Sunday, August 15, 2010
GM can not afford to let these out of the plant, assuming it wasn't damaged later. Even a slight mis-alignment of door trim really ruins the perceived quality of a vehicle.
And how could she even stand to drive the car like that? I would feel nauseous.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
All was not lost however. Since the point of coast-down testing is to coast the vehicle to measure its decelerating forces, an engine isn't needed except to get up to speed. Chrysler was able to save the day for Edison2 by pushing their cars up to speed with another vehicle.Also on the morning of Day 3, Edison2, TW4XP, and X-Tracer hit the proving grounds for their turn through Coast Down. On the straight-away of the test track, Edison2's Mainstream Class entries, vehicle numbers 97 and 98, were fielded. In both cases, as third party test drivers accelerated the vehicles to speed, a mechanical over-rev condition resulted in engine failures and the tests had to be aborted.
The fact that the Edison2 vehicles employ sequential transmissions may have contributed to the unintended downshift and subsequent mechanical over-rev condition that damaged the engines. In a typical racing configuration, the driver pulls rearword on the shift lever to shift up through the gears. This is opposite the convention used by many US automakers in their semi-automatic transmissions (like Chrysler's AutoStick), where manual upshifting is executed by pushing forward, away from the driver. Further, given that this is a competition vehicle, the automated software that would normally override an unintended downshift at speed or at high RPM is not yet perfected.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Maker Faire was a strange place, it reminded me of Burning Man (without drugs), or maybe a sci-fi convention (without Star Trek uniforms). The crowd was a mix of all kinds of people. I saw lots of punk rock and tattooed kids. I also saw religious Muslims and Jews, together in one space, in Dearborn. It was like, peace, love, and robots, man.
Here are a few things that I thought were neat.
It runs!
A really neat 4-rotor remote controlled helicopter (quadrocopter). It uses an on-board micro-controller (Arduino) to trim the motors to maintain attitude, using inputs from a 6-axis inertial sensor board.
The Life Size Mousetrap in action.
A Big Dog drive-by, slightly out of focus (sorry).