invaliddata

Stepper motors simply provide accurate and fast occasional rotational positioning. This requires high torque at a wide rpm range, including 0 rpm, for obvious reasons. stepper motors are a very bad application for induction motors, since everything other than steady state operation requires advanced control systems and switching power supply circuitry. For the basic induction motor without an advanced control system, the starting torque must be provided by inefficient means, and is still very limited.

Synchronous motors are motors where the rotation of the magnetic field is synchronous with the rotation of the motor. For all induction motors, the induced field is a result of a varying magnetic field across the element in question. This implies that the speed of the rotor must be different than the speed of the magnetic field. Thus, no induction motor is a synchronous motor, almost by definition.

As a first order simplification, motors are all about pairs of magnetic fields attracting / repelling each other. Often, one side of the pair is a permanent magnet. If instead the magnetism is induced (implying no magnet involved, as the other side must be switchable / controllable / varying, thus not a permanent magnet), you have an induction motor.

At low power levels, permanent magnet motors (specifically brushless motors) tend to have higher efficiency than induction motors, additionally, they don't require complicated control systems to operate efficiently at varying speeds. Thus you are unlikely to see an induction motor in an RC model anytime soon.

That was precisely the misunderstanding. The purpose of the device was to improve mechanical grip by allowing the tires to have a more uniform pressure with the ground, removing some of the influence of impulses applied to the tire/suspension and the attendant lateral oscillations that result.

With such a rigid interpretation of the regulations, one could say the anti roll bar, spring, or damper would also be in violation of the regulations, as they have knock on effects concerning the aerodynamics.

They ostensibly have this, a Resource Restriction Agreement. It does things like eliminate in season testing, which used to be very expensive, mandating a multi week summer shutdown during the middle of the season when no work is to be performed (even email is shut off for some teams). They also restrict time in the wind tunnel (even though most teams have their own wind tunnel(s), they can't use them all the time they are actually available, and limiting the computing power which gets applied to CFD in lieu of wind tunnel testing. There are a few notable things that don't get limited, for example, driver salaries, which can be very high.

In recent years, a lot of parts of the car are of a fixed design, and cannot be changed except for safety and reliability reasons. This includes the engine, the wheels and the main chassis monocoque (the latter is homologated at the beginning of the season). Chassis homologation caused a lot of teams problems in 2011 during the "f-duct" episodes due to teams having to find all sorts of clumsy workarounds to accommodate the ducting for the device without having designed space and openings for it in the homologated chassis.

Even the freeze on engine design (since 2007-2008 ish), has seen things like ferrari spending ridiculous sums to ostensibly improve the reliability of their oil pump, and oh, look at that, as a side effect, gain marginal amounts of engine horsepower.

Racing stresses components to their limit, on purpose, and fans don't like it when races are decided by attrition. So even well meaning attempts to limit development and restrict spending often fail. If someone has the money and the will to gain a slight advantage, it's hard to stop. Even templated designs and string limits on what development is allowed doesn't stop people from spending vast sums of money in search of tiny gains. Nascar is good example of this. While not all the spending is at the individual team level, you have large collectives and manufacturers doing things like designing their own suspension dampers and various engine optimizations. It's still extremely expensive in aggregate.

I'll add that the no moveable aerodynamic devices ruling has been applied very widely, and in sometimes surprising ways. The prime example is the ban on Renault's tuned mass damper from the 2005 time frame. It was a mass damper inside the nosecone, which meant that the moving masses were never exposed to the air outside the car. It was ruled that by influencing the movement of the front wing (maintaining it at a more optimal height), it was therefore a moveable aerodynamic device. The sad part of this story is that the regulators didn't actually understand what benefit the device was supposed to provide, which was to allow for a more compliant suspension (a non aerodynamic advantage), and in fact Mclaren had a suspension element, the interter, which did effectively the same thing, but was not banned.

The F-duct was a clever work around of the old F1 rule of no moveable aerodynamic devices (which dates from the 70's) and was motivated, intially by the practice of mounting the rear wing directly to unsprung parts of the suspension. A more applicable example of the rule was the late 70s brabham fan car which used a large fan at the rear (ostensibly for engine cooling purposes) to suck out air from the underside of the car to add downforce. Think of the hyperloop design, in reverse.

By making the only physical moving part in the f-duct design the driver (who obviously has to be allowed to move), the devices cleverly adhered to the letter of the law. The driver would close a hole in the cockpit which allowed some air to pass or not to a fluidic switch (think of a transistor), which would influence the flow of a larger stream of air to the rear wing).

One issue with banning the engine mapping that blew the diffuser off throttle was that this was already being done by many engine manufacturers for engine cooling purposes, and thus could not be easily regulated. Even their year end attempt at a fix by specifying the location, pointing direction, etc of the exhaust outlets didn't work (see coanda effect / downwash exhausts of 2012). They have finally addressed the solution in 2014 regulations by specifying that the exhaust outlet has to be behind all bodywork.

It's also worth pointing out that exhaust blown diffusers are more than a decade old, but in the past suffered from the problem of changing the balance of the car drastically mid throttle (when the driver gets on the throttle) due to 1) less advanced engine mapping), and 2) directly feeding into the diffuser venturis. In fact, for a long time, the standard solution (periscope exhausts pioneered by ferrari), sought to remove as much influence of exhaust air on the aerodynamics as possible to make the car's balance unaffected by engine exhaust volume, so given that environment, no one was worried about anyone using the exhaust for aerodynamic benefit. The modern (Red bull design) blown diffusers only channel a relatively small portion of exhaust air directly into the diffuser channel, and instead use a large portion of exhaust to blow over the top of the diffuser itself (enhancing the diffuser effect), and on the side of the diffuser (to provide a air skirt that prevents squirt air from the rear tires bleeding into the diffuser from the side which decreases efficiency), particularly on cars like the Red bull which run a high level of rake (which enhances aerodynamic downforce separately by placing the front wing closer to the ground but makes the diffuser more vulnerable to tire squirt and other effects).

Regarding the heater, I'm not too familiar with the pre 2013 models, but all 2013s come with standard heated steering wheel and heated seats. This is because running the standard forced air heater uses a significant amount of power by comparison.

Most 2013s (all except for the base model) also come with a heat pump instead of a resistive heater, so efficiency of the forced air heater has also improved relative to earlier models (and relative to other similar cars).

For people who live in a mild climate, (sf bay area for me), temporary battery capacity loss due to cold weather, or permanent battery damage due to excessively high ambient temperatures, are not an issue, and given the plethora of chargers in this area, I'd say that almost 100% of the driving my family does outside the daily commute (my wife and I drive separately, and we only have one Leaf), is done with the Leaf. I was skeptical about the car initially, but the leases are inexpensive enough not to worry about and it's been a pleasant surprise.

That is true if the CPU is responsible for data plane operations. For a lot of modern equipment, most traffic never hits the CPU (it's handled by a special asic or other packet processor) and so you wouldn't know if if LI is active.

I just looked at the license he referenced in the blog post: https://raw.github.com/chrisballinger/Off-the-Record-iOS/mas... and it is the GPL, not BSD. So all the discussion about BSD is moot (unless it was really licensed under a BSD style license previously, and was just changed).