NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Congrats, you became the human owl.
EDIT to add: someone please make an emulation of this, with a slider to control the raspberry's pitch.
The problem was, the service techs never knew about this, so when they'd go out and warranty a caster, they'd find a bunch of cardboard or whatever jammed in the leg, put the caster back on without replacing the cardboard, and the chair wouldn't be level. So, they would come back out next week with a new leg.
Even more time and effort was spent after the problem was already ‘fixed’ twice at which point they used both the fan and the more complex system.
2. The fix described in the article definitely cost more than $5. The ICs might've cost <$100, but I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of the fix was six or seven figures after taking into account the design, installation, and QA steps
Have you seen the designs for interplanetary spaceships that use the crew's water supply as a protective shield to block radiation? I wonder if they need mass dampers for their dampening mass.
Fast forward decades, and some friends were working on a portable device with an LED display. It had a power consumption problem. I suggested instead of turning the LEDs on, to strobe them. They'd use much less power, and the difference would be imperceptible to the user.
Then they had the idea of strobing the line of LEDs to form text messages you could see if you waved it back and forth, but was just a line of on LEDs if it was stationary. That worked surprisingly well, but as a toy it never caught on. But it was fun.
The first one one google is https://holocircle.com/en/ but you will readily find devices on Amazon or at the retailer of your choice if you search for "hologram fan" or "hologram projector"
Only saw it spin up once and it terrified me - all the wheels had to be chain-linked and -driven because they'd tried keeping 6 motors synced up at the same exact speed whilst spinning round hefty 4ft propellors and it just led to the arms hitting each other and "rapid unscheduled disassembly" - not what you want for your roadside adverts.
They also made huge cylindrical ones that were actually deployed at a few places in London and around the UK. Never really took off because the mini-PCs inside[1] tended to shake themselves to bits after a few months of spinning around at 4000rpm.
[1] I obtained my first Mac Mini from them free because they'd tried that in a cylinder, the hard drive Did Not Like It, and they were just throwing it away.
Now, you can get fancier items, like https://www.etsy.com/listing/491059634/strange-light-up-led-...
They used to make spinners which had something like a dozen red LEDs in a vertical configuration. Very simple.
Resolution was like this https://www.amazon.com/128pixel-indoor-electronic-display-me..., but it only displayed one vertical slice at a time.
I'm surprised they're not more common
2. Does it include opportunity cost of waiting for the 5$ solution?
3. Does the cost include extra prototyping and engineering time?
The title of the article is a lie based on misunderstanding of engineering.
After all engineering is done, the __remaining cost__ is the same as bill of materials...
Until you need to update the system with new components. And rockets made by NASA are made in few copies... so the Non-Recurring Engineering cost dominates the whole business.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
My comment about "service jobs" is kinda evidenced with your own remark: the existence of high-value manufacturing jobs. The high-value here is always in the cognitive dimension, rather than the physical.
My point being that the relevant political project for increasing class mobility, prosperity etc. is skills/education/training/etc. rather than this false-belief that there is something called "Manufacturing" which pays well without such things.
Or, to use the example given, it's "knowing where to put the chalk", rather than removing the metal plate. There is no modern rich economy which can sell "removing metal" as the route to prosperity.
That used to be the case, but all that labour has been automated away or is otherwise not well-paying,.
Now it is all about value-add via skills.
We imagine the "value-add" due to advanced cognitive skill is somehow "less real" than that which could be replaced with a machine arm.
What we have discovered, and will do so, is that knowing where to place the chalk was always the basis of profit.
And what point is knowing where to place the chalk if there is no machine upon which to place it. Proximity is important. Then there is the matter of scale and a question of how many pure knowledge experts are really needed.
Putting a fan next to a conveyor to filter out empty boxes doesn't require a college degree (if anything a college degree makes it more difficult to find that solution), but it is nonetheless a significant process improvement.
The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!”
“No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.
https://m.youtube.com/@KathyLovesPhysics/videos
Really took Tesla down a peg. (No, Tesla did not invent the 3-phase power system we use today. That was a Russian in Switzerland, Dolivo-Dobrovolsky.)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
There was a problem with machine on factory floor, company tried to do everything already so they called specialist. To cut story short, specialist went around the machine took hammer out and smashed in one place - machine fixed. Invoice for the company $500 - so manager was angry
- "one swing of hammer $500?" - "swing of hammer was free, knowing where to hit $500"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
But then on some of the vibration runs (they did a bunch of different frequencies), there was this overwhelming all-focusing urgent need to make it stop. It just felt wrong, and dangerous, and there wasn't room in the head for anything but this worry that something dreadfully wrong was happening. It pushed out any other thoughts.
The target runs (and this was a decade ago so I'm dragging through memory) were mostly just visual effects, though. Everything was bouncing around and you couldn't focus on anything well enough to read; and there was a bit of the worry in my thoughts but not the panic from other frequencies.
Nevermind that solid rocket motors is and always have been a terrible idea for crewed launch systems, and were probably the worst mistake made on Shuttle.
> Analog gauges, commonly called “steam gauges” because their faces resemble a steam pressure gauge
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/march/flig...
Contrast with "glass panels" or "glass cockpit" which just means "using a LCD" or similar (nevermind that the "steam gauges" also have a glass front)
Well, that's Mark Rober before bis YouTube fame.
Of course the proper solution would have been to not mandate the use of such large SRBs since the vibrations still make SLS near useless for launching scientific payloads. The reason for choosing Falcon Heavy for Europa Clipper instead of SLS was that on top of the rocket price difference, it'd cost $1B extra to make Clipper able to handle SLS's vibrations, Congress was insistent on Clipper launching on SLS but backed down when they informed that they'd have to spend an additional $1B on science instead of corruption.
But alas, that sort of dumb stuff is what design by Congress gets you.
NASA solved a $100M vibration problem cheaply by strobing the display - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109420 - Aug 2021 (15 comments)
Also how are the astronauts supposed to reach for the control buttons if they can't see them?
They can see the physical buttons because they don't refresh and momentarily disappear like a digital display.
This was also after the tragedy of Apollo 1.
Meanwhile Soviets used grease pencils, which while safer, were horrible in usability.
Fischer's private development of space pen was quickly picked up by both US and Soviet space programs to solve the problem of writing in space.
[From my contract-drafting course materials:] The parties in a 2020 Vermont supreme court case might have been better served if they had done periodic check-in calls — in that case:
- In a project to rebuild a railroad bridge, a subcontractor was supposed to handle one aspect of the project.
- The subcontractor encountered an unexpected problem.
- The subcontractor spent weeks trying to fix the problem — and billed the prime contractor an extra $120,000 for its efforts.
- At trial, however, it came out that — for only $9,600 — there had been a simpler way to solve the problem.
- If the prime contractor and subcontractor had just talked to one another — perhaps using the SPUR agenda, discussed at 7.2.6 — they just might have solved the problem sooner, at much-lower cost (and without having to go to litigation).
See Construction Drilling, Inc. v. Engineers Construction, Inc., 2020 VT 38 ¶¶ 6-7, 236 A.3d 193, 196-97 (2020) (affirming denial of subcontractor’s breach-of-contract claim). https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=144056062390412...
[The SPUR agenda is a general-purpose meeting agenda: Status; Problems; Uncertainties; Risks.]
That kind of bugs me. Why should our government be able to patent things?
Alternate solution: send crew up with image stabilized cameras.
Ares I was, to put it simply, a bad design. By the end of all this, NASA decided, correctly, to ditch the idea.
But those vids on YouTube of helicopters flying around with still rotors, and hummingbirds with their wing held out, are great.
Problem: cabin would inevitably vibrate at some point and astronaut's chairs would too, making displays impossible to read.
Soution: put a sensor on the chair and synchronize the displays to only pulse their light when the chair (and thus astronaut's eyes) returned to the same location.