16 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] thread
Designing and testing it would have cost them more than $5, but substantially less than $100M. Nice solution.
What amplitude of oszillations are we talking here?
> vibration amplitude classified into low (< 0.3 g) or high (>0.5 g) (i.e., into 2 levels) were performed to assess the significance of these findings

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150000242/downloads/20...

I was hoping to find something like "5cm", but it looks like "g" is all they offer.

Yes, I meant the amplitude of the seat. I was wondering while this solves reading gauges it doesn't help if you need to operate a switch.
If you know the g's of vibration (force) and the hertz they needed to use on the screen, can't you calculate it? Maybe you also need to know the weight of the passenger as well as the details of their strobe method.
No, you cannot calculate this from that. It is basically a free parameter depending on the shock absorbers of the seat.
This is such an awesome fix! I'm curious as to what portion of the aero / solid rocket motor causes these violent vibrations, specifically in the 10-12Hz range? Maybe I should've just finished my mechanical engineering degree instead of switching to EE / CS haha...
Ares 1 was a terrible idea. Putting humans on top of solid rocket motors is bad enough when they are boosters alongside a more traditional liquid fueled stage that can smooth out the oscillations, but that still does nothing about the fact that you can't shut down solids, and all abort scenarios involve just waiting until the SRBs burn out. Having humans riding a rocket that's just a giant firecracker is insanity.
Hi Gizmodo— please add more advertisements to this page

It isn’t nearly saturated enough (on mobile)

As a reader, I want to be fully choked to death by advertisements and Gizmodo you’re almost there but not quite. So please make it more difficult for me to read your content so that I know what brand to avoid in the future

I recommend setting up a Pihole.
Nice, thanks! Ill look into it.
$5 in parts, untold amounts of resources and paychecks. Not $100,000,000, but magnitudes more than $5.

Misattributions like this is how we end up with people that value all things by their component cost.

Back in the 1980s, in the days of MS-DOS, a client had a CRT monitor set up near some massive 3 phase power feeds inside a power plant, and the rotating magnetic fields made the display rotate rapidly in a circle about 1/2 inch in diameter.

To fix it, I wrote a program that put the computer in 640x480 bitmapped text mode, which slowed the display of text down a bit, but altered the refresh rate to exactly match the power frequency, and the problem was solved. 8)

I love this fix. I have an analogous problem. I have a small powerboat. When speeding across even mildly choppy water, it can be difficult to read the navigation and instrument monitors. Wish I had the time and skills to make a hack for this.