Dealing with dishwasher failures

Albeit 10 years of flawless operation can be considered quite good for a home appliance, still when it finally fails, there is the brief criticizing thought of "why didn't it last longer? Bloody programmed obsolescence in modern industry!" ..and so on and so forth.

Well, the truth be said, 10 years of operation without a single glitch is either a product of sheer luck (i.e. one golden batch in the production line), or the brand really went serious with quality and the strategy at the time didn't include the need for recovering the same consumer soon in the product life cycle.

I can say this from the Whirlpool dishwasher model ADP 6837/1 that I have been using since 2009. During 10 years it never complained, while we threw dirty dishes at it on a daily basis.

Once again bumping into questionable product safety standards

About 6 months ago, I replaced the manual plastic pump I used to have for dispensing water from 5+ litre jugs, with what would in principle be a more sophisticated and convenient approach: looked for an electric water dispenser, and without much searching, found several options. Most, if not all were unfortunately designed to fit into the 19 litre office water bottles. Without any alternative, ordered one of these, considering that I would have to come up with some custom adaptation if I wanted to use it with the 5 litre bottles. Ended up ordering the one below, for its minimally elegant design and compact dimensions:

Car DVR replacement and related shenanigans - part 2

Moving along with more details, like I mentioned in the previous post, the rear camera was reused from the previous installation. This CCD based camera happens to be superior to the basic CMOS camera bundled with the kit. Both in terms of the quality of the sensor itself and its low light sensitivity, but also regarding the lens, featuring a wider viewing angle (important given its role as a backup camera).

The only change however was a substantial improvement in the mounting design, by having added an U-shaped plate in the rear of the camera, with a 4-screw mount instead of the original 2 screws attached to the sides of the camera. This provides a more solid attachment to the L-shaped aluminium parts that in turn stick to the door through an adhesive:

Car DVR replacement and related shenanigans

Introduction

With the vulgarisation of miniature cameras and computing devices of all sorts, technologies that fundamentally serve the mobile industry become cheap enough and available to the point of being useful for other purposes. That is the case of DVR devices for automotive use.

Adding metalurgical capability to a biological microscope - part 2

Like I had previously explained, I was able to obtain from eBay (for a minimally decent cost), just the bare vertical illuminator, which didn't include any accessories. The light house was not an exception. The vertical illuminator consists the main body:

and the light house, which in the original device would be based on a halogen bulb of at least 15-20 Watts:

Adding metalurgical capability to a biological microscope - part 1

Biological microscopes among a few other things, are characterized by the fact that rely on transmitted light rather than reflected light, to produce an image of the specimen.This is adequate for most biological needs because the specimen can either be made thin enough for light to go through, or the medium and/or the specimen itself is relatively transparent to light.

However there are other applications in microscopy where it cannot be assumed that the specimen is transparent or able to be ground to a thickness small enough for light to traverse it. Some materials are opaque even at thicknesses of few microns.

The only solution in these cases is to rely on reflected light. For this to be possible, a different illumination system is required on a microscope. This type of illumination is commonly designated of epi-illumination (as opposed to trans-illumination used for biological observations). This is where a device known as vertical illuminator comes into play (picture obtained from a Olympus BHM manual):

4-wheel adventures ranging from customer relationship to automotive hacking

1. Context

Since more than a decade ago, automotive technology have captured my interest to some extent. Not so much in the mechanical domain, for which the industry have in most part been over the years conservative and slow in pushing inovation, but mostly in respect to the digital framework that integrates the vehicles. This overlay of digital technology plays a fundamental role in modern cars, ranging from safety, fuel economy, controlling the production cost (by reducing the number of individual parts), emissions control, comfort and entertainment.