CheeseFromLidl

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Aug 4

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Comment · 9 months ago

I’ve just read the wiki page on Magnetorquer but I couldn’t find what I was looking for: ballpark numbers.

What kind of current are you driving those coils with (amps or dozens of amps?). What order of magnitude is the resulting force (a few newtons?)

I’ll gladly read the paper but knowing myself I won’t remember why exactly when a few weeks passed.

Comment · 9 months ago

ok you have reduced my cringe.

Comment · 9 months ago

This is the reason I cringe every time I hear or read statements like “we went to the moon”, “we’ve split the atom”, “we developed antibiotics”, …

No, we didn’t. A few who are not like us did.

Comment · 9 months ago

  dementia, weight loss, unsteadiness, jerking movements and facial twitches

This actually describes my benzodiazepine withdrawal symptoms. The only thing missing is the suicide-inducing tinnitus.

Comment · 9 months ago

I’ve occasionally found them, but only when their color contrasts with the background during walks. Can they be found year round? Do they have a preference for logs?

Comment · 9 months ago

I’m going to go against the standard advice of this book or that course.

Pick up (broken) equipment and start disassembling it to figure out how they turn A into B [1]. Go down the rabbit hole of hunting down the service manual of the thing or one of its siblings. Look at how the pcbs follow the same pattern in competing design. Look at how all the yamaha, sony, medion, … amplifier/tuners are made in the same way and learn from it. Notice that one that is costlier and has those few quircks in its design. Notice how different variations of a theme achieve the same result, but died out because the tech doesn’t scale or simply proved to be suboptimal. Try to repair your broken equipment by understanding the path that the signals and power lines follow.

Rinse and repeat a few years and you’ll get a grasp on what the innards of an unknown electronic thing looks like without opening it. Then open it and be amazed that there was a different, cheaper, simpler way to turn A into B.

All along the way you’ll experience that most educational resources aren’t actually that good at explaining, or that they follow a different school of mathematical notation, or that they’re really good at explaining this detail but the rest is missing.

Design your own pcbs. Remember that - like software - hardware design is iterative. Remember that - unlike software - hardware iterations cost money.

Hope this helps.

[1] the ways to turn A into B are rather limited and it relies heavily on electromagnetism and conservation of energy.

Comment · 10 months ago

Thanks for submitting this. I’m currently working on the schematic of a VNA and having a ref design is a big help.

Comment · 10 months ago

  a process that can be used *on site* to render environmental toxins such as DDT and lindane harmless and convert them into valuable chemicals – a breakthrough for the *remediation of contaminated sites*

Comment · 10 months ago

How does this work on a practical level? Do you scrape the soil to a depth of a foot and submit it to electrolysis or is the soil washed and the sludge then processed? How many grams of halogens does this recover per square acre of contaminated site? Does this sterilise the site?

Comment · 10 months ago

This plant gave up photosynthesis, shrank its genome, and learned to clone itself—and somehow survived for 100 million years.