Bugatti Veyron Air Brake°

The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the pinnacle of human engineering. Powered by a 8 Liter  1200 BHP behemoth of an engine, it produces 1200 pounds of torque, which is almost enough to jump start a dead planet. The power from this engine is delivered to the wheels via a 7 speed double clutch gear box. This means that the Bugatti Veyron does 0-60 mph in almost 2.5s and 0-100 in less than 4.0s and it tops out at close to 262mph. The problem then arises when one tries to slow down this 2 Tonne monster.

Bugatti had to employ these massive brake calipers just to attempt to slow down and stop it. They calipers were made of a special carbon-ceramic alloy and are able to withstand temperatures upto 1100 degrees centigrade. However, stopping a car this big from such high speeds is extremely difficult and even such large and powerful cannot accomplish this task and fail. 

As one can see in this video, the Bugatti's brake calipers are glowing red from being too hot. Bugatti had to solve this problem before the Veyron's brakes started failing out and they came up with an extremely effective solution. They took the idea of flaps from airplanes and applied them to the Bugatti and the results were incredible. A flap like brake was attached to the back of the Veyron and it produced as much braking force as a normal four door sedan. It could move. Therefore, it had the ability to be deployed when needed. This was truly a subject of good design as it was effective and solved the problems that the Bugatti design team was facing.

The Reliant Robin

The Reliant Robin; straight from its name is a joke. Developed in England in the 1970s, the Reliant Robin is the epitome of bad design . To truly see what I mean, one must watch the video in which Jeremy Clarkson, a presenter on the British Show Top Gear takes the Reliant Robin on a very brief trip around the town of Sheffield. On this trip, the Reliant Robin proves as reliable as a rattlesnake that has been stepped on. I believe that the designers came up with the Reliant Robin in a pub in the Midlands, because, as you can see, it has just three wheels. Therefore, anyone attempting to turn around a corner in the Reliant Robin ends up with the car either on its side or upside down. Even cars with four wheels going around a corner sometimes lift their back wheel but the Reliant Robin, not possessing wheels on both front ends, is unable to handle the change in momentum and ends up on its side nine times out of ten.

Another major problem with the Reliant Robin was that ever since the car manufacturers fitted it with a bigger, 850cc engine, every time the driver would turn the throttle all the way up, it would lift up as shown in the picture above and this too was not favorable to driving on city streets. The Reliant Robin therefore, can be used by any one looking at examples of badly designed products. For anyone brave enough to venture forth into Reliant Robin territory, this was the fate that awaited them.

The Flappy Paddle Gearbox

The gearbox was invented and integrated into automobiles to deliver the power from the engine to wheels efficiently and to maximize speed and torque. However, there was from the start a major flaw in how the interior of a car was designed. The gear shift lever was, placed between the driver's seat and the passenger's seat. To change a gear the driver had to take his hands off the steering wheel, press the clutch, change the gear (which in itself was an effort) and then put his hand back on the steering wheel. This whole process was tedious and unnecessary and so came the automatic gearbox.

All the driver had to do was put the car in drive and his job was done. The car would shift up when he pressed the accelerator and shift down when the car slowed down. The automatic gearbox though had its own problems. The biggest problem that it had was that it wasn't responsive enough. There was generally a delay between the time the gear change was needed and the time when the gear change actually happened. This was completely acceptable to the petrol head community at large and so the car companies went back to the drawing board.

The flappy paddle gearbox was born, One of the first working models was deployed by Ferrari for use in their F-1 car and surprisingly it won the championship in its year. This prompted other F-1 teams to start using flappy paddle gearboxes as well and the rest is history. Today, flappy paddle gearboxes can be found in most high-end production cars. Probably the best version of the flappy paddle gearbox can be found in the Ferrari 599 GTO which is capable of changing a gear in 60ms.

Cord Input

Cord input is an innovative yet highly researched input method. The paper that I read was presented in CHI 2010 and was titled "Cord Input: An Intuitive, High-Accuracy, Multi-Degree-of-Freedom Input Method for Mobile Devices". The problem that was being addressed was the stagnation of innovation in input methods for mobile devices and the suitability of a cord as an input device. The idea presented was that since a cord has many affordances that advocate its use as an input device, this area needs further exploration. Three students from Carnegie Mellon looked into this problem and found out that a cord has an affordance to be pulled, twisted and pressed in different spots. All of these physical interactions, they devised, could be used to input data.

They developed a cord that could be used in such a fashion, which has sensors attached to it that could detect when someone pulled on the cord, when someone twisted the cord and when someone touched the cord in certain spots. All this data was processed by a computer and then presented to a program as input. Two test cases were devised for each physical interaction. One consisted of a user solely using a particular physical interaction such as PULL to navigate to the option they wanted to choose and then pressing the space bar on a computer to select that particular option. The second test used two physical interactions such as Pull+Twist so that the user pulled the cord to navigate to an option and then twisted the cord to select that particular interaction. 

From their results it is clear that Pull+Twist was the least successful input method whereas the other two had equal success rates. A user survey was conducted after the two tests and the users responded that using Twist solely was the easiest and most helpful. A constraint on this input method that I can see is that the user is constricted to choosing from a 1-D list and cannot make selections or navigate in 2-D without using all three Pull+Twist+Touch together.

Retrieved from: http://www.academia.edu/777658/Cord_input_an_intuitive_high-accuracy_multi-degree-of-freedom_input_method_for_mobile_devices

3.5mm Speaker Jack

I was really excited when I found the Logitec Z506 Surround Sound System on sale on Ebay. It had the perfect sized sub woofer for a dorm room and the speakers were small enough to fit in any small nook or cranny. I ordered it immediately and awaited its arrival with bated breath. 

It arrived in a small box in a week and I took it back to my room opened the box, spread the speakers out to all four corners of the room for the perfect surround sound experience plugged the power cable in, picked up the cord which has the jack on it to attach to my laptop and this is what I see.

Three jacks. Not one, not two but three jacks! What am I supposed to do? I check my laptop again and it only has one port for speakers. I try to think of a solution and I remember that I used to have a similar system before with the same three jacks. At that time I owned a desktop with a sound card that had multiple output ports specially configured to work with surround sound systems. My laptop has a sound card as well but unlike its desktop counterparts, it does not come with multiple ports. So I experimented with the three jacks and they all produced sound but none of them produced sound from all of the speakers. I settled with the black jack which produced sound from the sub woofer and two of the back speakers. I went online and found several solutions to this very problem. All the solutions narrow down the input to one jack.

All the solutions however cost more money. Money that I wasn't expecting I would need to pay to get my sound system up and running. I was extremely disappointed with the product description provided and hopefully future sound systems either work out the problem or at the very least list it in the product description.