I interviewed at a company that made LED light assemblies for runway lights. I remember the heat sinks were HUUUUUUUUUGE.

They run cooler, but they also have lower thermal limits and because they're so much more compact and dense they lack the surface area to dissipate heat that the incandescents have.

--Ian

Precisely.

LEDs are highly power-efficient as compared to restive filaments, but they're still semiconductors. As such, they have a fixed forward voltage, and generate an amount of heat which is more or less linearly proportional to the current flowing through them.

And semiconductors, unlike resistors, don't deal with heat very well.

Lasers, particularly solid-state lasers, aren't the most efficient devices in the known universe, but they're significantly better than LEDs in this regard.

but...

will the roads become clogged with cats trying to catch the lasers?*









*dont pester me with sensical discussions of beam spread.

Yes, but since they'll always be running for the dot, they'll always be running *away* from cars - as such, this is a cat-saving device.

Hey Six ...

Another Florida Man incident :facepalm:

Florida man kills couple, tries to bite man?s face off - NY Daily News

He was still atop and biting the victim when police arrived. Both tasing and police-dog bites failed to get him off. :eek3:

So today i registered for the fall semester. Looks like i'll need to retake calc 2 and physics 2 since they didnt count. Uck. I havent done this shit for 8 years now.

FloridaMan is a little desensitized at this point, he needs a bit more than the rest of us in order to pull the train into the station.

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/...aamloos-2.png?

Props for Harley :)

Ok, so my old 2007 vintage draft N wireless router finally died and I need to find a replacement. Someone convince me not to buy an ASUS RT-AC1900P

https://www.asus.com/media/global/pr...0_end_500.png?
https://www.asus.com/us/Networking/RT-AC1900P/

I mostly picked this because it'll do N and AC so I have a little future proofing, plus my local BestBuy has it in stock so I can go pick it up tomorrow.

Right now I'm temporally rocking a WRT54GL that I pulled out of retirement and it can't seem to keep up with my wireless bandwidth hungry lyfestyle. I can make Netflix through my Chromecast kick into low res mode if I do too many things on my phone while connected to the weefee. No bueno :(

I have one of RT-N66U (previous version) within 2 feet of me right now. Never a hiccup, it just keeps working. Asus stuff is great, and the interface is really nice.

Buy it.

Why are some 1/2a fuses labeled as 5/10a?
That is just annoying. Especially when you have employees that can't find the 1/2a fuse because all we have are 5/10a fuses.

The old Linksys Routers (And, seemingly, most older routers - and probably most newer routers if history has anything to say about it) require the DD-WRT firmware to actually do what they say they'll do out of the box.

http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Lin...nksys_firmware

The Linksys firmware is akin to Windows 3.1 on a fully built Core i7 rig.

Do it. It's the best version of the ASUS AC1900 line. Apparently a lot of stores have a mix of v1 and v3 versions, buy the v3 if you can. Merlin's firmware for the RT-AC68U supposedly works fine on it.

Linksys SUCK. I had an older router, which "required" me to upgrade the firmware. Halfway through, it just stopped. Essentially, the upgrade bricked the unit. When I contacted the company, they claimed it was a known issue, but would do nothing to help fix it.

I will never own one of their products ever again after that.

The Asus worked right out of the box. The only thing I had to do was set the password. It has never had to be rebooted in about two years, unlike the Linksys, which needed a reboot about every two weeks.

I will say that I think ASUS routers tend to run hot. When my RT-N66U failed I disassembled it and found evidence of overheating (seriously discolored traces, the main heatsink was bowed not making full contact across the two chips it covered, etc.).

For my RT-AC68R, I bought a cheap multi-speed USB 5v computer fan, plugged it into a USB phone charger, and propped the fan behind the router. Made a huge difference in the CPU and radio temps.

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b1.../ASUS_Temp.png


Discoloration on the RT-N66U from poor cooling:

Attachment 183475

Attachment 183476

I have an R7000 Nighthawk I just decommissioned because I'm simplifying and don't need.

Does this mean that ebay will eventually have laser retrofit kits that actually permanently blind people instead of just temporarily as with the HID kits available now?

:rly: I'd be glad to help you unburden yourself of said millstone.

I'm kind of surprised that they don't already, but when I searched for Laser Headlight, all I found were a bunch of ads for worthless LED retrofits.