Cars

[Alien]

[Malkin]

I hope you drive one of these:

Hovercrafts and wind sleds are more common for questionable ice roads. The lake in the video still has 3 feet of ice and is fine.

[Malkin]

Also, why are embedded videos so huge but images are tiny?

[Geesie]

Spoken like someone who hasn’t repeatedly cut up his hands replacing the headlights.

For my car, every time I would replace my headlights, my knuckles would look like I’d lost a boxing match with a cheese grater. Replacing the bulbs with ones that were likely to last longer than the car was a huge advantage for me.

In addition to the knuckle scrapes, I damaged the inside of a finger joint replacing my wife's HID bulb badly enough that I had numbness and recurring bruising for months afterwards. These things should not be built that way.

[j_tso]

Spoken like someone who hasn’t repeatedly cut up his hands replacing the headlights.

For my car, every time I would replace my headlights, my knuckles would look like I’d lost a boxing match with a cheese grater. Replacing the bulbs with ones that were likely to last longer than the car was a huge advantage for me.

Do you happen to own a Renault Megane?
A long while back Fifth Gear did a segment on the hassle of its headlight replacement.

[Jehannum]

The color temp can be specified in the app.

My LED headlights are NOT usually set to cool blue.

What you’re talking about is just not an issue with my lights.

You want them cool blue? Fine. Warm blue? Fine. Incredibly yellow? Also fine.

And this whole idea that I’m sitting there adjusting lights while I’m driving?

Seriously. Think about it for five seconds. Do you seriously think that's happening, that anyone is doing that? Or do you realize that you just made that up?

It’s something you do maybe once or twice. You set it to exactly what you’d prefer. My eyes are really sensitive(as in CAN NOT OPEN MY EYES ALL OF THE WAY OUTSIDE WITHOUT GLASSES sensitive). I was able to set them at a level which is appropriate, not offensive to the people around me, and not using the blue-or-purple-hued light that is common with LED lights. But my lights say they should last 70,000–80,000 hours.

These lights have literally every advantage that LED lights have, and none of the well-known drawbacks like what you’re talking about.

And hell, if I had someone driving around bothering me at night, I could turn around a corner, change the color of my headlights, and drive back, and they might think it was a different car.

I don’t really know you, but I do know Albuquerque drivers, so my assumptions weren’t based on assuming the worst of you, but assuming the average of the people around me, which range from "my car's too big to fit in a single lane" to "fuck you, my texting habit is more important than traffic". I meant no offense.

I wish you the best with your 70–80000 hours, but it costs $2–3 to replace a halogen headlamp after ₁₀₀₀ hours of service, and that's just fine with me, because it only takes a couple minutes to do the job, so you’re describing a feature which bestows no advantage, IMO.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t repeatedly cut up his hands replacing the headlights.

For my car, every time I would replace my headlights, my knuckles would look like I’d lost a boxing match with a cheese grater. Replacing the bulbs with ones that were likely to last longer than the car was a huge advantage for me.

I assure you, I've found every way to damage myself with tools and badly designed engine bays, but I've never had trouble with headlights before.

Even the VWs, once I removed the ebay LED nonsense on the GTI, were easy.

[Jehannum]

I hope you drive one of these:

Hovercrafts and wind sleds are more common for questionable ice roads. The lake in the video still has 3 feet of ice and is fine.

Are the hovercrafts full of eels?

[obvs]

The color temp can be specified in the app.

My LED headlights are NOT usually set to cool blue.

What you’re talking about is just not an issue with my lights.

You want them cool blue? Fine. Warm blue? Fine. Incredibly yellow? Also fine.

And this whole idea that I’m sitting there adjusting lights while I’m driving?

Seriously. Think about it for five seconds. Do you seriously think that's happening, that anyone is doing that? Or do you realize that you just made that up?

It’s something you do maybe once or twice. You set it to exactly what you’d prefer. My eyes are really sensitive(as in CAN NOT OPEN MY EYES ALL OF THE WAY OUTSIDE WITHOUT GLASSES sensitive). I was able to set them at a level which is appropriate, not offensive to the people around me, and not using the blue-or-purple-hued light that is common with LED lights. But my lights say they should last 70,000–80,000 hours.

These lights have literally every advantage that LED lights have, and none of the well-known drawbacks like what you’re talking about.

And hell, if I had someone driving around bothering me at night, I could turn around a corner, change the color of my headlights, and drive back, and they might think it was a different car.

I don’t really know you, but I do know Albuquerque drivers, so my assumptions weren’t based on assuming the worst of you, but assuming the average of the people around me, which range from "my car's too big to fit in a single lane" to "fuck you, my texting habit is more important than traffic". I meant no offense.

I wish you the best with your 70–80000 hours, but it costs $2–3 to replace a halogen headlamp after ₁₀₀₀ hours of service, and that's just fine with me, because it only takes a couple minutes to do the job, so you’re describing a feature which bestows no advantage, IMO.

Spoken like someone who hasn’t repeatedly cut up his hands replacing the headlights.

For my car, every time I would replace my headlights, my knuckles would look like I’d lost a boxing match with a cheese grater. Replacing the bulbs with ones that were likely to last longer than the car was a huge advantage for me.

I assure you, I’ve found every way to damage myself with tools and badly designed engine bays, but I’ve never had trouble with headlights before.

Even the VWs, once I removed the ebay LED nonsense on the GTI, were easy.

I can acknowledge that headlights are USUALLY easy.

My car has been a great car.

But its headlights are NOT easy.

[arkayn]

2017 Toyota Corolla SE, perfectly fine for driving the 24 miles to work and back.

[Jehannum]

Got the steering back into the roadster yesterday. Replaced whatever oil had leaked out of the steering box with some corn head grease, so hopefully it doesn't leak (or leak as badly) out of seals that are no longer available from Nissan.

Kind of at a put up or shut up point, because the next logical thing to do is to paint the engine bay.

[Jehannum]

Got the arduino project for the Audi's gauges to the point where I need to learn LVGL, at least in theory, because I don't have any ESP32-S3 boards on hand to test. It compiles (yay, ship it!), and should dump all the telemetry it reads to the serial console.

Got oil temp and illumination added to the loop, both of which are analog inputs. The oil temp is a simple variable resistor, so I'm going to put a pullup resistor on it and 3.3v from the board. The illumination is (I assume) 0-15V (alternator voltage), so I'll need to make a voltage divider that limits it somewhere under 2.5V. The rest of the telemetry is just updated off the can input each time the main loop repeats.

Not sure how much I like the oil temp lookup; I can't think of any way to do it other than a std::map, as the VDO sender's resistance table is in 5 degree increments:

So my current loop uses std::map's lower_bound(T) and std::map's upper_bound(T), both of which incur a log(n) performance hit, but on a table where n is 40-ish, that's not actually terrible. It finds the lower and upper bound on the read value, and then interpolates between the two linearly. Obviously, I'd prefer an O(1) lookup, but there's a little problem with that, in that I'm not keying the map in degrees C, but by voltage, because I'm using a 3.3V vref and a 220 ohm pullup resistor on the analog pin, which doesn't bin into increments of 5 as cleanly

Exceptionally good note: I found a reliable vendor for the ESP32 boards I need: https://www.adafruit.com/product/5800

So, now I can let garage-tinkering's Andy sit on the $350 I paid him back in November while he still thinks there's some hope the USPS might find the package they lost in January, but I can make forward progress without him. Obviously, this is an inferior solution, as it doesn't have a built-in CAN transceiver, but I do have those on-hand, which means that I can make actual progress.

[juice]

On today's run I saw the chassis of a 240 in someone's yard and I wondered if he knew @Jehannum

[Jehannum]

I went on Saturday morning to a Cars and Coffee event at someplace called "Heatwave Coffee", and took the 240Z.

While I was there, a kid about 16-17 years old drove into the lot in kind of a ratty white 280Z. While I was standing around with the dog drinking some bad coffee, he came up to me, and opened up his camera roll. It took him some scrolling, but he found the picture he was looking for: a picture of himself, in about 2015 (at age 5 or 6), sitting in the driver's seat of my 240Z at a different Cars and Coffee.

Then he said, "your Z is what got me into Z cars".

So I took another picture of him in my driver's seat with his camera, so he could send that on to his dad.

[ConnertheCat]

Then he said, "your Z is what got me into Z cars".

You have that effect on people! What a great story.

[LCGuy]

Thats awesome! I hope I get to “pay it forward” the same way one day.

[j_tso]

I had a similar "full circle" moment like that.

20+ years ago I first saw an RX-7 while pushing carts for the local grocery chain. Then a few years ago I see a kid collecting carts for another store of the same chain staring at mine.

[obvs]

I went on Saturday morning to a Cars and Coffee event at someplace called "Heatwave Coffee", and took the 240Z.

While I was there, a kid about 16–17 years old drove into the lot in kind of a ratty white 280Z. While I was standing around with the dog drinking some bad coffee, he came up to me, and opened up his camera roll. It took him some scrolling, but he found the picture he was looking for: a picture of himself, in about 2015 (at age 5 or 6), sitting in the driver's seat of my 240Z at a different Cars and Coffee.

Then he said, "your Z is what got me into Z cars".

So I took another picture of him in my driver's seat with his camera, so he could send that on to his dad.

That's very cool.

[Jehannum]

Scout had her first experience in a convertible on Saturday night; safe to say she's a fan.