And then nobody goes on to bat eyes at the galling maintenance costs, insurance, registration, or taxes on cars, but yeah $4k (or euro or gbp) for an e bike seems like a stupid idea to people for some reason. I think it’s either bad marketing on the part of the ebike folks or pernicious effort on the part of car manufacturers.
This is my understanding of the state of the art in transmitter technology too. ELRS equipment and software offer a number of advantages over every other protocol I have used. It’s easier to pair and configure, it offers robust connectivity even in lossy signal environments, and its range exceeds that of any video downlink on any of my aircraft.
The one exception to your statement is "easier to pair". ELRS has historically been more of a pain to pair and update than crossfire.
Crossfire has OTA updates from the TX to the RX's, so you just need to update the transmitter and updates can then be pushed to RX's next time you connect. On crossfire, the button on the TX's always allowed for easy push-button binding.
ELRS was a pain having to flash and update binding phrases via wifi, which often had poor wifi chips on cheaper receivers. You often needed to take your RX, update it near a computer, update the binding phrase, update your TX, update the binding phrase on it. You had to do this for each RX individually (still do for updates).
3.4, released just last week, now allows for push-button binding on RX's (the button was originally reserved for recover modes on boot).
However, once you're configured and bound, ELRS is technically better at every turn. If they figure out a way to get OTA updates (harder for them as there's dozens of different hardware vendors with diferent designs and limited flash space on them) to RX's, there's no reason to do crossfire. The only remaining issue with ELRS is that there are bad vendors with poorer quality hardware, but it's only an occasional problem.
V5 was always my favorite, but the v7 consistently stands up to my ham handed abuse without ruining the ball. They will leak if flown with or washed, and because of a few dramatic ruptures I have been experimenting with the uniball vision fine with excellent results.
Anecdotally I had general anesthesia a couple times in my 30s and both times I felt like I came out of it permanently stupider. No complications or other observable side effects either. I’ve done fine in spite of it but this makes me interested again!!
The few studies seem to show it’s not correlated with anesthesia. There was a supposed “pumphead syndrome” that blamed cardiopulmonary bypass machines for it, but one of the few studies done didn’t find that correlation either. The most plausible thing I’ve seen is that it’s somehow an effect of inflammation, as more and more things seem to be. Surgery is a major trauma, and although you aren’t awake for it, your body is just as traumatized.
I’m an old dad (by my standards, 41 with two toddlers), and this is the reason. It took me most of my young adult life to even get to a stable configuration where kids felt remotely possible. No regrets over here, but I have less energy than I did when I was 30!
The fact that my cheap-o air purifier has soft buttons and no way to turn it on autonomously (I.e. on an automated outlet) is infuriating. What value do membrane switches add?
I'm that close to do the same for my child's nightlight: just shunt power around whatever is opening the circuit and drive it with a Shelly plug.
(Okay the grand idea would be to ultimately put an ESP32 between the control unit and the three buttons, so that I can both operate it manually yet have full control of the thing; not the least because if you cut power it resets its state to a static white light. Never done that so that'd be nice way to acquire the skill without much risk to that super cheap device)
It’s antithesis of ‘sweet spot’ between dumb and smart.
Thing should either be dumb and do everything you want with a button, or smart and then at least you get programmability.
For simple things like lights it’s usually better use of time to buy Yeelight nightlight and then you get to control it through HomeKit:home assistant/their app.
> It’s antithesis of ‘sweet spot’ between dumb and smart.
You mean the soft buttons? yeah it's nuts, not the least because since it's reacting to an impulse (either pull down to mass or pull up from mass) there's gotta be a constant power draw - however small (my Shelly plug measures it as non-zero <0.1~0.5W) - to the logic board to compare it against.
(warning: back of the envelope calculation)
At scale on a house one would have a bunch of such soft button devices†, cumulatively it might be on the 1~5W scale. Across a 1M city it's going to be 1~5MW.
It's made worse by these devices having cheap transformers or switched mode power supplies whose non-linearity drive the power factor down to 0.5~0.7, which means it's pumping real energy production to 2~8MVA (plus on the utility side electrical hardware needs to be scaled up because e.g loss doubles)
Which means for my town we're basically throwing 50~200MVAh a day right down the drain - or rather either burned up in the air or buried down "places that are not of honour" - because it doesn't make sense to have power factor correction economically (either on the device maker side, which would rise the BOM a few cents up, on the residential side where the cost is prohibitive, or on the individual size where people prefer buying cheap, electrically terrible, knockoff devices). Because yeah, in the EU passive PFC - which raises PF ~0.5 to ~0.85 - is mandated above >75W only.
Comparatively to the overall energy production and usage it's small, but in absolute terms it boggles the mind that as a society we're able to handwave such amounts of energy.
† I'm not counting stuff like powerbanks or chargers but again back of the envelope it should overall fold into the range, making the worst case conservative.
As a recovering bike mechanic of 20 years (my retirement goal is to be able to afford doing that job again, it’s joyful but hard to make a living) the writing has been on the wall for several years about the many benefits of wider tires (and rims too I suppose). From fewer puncture flats, to greater comfort and traction, to actually lower rolling resistance, I dknt see a move back to narrower tires being something that ever happens and I couldn’t be happier about that fact! I’m too slow and old to reap any performance benefits, but my comfort and enjoyment of wider tires makes me ride my bike more. https://www.renehersecycles.com/bq-tire-test-results/
Completely argee - I use 35mm tires on my 'road' (repurposed gravel) bike since ages because I just like it that way and never felt the need to go narrower.
