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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Your next upgrade is going to a junkyard and getting a driver's seat from a luxury car, like a BMW or Mercedes, with 16 way adjustment and heaters and coolers. Hook it up to sufficient power, and you can get all the same adjustments as in a car (lumbar, neck, thigh, etc).

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Have you tried this? Because I remember reading somewhere that you need to reverse engineer the protocol they use to send the seat commands and that's a bit harder than simply hooking it up to power. I could be misremembering, I haven't tried it myself.

A lot of times the controls are on the seat itself, so for adjustments you’ll just need 12v power. For heating/cooling, I suspect it’s more complicated. On older cars, it might just be a wire you need to jump for hearing.

It's a lot more involved than that.

The wiring harness on a seat with powered multiway movement, heating/cooling, etc. will have dozens of 00 gauge wires ganged into a proprietary male plug that can only plug in and communicate to a module that is hardwired to a computer proprietary to the vehicle manufacturer.

I can't even get 2012 mazda rx8 seats into a 2012 mazda speed3 due to the above ^ makes me sad.

Yeah, that’s true especially for modern cars with memory seats. That said, afaik the actual seat controls can still be used with nothing more than a 12v power source. I have not personally tested this on a newer car seat though.

lol - those things are driven by software modules which many times requires communication to other modules like radio, body control module, door assembly module. maybe an older car will work with 12V supply.

seems like it would be easier to just get one of these bad boys: https://www.amazon.com/Fly-YUTING-Ergonomic-Comfortable-Simu...

The review on that is great: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2VW4IFHOG3F9X/

Wonder if I can get my employer to foot the bill for this as an ergonomic necessity through OSHA.

My workplace would require you to go through an ergonomic assessment, and to have evidence that upright posture is contributing to (already severe) back issues.

those are easy to get

Never go full scorpion

Car seats are not optimized for that.

For example, weight is an important design criterion, which already reduces the design space.

power is one thing, signal is another. Power and signal are both controlled by proprietary controller and computer in a car.

I honestly think a nice manually adjusting lumbar supporting leather driver seat (or even cloth from like a low tier sport car)would be nice enough. Now I'm planning....

Why not a 1st-class airplane seat?

Presumably they're not often found in junk yards.

They're hard to find and also not nearly as adjustable as the luxury driver's seat.

Even better if you can get a S-Class back seat with recliner/calf support.

I have looked for a dentists chair because they recline so well but I dont know if they would be any good for extended lengths of time unlike a high end car seat which is designed for long journeys, but how many recline for the truly lazy?

More complex and take more room. You don’t need a lie flat bed for example. I don’t remember having heating last time I flew first class either.

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