11   General / Off-Topic / Re: Little brother caught me on dashcam  on: Today at 04:23:18 AM 
Started by suzukir122 - Last post by LightsoftheWest
@suzukir122 - If you need any more help finding a used car, let me know! Toyotas and Hondas, while excellent cars, can have high resale value, thus not getting as good of a deal as something like a Ford Focus or a Hyundai Elantra, both of which are solid options (as long as they're older than 2012).
 12   General / Off-Topic / Re: Little brother caught me on dashcam  on: Today at 03:31:51 AM 
Started by suzukir122 - Last post by suzukir122
@Baked bagel 11, my daily car will be something completely opposite from my sportcar... something slow and less powerful, with a 4 cylinder, non turboed engine. Probably a generic Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic... as long as it's an automatic.
After I purchase it, I can put the Genesis up for a while in my Metal Halide lit garage, to get more engine work done as well as basic maintenance.
 13   General / General Discussion / Re: European Semiparallel Ignitors?  on: Today at 03:16:33 AM 
Started by Multisubject - Last post by Ash
The ES50 is designed to work with those ballasts, and the ballasts have on them the wiring diagram for ES50

It is rated to 4.5kV output

It is rated for HPS only, but in practice statrs all MH from cold just fine. It does have hard time hot-restriking MH though

It is rated for remote installation, with up to 11m cable between it and the lamp

Inside are the SIDAC with ~220V Vbo, capacitor 2.2uF
 14   Lamps / Modern / Re: Does Transporting BT-shaped Mercury Lamps Cause Looseness?  on: Today at 03:08:43 AM 
Started by Maxim - Last post by Medved
Shaking them around definitely won't help, so if you kept them in the car boot for unnecessarily long time just because you were too busy to take them out, I would say you did cause some damage. It even may not be the rattling itself, but e.g. some cracks propagating further, so leaving less margin till a failure.
 15   Lamps / Modern / Re: LED Headlight Purpling?  on: Today at 03:03:05 AM 
Started by Maxim - Last post by Medved
Why that the LEDs inside automotive headlights would be driven harder than in general lighting? They should be driven the same.

They need as high intensity of the primary light source (the LED die) as possible.
Headlights are precise beam control optical devices, where the beam parameters, as well as light flux are strictly controlled by the regulations. To achieve that, the higher intensity the primary light source, the smaller the headlight could be. If you drive a LED by 2x higher current, the intensity will become nearly 2x higher, quite an impact on the total optics size. The efficacy penalty could easily be more than offset by the increased optical efficiency when the light source gets smaller and the car fuel savings smaller, more compact headlight assemblies. And the lifetime in the 5k hour range is more than the rest of the car (mainly the propulsion), so having it any longer won't bring any benefit.

On the other hand general lighting is more about diffuse light, running long hours, so very sensitive to efficacy (because electricity cost is the major operating cost contributor) and lifetime (replacement costs of the light alone are the second highest operating cost contributor). So the designs are more focused to get maximum life and efficacy.

At the end it is all about the cost. But not the cost of the LED chips themself, that is very small fraction. It is about the cost of the complete headlights to make and, more important, the cost required to incorporate them into the car and to solve all the implications related to that, like weight, aerodynamics, crumple zone design (the big holes in the from for the headlight have severe impact on the front structure) and also visual appeal for car buyers. The smaller the optics, the more flexibility is there to design the car, so the easier and cheaper is to design and produce it to still meet the regulations. So ability to achieve any higher intensity is saving a lot of costs at many places, as long as the headlights lifetime is not the limiting factor.

So car headlight the designs go for the highest intensity attainable for the given lifetime requirement, any longer lifetime has no benefit.
Vs the general lighting designs, which go after maximizing the efficacy and the run lifetime. Fitting into standard formats is just enough, any smaller makes no benefit.

In either case do not confuse the lifetime with premature failure rate (failures before reaching the rated lifetime). The later is a problem for both, so the related probabilities are also a factor steering the designs, but mainly the discipline at the production floor.
 16   General / Off-Topic / Re: Little brother caught me on dashcam  on: Today at 02:37:11 AM 
Started by suzukir122 - Last post by Baked bagel 11
Sweet vehicle, looks great!

I have a feeling that I may have asked this before, but here goes anyway, what sort of car are you planning to get as your daily driver?
 17   Lamps / Modern / Re: LED Headlight Purpling?  on: Today at 02:32:28 AM 
Started by Maxim - Last post by Medved
because the mechanism involves random spot defects, then it is not all pieces the same, but rather a kind of lottery on which piece will be affected and which not. The design then controls just the odds of it happening...
 18   General / General Discussion / Re: European Semiparallel Ignitors?  on: Today at 02:15:23 AM 
Started by Multisubject - Last post by Medved
Wow, this is really complicated. No wonder superimposeds are so common over there, there are multiple non-interchangeable types of semiparallel among even more obscure types! Way easier to just chuck in a superimposed and call it a day.

@Medved
Interesting that European SIDAC ignitors use a tap at 5%, IDK the exact percent that American ballasts use but I think it is less than 5%, less than 5V for 240 VOC. Strange that those aren't very popular over there.

That semiresonant-based ignitor I believe is the type I saw in the video. Who knew there were so many different ways to do the same thing?

The tap position is dictated by the required pulse voltage. R-C-SIDAC pulsers charge the capacitor at 200V when the sidac triggers, this 200V is then discharged into the short section acting as the primary, the whole winding as a secondary, so multiplying the 200V by 20 you get the usual 4kV pulse required for MH ignition.

So when you use the SIDAC pulser with the 20% tap, you get just 1kV pulses (maybe 1.5kV with some ringing on leakage inductances; but that is not that reliable), that may be barely enough for some HPS but not for MH.

The SN57 style works in a digfferent way: It swings the voltage back and forth via the triac, cycle by cycle building voltages way higher than the mains, stabilizing at about 800V (practical maximum for standard triacs), so factor of 5 step up is sufficient to get the required 4kV ignition pulses.

 19   General / Off-Topic / Re: Severe weather never sleeps!  on: Today at 02:09:42 AM 
Started by lightinglover8902 - Last post by suzukir122
@Cole D, you lucky, lucky, lucky man.
Up here, we're looking at lows in the negatives, actual air temperature. So wind chill will probably be above -20 degrees.
 20   General / Off-Topic / Re: Supermarkets  on: Today at 01:09:27 AM 
Started by Cole D. - Last post by SussexEuroSOX
In Belgium I had
-Carrefour
-Alva
-Lidl
-IKEA (Antwerp)
And in England I have
-Co-op (Partridge Green)
-Co-op (Cowfold)
-Sainsbury’s (Horsham)
-Sainsbury’s (Haywards Heath)
-Tesco
-Budgens (Southwater)
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