Daily Archives: February 23, 2013


I took a very similar trek almost exactly 20 years ago

In early February 1993, Lotus engineer Steve Green and I set off from Hethel in eastern England with an Opel Vectra and a Saab 9000 Turbo. I was an engineer with Kelsey-Hayes and we were early in the development of a new traction control system. 

We had contracted with Lotus to build us a Vectra with custom engine management system so that we could manipulate the torque output. I had already spent several weeks in Arvidsjaur before heading to Hethel to help finish the preparations of the Vectra. We took a Ferry from Felixstowe, England to Brugge in Belgium and then raced across through the Netherlands and Germany to catch another ferry from Keil to Gottenborg. 

From the home of Volvo we trekked east to Uppsala but unfortunately our schedule didn't allow for a side-trip to Stockholm like +Jonny Lieberman and Justin Bell. After a night in Uppsala we followed the coast up to Lulea before turning back inland to our destination in Arvidsjaur about 60 miles south of the Arctic circle. 

Through the entire trip I drove the Saab while Steve commanded the Vectra, and finished calibrating the new engine management system. Like the MT boys, we ate most of our meals on the road at gas stations and canteens. Steve spent about a week in Arvidsjaur fine tuning the Vectra before flying home to England. I stayed there for another 2 months before finally heading south in mid-April. 

That was a pretty surreal winter, having in arrived in Arvidsjaur on January 4 when the daylight lasted about 20 minutes and the sun barely came above the horizon. By the time I left, the sun was coming up about 4:30am and it didn't really get dark until about 10pm.

It was however a very productive winter and we had the beginnings of a workable system. I also learned some important stuff and developed what a rudimentary stability control system using just the wheel speed sensors. Without accelerometers and yaw rate sensors, it was wasn't nearly robust enough to use in production but elements of it would later be incorporated into a turn detection system for our ABS.

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Eventually, the camshaft in the internal combustion engine will become obsolete but… 1

Eventually, the camshaft in the internal combustion engine will become obsolete but we're not there yet

Anyone familiar with old pre-electronics carbureted engines knows that getting one to work well across a wide range of operating conditions and speeds is not a trivial matter. Thanks to computer brains today's engines mostly operate smoothly and seamlessly from a 600 rpm idle up to 7,000 rpm and beyond. 

The dynamics of moving air and fuel, combusting it and then getting the exhaust out takes a lot of very careful engineering and mechanical systems have severe limitations one of which is the valve-train. That's why engineers have been working to eliminate the camshaft from that process. They've already developed mechanisms to adjust the timing and lift but there is only so much when the valve stem/lifter has to ride up and over the bumps on the cams. 

Engineers everywhere have been developing actuation systems that can individually manage each valve and provide the optimum lift and duration for each cylinder. Lotus had an electromagnetic system in the early-1990s. Unfortunately while these systems actually work, the actuators also require a lot of power to run. That means the benefits of improved valve control are lost. Sooner or later however, someone will develop a system that is more efficient. I don't know if this pneumatic system that Koenigsegg is developing is the one, but it's an interesting video. 

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Everything published by government agencies is in the public domain and NO ONE has…

Everything published by government agencies is in the public domain and NO ONE has the right to claim copyright, EVER!

Reshared post from +Tim O’Reilly

Carl Malamud asks a key question that demands an answer in a democracy: do we have the right to read laws that govern us, or can we be required to pay to read them? 

Free Speech Battle Over Publication of Federal Law
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal judge today to protect the free speech rights of an online archive of laws and legal standards after a wrongheaded copyright cl…

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Google Glass will present a real paradigm shift in how we use technology in the coming…

Google Glass will present a real paradigm shift in how we use technology in the coming years

I can't wait to try this out, but we will have a lot of new questions to answer about how and where we use cameras.

I used Google Glass: the future, with monthly updates
The frosted-glass doors on the 11th floor of Google’s NYC headquarters part and a woman steps forward to greet me. This is an otherwise normal specimen of humanity. Normal height, slender build;…

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