221–230 of 375 posts
Heh - do you have a "blog" (ala jwz's DNA Lounge)? (This is the kind of retiring from IT tale that I love to read and follow the trials and tribulations of over the years - good luck, thanks for open-sourcing your work!)
Lol, nice! It depends on what you mean by "owning a bowling center," but it looks like there are at least two of us into this :D I bought a really old fully mechanical (and automated!) mini bowling lane. It works without a CPU, except for the score display, which originally used a 1970 Intel D8749H (MCS-48)! Just like yours, the only thing that turns this machine on is a single relay :D On my model, I also get feedba…
Can you explain the significance of the single relay? My car starts with a single solenoid.
Your car also starts with a single relay... that drives a solenoid and a motor.
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It's because the way the sole slides is an integral part of bowling the ball. You can't play "properly" without a proper sliding bowling shoe. I was a little surprised when the local bowling centres stopped bothering to make everyone use the proper shoes. I get what you're saying about playing casually, but when I last went bowling with colleagues, and won comfortably, and others were asking for tips because they jus…
Appreciate the good answer. Out of curiosity, ofder of magnitude how much would a person need to be bowling to get good enough that choice of shoe matters?
Bowling shoe vs running shoe? As soon as you’re trying to get better, the shoes matter a lot. They let you use the established techniques.
Bowling shoe vs socks? Never tried it, but I’m going to guess once you can break 100 that socks don’t cut it.
Short repairs are always nice, but I'm curious about the frequency. You're your own repairman, but that won't be true for all owners. So it's not if the repair takes 5 minutes, it's how long the lanes are down any time there's a problem. I wonder what sort of things you could do to harden the system. From potting to overbuilding to redundancy.
While I'm not really defending the markup of the commercial system, you're not so much paying for the system as you are paying to have someone to call when it breaks, ready spares inventory that can be overnighted, etc).
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I think I see some parallels with the aftermarket for old cars. Holley's entire catalog is "here's a thing that'll modernize your 1960s engine without replacing the whole damn engine" This kind of thing is a low-volume, low-margin business by nature. It's those kinds of businesses that the megalomaniacs of our field tend to ignore. There are people with needs, and money they are willing to exchange for a solution to…
I once expected an aftermarket industry to pop-up to hybridize old cars. Old rear-wheel drive manual cars sound easiest. Generator attached to the flywheel instead of the starter motor, and then find some way to squeeze a drive motor by the rear diff (probably more complicated, but surely not impossible). I thought something might pop up once companies like Bosch started making generic e-axles for manufacturers to us…
I want to start working with arduino/raspberry pi/esp32/sensors. What would be a good source to buy these in bulk (along with accessory components. e.g. wires etc.)?
Aliexpress is king for cheap IoT modules/accessories https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-esp32-s3.html
You can get a range of ESP32 boards from Digikey for $5-$8 and you'd have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get them much cheaper than that on Aliexpress.
Thank you for posting this, it reaffirms what I've been thinking for so long. There are many opportunities to retrofit old systems of all types with modern low-cost embedded technologies. Around 2019 or so I was approached by an engineer who had a small business retrofitting very old machine tools with modern motion controls. Think very large lathes and planers. The problem they had was that in order to get these sys…
Turns out, they abandoned most of them in 2008, as it was the local council who were meant to maintain them, but they couldn’t afford it - a chat with the president revealed they’d been paying €15k a year for each station to maintain it and they’d cost about €100k each.
I went and looked at the battered remains. Sounding tube. Ultrasound transducer. Box of 90’s electronics.
Anyway, long story short I banged out six of them for them for about €80 a piece - the expensive bits were the batteries and the dinky solar panel. ESP32, ultrasonic transducer, GSM and LoRa (as two are outside of the cell network), haven’t had to touch them in five years and we now know when it’s time to evacuate, rather than wading out in the night while trees sail past us at 60kph.
So much stuff like this.