they actually tested the damn thing, and didn’t just slap a largely meaningless (and as already noted, “bigger number better”) rating on the thing, as is largely the style of our times because consumer protection is dead and regulations are meaningless.

    This is exactly the kind of should be done properly, or just not at all. Test it and rate it for the people who do care, or STFU, put the unqualified but perfectly reasonable label of “water resistant” on it, and the bulk of people who indeed do not care (or will be confused) will be no worse off than they are now.

    Anything else is just annoying.


  • Yes, but I also get into a rage about manufacturers being dicks about it. People by and large don’t seem to understand the IP rating scale is in fact two largely-unrelated scales, and companies slapping IP ratings on their products use that in what I feel are underhanded ways.

    The values IPx1-IPx6 correspond to varying levels of resistance against directed streams of water. IPx7-IPx9 are degrees of resistance to submersion. The latter does not imply the former, not even a little bit.

    It is in theory entirely possible to build a device that could withstanding being put in the bottom of a swimming pool that’s being slowly filled with water, but failed from the higher pressure of a small amount of water falling on it from a certain direction.

    But you still see phones listed just as “IP68”, which tells you nothing. The better manufacturers will explicitly write the likes of “IP65/IP68”; showing that it reaches the 5 rating of “water jets 12.5litre/minute” but not the 6 rating of “powerful water jets 100litre/minute”, but also IP67 “immersion <1 metre / <30 minutes” and IP68 “immersion >1 metre / >30 minutes”.

    (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code#Second_digit:_Liquid_ingress_protection)







  • qupada@fedia.iotoScience Memes@mander.xyz[Thread] Mental Math
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    I got into an argument with someone once about this, when they told me (paraphrasing) “it’s safe to drive listening to music through headphones, because they let outside sound in”.

    Yes they indeed might, but - even ignoring delay introduced from digital electronics - you’ve now lost all sense of where that sound is coming from, because you’re listening to the sound of one microphone being played through one speaker.

    The human ear really is an incredible thing.





  • While I have a personal general rule against backing electronics on Kickstarter and would likely wait for it to be available at retail, I wouldn’t necessarily immediately discount this one.

    It’s probably worth noting - mentioned in Jeff Geerling’s video - they had a MOQ of 1500 on the metal case, which likely forced them to be significantly further through the process than a lot of Kickstarters are at launch.





  • Putting a solar roofs over any open-air carpark you happen to own is just a hilariously easier option. Hell, you could erect these OVER the train tracks.

    https://greenox-group.de/photovoltaik-carport/ (Article is in German, but it’s really more around the picture)

    According to a completely un-sourced picture I found online, one carpark (in the USA) is typically around 5.5 x 2.6m, so if you had even 50 carparks on your site you could have ~715 square metres of panels. More, if you figure a way to cover the aisles between the rows of carparks too.

    At the top end of all applicable figures (panel efficiency, solar irradiance, inverter efficiency), that could net you ~160kW at solar midday.

    Now on the other side, standard-gauge railway is around 1.4m wide, and maybe you could cram a 1m width of panels between the rails.

    That sounds like a lot - 1000 square metres per kilometre, and there are thousands of kilometres of railway lines out there - but it’s harder to install, harder to service, gets dirty faster, is liable to get damaged, and now you have to figure out how to extract power from somehing a kilometre long, instead of an area that could be a square only around 35m (~115’) on a side (for the above 50 carparks).

    I know which one of those I’d want to run the cables for.

    As has been pointed out many times when this dumb-ass idea comes up, only once you’ve exhausted every other possibility (carparks, rooftops, putting panels ABOVE roads/rivers/canals/cycleways/railways) and have literally no other viable installation locations, then we can talk.





  • it’s essentially 2 PCI Express x1 lanes and USB 2.0

    Sometimes there’s only a single PCIe lane though. And as you say, that’s not a x2 but explicitly two x1s.

    No WiFi card needs the bandwidth (yet), at PCIe 3 speeds you’ve got around 7.8Gbps for a x1, and PCIe 4 double that.

    The Coral comes in a “dual” version for exactly this reason (https://coral.ai/products/m2-accelerator-dual-edgetpu/) you just have to be very sure the slot you’re putting it in is actually delivering two PCIe connections.

    Also for bonus fun, most WiFi/BT cards use the PCIe interface for the WiFi and USB for the Bluetooth.