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This bothered me:
Why is the word "very" pronounced with a "v" in the first two instances, and an "r" in the third? If anything, a Japanese person is likely to substitute "b" for "v". *
The sloppiness of transcription is TRWTF.
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No, he's not an idiot, but there may be an idiot involved in this discussion.
While it's literally true that the car's sound output is the sum of its individual parts' contribution, what he undoubtedly meant was that some of those parts exist only to change the sound output, and many of the others are configured in ways which are either "could be done either way, let's do it this way so it sounds better" or are actively sub-optimal in other contexts (lowers efficiency, reduces power, etc) so as to modify the sound output. And depending on the car, "changing the sound output" may not have as its ultimate goal achieving the absolute minimum sound output. Quiet Mustangs do not sell well.
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Sigh. In the third instance he's saying "really". What's up with you guys today? It's like special school in here.
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I think part of the problem with the discussion is that people are confusing "engine noise" with "exhaust note".
Most (all?) automobile manufacturers care greatly about the exhaust note and overall exterior sound of the car, and do indeed employ people to tune it. They also care about the sound inside the cabin, and employ people to deal with that, too.
"engine noise", OTOH, is the noise created by fans, alternators, pistons, etc. and is pretty much the sum of the noises of the individual parts. Manufacturers care much less about this noise, though the more exclusive the car the more they care about it.
I'm sure Ferrari cares a great deal what the engine sounds like, separate from the sound of the exhaust. As does Jaguar, Harley Davidson, and a handful of others. I doubt Kia cares that much, except that it shouldn't sound like a bunch of pots and pans clanging together.
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"Rearry" <- "Really", and it's as good a transcription as any of the accent. The Japanese r/l is actually somewhere in between, and sounds more like a flapped d in isolation, but English speakers tend to hear it as "wrong" and so transcribe it as a transposition of r to l and l to r, rather than r and l to d.
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I CAN'T REALLY BELIEVE THA.... BANG!
Hey you were right after all...
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The misinformation was that it's seemingly not dangerous to leave smoking electronics plugged in. My whole point was 'don't leave it plugged in'. When it starts smoking, unplug it.. then you don't run the risk of starting a fire.
Fail safes are all well and good, but on any large electronic device that fails there is a danger of fire, and it is not trivial if left unattended. Fuses can melt open too.
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ときは、12Vのスイッチを入れる、車が起動するが表示されます
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I guess Murphy's Law was on vacation that day.
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RE: drinking nearly an almost entire bottle of milk of magnesia
TRWTF is the choice of beverage. Instead of milk of magnesia before coming back into the office, perhaps some "other" type of beverage immediately upon arriving home would be the more natural choice. :)
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Also bear in mind that these new electric cars that are just coming onto the market are deemed to be too quiet, and therefore too dangerous, for the inattentive ipodded-up generation (oh yes, and blind people). So they are deliberately designing noise makers in them to go "brrm, brrm" like real cars.
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Hey Bob, why don't you go back to that other debate you were losing?
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[quote user="frits"][quote user="H.P. Lovecraft"]
I've seen electrolytic caps do this because the dialectric broke down. Again, it did not cause an emergency.
BTW- I am not advocating that anyone leave smoking electronics powered up. [/quote]
Goodness, that brings back memories. I worked during my student apprenticeship some 30 years ago in a lab which tested power supplies for TV cameras. Twice in one week one of these machines malfunctioned so as to send the can from an exploding capacitor shooting past my temporarily-deafened ear.
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Anyone have a link to what one of these behemoths look like? My Google-fu is weak today; most of the links I find come back to this article.
damnum - dense, crumbly mineral that curses out whoever mines it.
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QFT.
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I guess what's confusing me was the description in the story about "angry lights" flashing at Chris, but when the Japanese guy did it and the car was running smoothly, all the "angry lights" were dark and the engine was running smoothly. That suggested that the lights and the noise were part of some ignition sequence, and I would have thought that Chris might have run over to the machine in a panic, but by the time he got there, the lights were off, it was running smoothly, and he'd have realized that it was normal.
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This reminds me of the time I worked for a school district and was an adviser for a High School Solar Car project. The day before we were supposed to have a press conference and demo the car, we were running WAY behind schedule so the whole team pulled an all-nighter to get the car driveable. Press conference time was nearing and the TV crew was already there, and we had just gotten to the "smoke test". We turned on all the switches, pressed the "Soft-Start" button that was supposed to pre-charge the capacitors in the motor controller, and the Main Fuse blew. We ran some diagnostics, and tried again. Main fuse blew. We tried just about everything we could think of, and every time we hit the soft-start the main fuse blew. We had one Fuse left, and I was sooo blooming tired my eyes wouldn't focus. I decided to run one last test, so I got my voltmeter out, connected a battery directly to the SS controller, disconnected the main power contactors and hooked voltmeters to the signal lines. Turns out we had the control lines swapped. The SS line was connected to the RUN relay and the run line was connected to the SS relay.
I swapped the connections using a couple of wire nuts and hooked everything back up. The driver gets in, hits the SS button, relays click, lights blink and the car powers up. In place of the expected cheer there was a collective sigh from the whole team. We were all too tired to cheer. In the back of my head I could hear the minstrels from Monty Python's Holy Grail saying "And there was much rejoicing." At which point I started giggling like an idiot.
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Ford and BMW have both added "sound tubes" to add more "engine roar" into the car. http://blog.cardomain.com/2009/03/02/fords-induction-sound-tube/
The engineers may not care about the sounds, but the marketers sure do. Can't have a Mustang sounding like a Camry, or a Camry sounding like a Harley.
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If their act had destroyed the machine it would no doubt be covered by Professional Indemnity Insurance anyway, but in reality would such a test machine really be worth so much money and then blow up and get damaged so easily?
Plus if it's a test machine, it should obviously be able to cope with errors within reason without self-destructing. If it can't do that it is not fit for the purpose.
The whole point of having test machines is that developers do not always get it right first time and that you can detect the errors and fix them in a safe environment.
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Here's one.
[image]And another.
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ha, this might be one of the best stories I have read on WTF in quite some time.
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Hey, isn't this article somewhat related to embedded systems?
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thats funny, I had to look at that sentence twice real quick to figure out what they meant, but your interpretation is far funnier
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You appear to be one of those cases of arrested adolescence who believe that your masculinity is confirmed by announcing your arrival by having your vehicle make as loud a noise as possible. Excessive noise pollution is a crime in most civilised areas of the world.
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+1
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I worked in an Automotive company, and we had a similar situation once. We had one of these test benches chuck full of equipment and we were testing diagnostics for an Airbag controller. The test bench had the seat belts as part of the setup.
While the test was running and the bench was on(VK ON) the engineer from the ECU controller company tried to disconnect it, but forgot to turn of the bench...
Well, a very LOUD explosion was heard immediately and pieces of equipment flew everywhere.
When disconnecting the ECU, the engineer flipped it over, activating the accelerometer that detects when the vehicle flips.
Result: BOOM!!
It happens that the seat belts are pyrotechnic. They explode to ensure that the optimal tension is archived in the case of an accident.
Fortunately we didn't have the airbags in the set-up....
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Oh look I found four things. :-)
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Seriously, though, most signal wires are as low as three, even less than one volt. Just enough to tell the component it's talking to: "1". The ignition, on the other hand, actually completes a circuit directly from the battery to the engine.
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WWhatt's thatt? 5 Watt?
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There's also this:
What?
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Awesome. I've never worked with automotive ECUs, but anytime you get to have real actual hardware (as opposed to some kind of emulator or boilerplate) to play with is cool. ;-) Of course, sometimes then that leads to the fun of discovering that your software doesn't work because up until now, you'd been testing it with an emulator, and the behavior was just a wee bit different.... So the car maker is certainly right to have a Test Machine like this. Emulators are great tools for development, but sooner or later you have to test in the real world, and the sooner in the development/integration cycle that you can introduce bits of reality, the better.
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TRWTF. Even hiring a part-time consultant or something would be a good idea - or asking for a loaner from the customer or something.
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probably ozone from the firing spark plugs....
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Are you for real? Your argument is akin to saying that people who conduct orchestras are trying to 'make as much noise as possible'. Tuning exhaust systems isn't about volume, it's about quality.
Yeah, for certain kinds of cars, louder exhausts sound better. But that still doesn't mean noise-pollution levels, and wanting your car to sound nice doesn't imply you want it to be loud any more than buying a good stereo implies that you want to blow the windows out of your house. My Saab is pretty damn quiet, but the sound it does make is really, really nice - far different from the usual econobox grind, even though it's about the same volume.
You need to consider things for more than a few milliseconds before you saddle up your high horse.
In other news, this was a fantastic article.
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I design MCUs for automotive applications (airbags, dashboard, powertrain etc).
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No I think you are quite wrong there, ducati for instance open the exhaust valves a little soon to get a good sound out of the engine. It costs a little power but thats marketing
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