I did for a moment considered jacking the car up, putting monitor on the bonnet, connecting to OBD and using pedals and steering wheel for simracing controls.
Then discovered steering wheel angle and break/clutch is not available on OBD bus in my car.
There are persistent rumors in the greater Munich area, that there are actual people being payed by BMW to, gasp, install them. But these are just rumors and horror stories we tell our children if they don't eat their vegetables... I think...
Exactly, a keyboard should replace that clumsy driving wheel that protrudes. It would be MUCH easier to pilot if every car function had a vim shortcut.
Looking at the control manual this looks very ergonomic. You're essentially delegating non-input controls to a joystick with feedback, while the typing is done on the keyboard. This is actually useful.
I actually have this idea where there’s a pedal that shifts your keyboard from qwerty to Dvorak, and some savant can hyper-optimize input by shifting with human look-ahead.
There are plenty of muscles that are underutilised in the computer peripheral world. Feet, legs, toes, tongue, anus. Hardware designers are too orthodox and we're all worse off because of it.
A few years ago I had some pretty bad issues with my hands, mostly caused by using my thumb to reach for the Alt key. My employer bought me some foot pedals that I ended up binding to alt and capslock (since I used my capslock key for ctrl + esc). It actually works pretty great :).
Annoying fact about these shifters, when mated to the ZF-8: if your car doesn't start you gotta go under it and screw in some bolt to make it go into neutral.
It's amazing the vast library of very make/model/config specific "put this in neutral" hacks that are basically required knowledge for modern tow truck operators.
> First start by safely lifting the car in the air. We always advise using a quality floor jack and jack stands to support the vehicle. Once it is in the air, you need to gain access to the transmission. Depending on the car in question, this could be behind belly pans or covers. Once you've gained access to the transmission, locate the hex-head bolt. Use a 5mm hex bit socket on a ratchet to rotate the bolt to the right. Listen for a click as you move the foot up. The click indicates that the transmission is no longer in park, and the car will roll freely.
Yikes! Best to keep a 5mm internal hex in the glovebox.
The gearbox is going to be shifted out of park WHILE THE MECHANIC IS UNDER THE CAR.
If there is a subtle error in setting up the jack (e.g. if there is a slight gradient and the drive wheels are on the ground, so that the car is "resting" against the parking brake), shifting it into neutral could cause the car to move slightly as the longitudinal force is transferred from the parking brake to the wheel chocks / handbrake / jack / etc. If the situation is marginal, this could cause the car to fall off the jack and crush the mechanic.
It just seems like a recipe for (occasional, statistical) disaster.
I would never go under a jacked up car. Just use the jack to change the tyres that is it. Anything else I take it to the mechanic who will lift it with the proper machinery.
Oh indeed, most people wouldn't. I bet some people do though.
Especially if the car is broken down in the road (which is where cars usually break down), and there is no tow truck but someone has a jack (e.g. the basic jack for changing the tyre) and there is pressure to get the car off the road. It's inevitable that out of all the millions of cars and people, someone will be in
a hurry to jack it up using the spare tyre jack and not much else, climb under, put it in neutral without thinking of what will happen next, and get crushed.
> Probably was in neutral without handbrake, otherwise: Holy shit, they gotta be liable for damage done.
Even in neutral, you'll damage the diff by having the wheels drive it without a load
"Normal" for a diff is to either have the engine drive it with a load (the road) or have the road drive it with a load (then engine). Applying a driving force on it while it freewheels without a load is not good.
This apparently isn't universally true; the manual for my rear wheel drive car says to lift it by the front wheels, put it in neutral, and leave the rear wheels on the ground.
The automatic version does have to be set to a specific gear, and there are speed and towed distance limits.
Eh, not full well. I myself have towed a Miata rear wheels down after removing the driveshaft. (In a parallel universe I very well could have been the tow operator that the commenter some levels up saw) My understanding is that re:Miata the diff isn't the problem, (since its always just kinda full of oil/grease that is flung around by the gears) it's that the transmission may only pump oil when operating normally. I think my previous comment replied to the wrong person actually. Things are getting blurry at 3am here...
I’d say it is always safer to fully load a car on a flatbed and tow it with none of the wheels turning. I never understood why it is allowed to tow someone else’s car with their wheels turning.
That does remind me of one time when I was living in Boston and my apartment window was right next to a tiny "golden street" - no resident parking restrictions, no street sweeping, no snow artery, nothing on restrictions. Room for maybe a dozen cars. Very secure because it was well lit with multiple cameras from an adjacent church. (and no one breaks into cars in front of God!) Near a train stop. You could leave a car there for weeks. Such a parking place is exceedingly rare in the Boston city core. Only threat was, after 72 hours, someone might call it in as 'abandoned' per state law.[1] Generally this wasn't done for neighbors and maintained-looking cars as a courtesy.
Anyway, someone who didn't seem to be a neighbor decided to park a big crusty step van there for a month and a neighbor must have took offence to that and called it in, because two non-flatbed Boston city police tow trucks showed up in the middle of the night to take it away. I became aware of this due to a horrible intermittent screeching sound - I opened my blinds and saw the two tow trucks, facing opposite directions and using one side of each of their hydraulic wheel lifts in tandem on the outer wheels of the step-van to pull the parallel-parked vehicle out perpendicularly into the street. Once it was out in the street they didn't bother to put it in neutral or anything, hooked the front on one of the trucks and drove away with the locked up rear tires just screeching all the way away into the night. Parts of the rubber tracks were left behind for years on that street.
The lesson to all who saw those tracks - Boston don't give no fucks about your street parked vehicle if it is deemed abandoned by the community!
The tow truck operators I have seen didn't give a shit. Pulled hard enough the car ends up on the trailer no matter whether it is in gear or not. No apparent concern for the wellbeing of the drivetrain.
Yeah, I really should have said good modern tow truck operators. Ah well. Thankfully every tow truck operator I've worked with has been very professional.
Ouch. That looks like a torture device. There should be some monocled guy petting a cat saying "let's see if you can type your way out of this, Mr. Bond".
Computer culture is sometimes a bit paradoxical - I thought moving hand to the mouse from the home row was a big no-no, but now suddenly it's all OK to move them hand from that row to a gear shift!
In any case, a cool project, and the naming of it is top-notch!
It's the rule of cool. Everything must be as ergonomic as possible, unless of it adds to the cool-factor, which a functioning stick shift for your computer certainly does.
From the title I thought it was referring to the iDrive knob. The knob was originally designed by 3DConnexion, which was a Logitech subsidiary that made human interface devices for 3D modeling
As someone who has used both a 3DConnexion space mouse and a BMW iDrive knob I always noted the similarity in design but do you have a source for the BMW iDrive knob originally being developed by 3dCx/Logitech? Because I have never seen a claim that there was actually a partnership or work done by the latter for the BMW. I think it is just a strong influence of single-point UI and a coincidence. 3dConnexion was founded in 2001, and the first BMW iDrive vehicle was the 2001 7-series but they had concept center-knob UI control before that.
The ZF-8 auto that BMW uses is honestly pretty great. I’m a diehard manual fan, but I have very few complaints about it in our BMW wagon, despite having hated every other automatic I’ve ever been subjected to.
They sell an option for paddle shifters on the wheel. Even F1 cars have automated gearboxes with paddles on the wheel, so it's not that crazy for a "sports" saloon to have the same?
The automatic transmission used in F1 cars is not at all comparable to the automatic transmission in consumer cars.
While the automatic transmission in F1 cars allows for fine grained control of the individual gears and just automates the gear-switching, consumer cars typically control which particular gear should be used at any moment of driving, and this difference is clearly noticable while operating the vehicle.
The sports automatic we're talking about here goes into manual mode if you use the paddles on the steering wheel. And then it operates the same as an F1 car, you are in manual control of the gears and the "automatic" side of it only steps in when the engine would otherwise stall (F1 calls it anti-stall and does it in a different way, but the effect for the user is the same).
Other than that of course an F1 gearbox is a very different and much more advanced piece of technology. I was talking about the way the user operates it, that's equal for a road car with paddles.
There is also two types, torque converter based one ("classical" auto) and DSG which are closer to "automated manual", the good ones have lightning quick shifts and are overall performance-wise better than automatics on every front. Well the good, ones, bad DSGs also happened.
The windshield wiper stick can clear the current buffer.