After >16000km mileage, my Shimano Saint shifter gave up on me 50km into a 200km audax. It is easier to shift gears with an indexed shifter. However, audax riding requires higher reliability. My 35-349 wheels (I'm riding a Brompton clone) makes it hard for me to install modern electronic shifting, except maybe Ltwoo's AE.
I've since switched to a Microshift 12S mountain bike friction shifter. Quite happy so far. It has click mode and pure friction. With my Shimano Saint derailleur (10s), due to the clutch, it took me some getting used to due to the hand strength needed. A spare friction shifter is also lighter to carry. An unintentional plus point is the ability to move to an 11s (jockey wheels on the Saint derailleurs seems to be able to work with 11s chain) the next time my cassette and chain needs replacing. 11s will give me less dead zone in between each shift.
Vis-a-vis an index shifter, I like it that I now have a way (apart from cadence, gradient and speed data from my bike comp) to know approximately which gear I'm at by just feeling the lever position. With the time I've had with this setup, I'm almost always able to shift whatever gear by muscle memory.
In reality, for my city's (Saigon) traffic, I find myself shifting gears more and hence my hands does get a bit sore. The bumps and uneven drain holes can also cause the friction shifter to shift unintentionally. I could tighten it but it'd at the expense of my hand comfort.
However, in an ultra distance ride (>=200km), there's less gear shifts and hence less of an issue. I'm also able to use both hands to take turns shifting gears which is more important on a super long ride.
I always reserve budget for night diving. Below the waters, night time is like peak hour traffic, with much better chances of spotting a cuttlefish. The colors they exhibit is beautiful. You can only see them at night and with a torch light as red gets filtered out even at shallow depths.
I just completed a round of research on this category of devices and decided to give the "Kody 21" [K21] a try. They're known as "田螺云厨" on the "TaoBao" platform, or "Kitchen Idea" outside of it. There's also a few other names like "Tokit", "乐小美", "tineco". Waiting for shipment, let's see what happens.
My main use case is for (A) weekly meal preps and (B) quick veg-meat stir-fry, steaming in a small apartment context.
Given that I can access the "TaoBao" universe, I couldn't justify the cost-functionality-ecosystem ratio of a Thermomix TM6.
I observe the following notable pointers in the current generation of this category of device on the "TaoBao" platform
- They can all reach 180C or 160C. For Asian stir fry dishes, this is great. the manual mode for the TM6 allows only 120C.
- Almost all can do a cook up with timers of 12-24 hours. For some reason, TM6 seems to only allow you 99 mins.
- Most units spins up to 10-12k RPM, TM6 spins up to 10k rpm. about the same.
- Price ranges from 391 USD to 1926 USD.
- On the higher end, you can get a 3L main bowl. Awesome for my use case. TM6 is at 2.2L
At the lower end, i.e. the K21:
- 2L main bowl which is enough.
- you don't get a built in scale but ... I am not sure if it's that much of an inconvenience.
- the blade only rotates one direction, hence the need for the tools. Some recipes would necessitate a "tool change". You can't exactly replicate the "throw in and cook" process of TM6.
- K21 tool change is awkward. the tool and the tool core are essentially one.
- Interestingly, there is a K29 from the same company with quick tool change ability (without taking out the core. the seller confirmed both are cross compatible) I'd just have to fork an additional ~70USD for the set of tools that I am interested in, which doesn't feel that bad.
- gets up to 10k RPM but not that relevant for my use case.
- You don't get the awesome ecosystem (paid subscrip) of TM6. Thermomix is way ahead on this. At the risk of my own gastronomic enjoyment, to supplement this, I'm looking forward to using gpt based LLM services to discover and translate recipes from TM6 to the K21
- its mostly metal accessories: pots for steaming, simmer basket. I don't really fancy the idea of anything plastic in a high heat application like cooking.
- Given where I bought it from, the UI is chinese only. Seller claims that its got more recipes on the international variant. we'll see.
- At this price, I could get 2 x K21 and still be half the price of a TM6. If it eventually becomes a workhorse, having 2 x K21 will be better for parallezing my cooking / doing bigger batches of meal preps, than having a single expensive TM6.
Looking at the new TM7
- the corrugated wall of the main bowl design seems to have increased overall surface area, and possibly better heat transfer?
- the lock mechanism of TM6 could crush fingers. I am glad they got rid of it.
From my own experience of burning out and getting out of it:
Mechanics: it seems easier to get in to burn out but far far longer to get out of.
I know what I wanted to do but could not bring myself to do it.
Though not always, gut health (or the lack of it. My burn out coincided with my IBD episode) could be an early symptom to back off the throttle a bit.
Subjective: I've learnt to remember that look on someone face who's heading down burn out wall.
In long distance cycling, in order to not 'bonk', you must fuel and hydrate sufficiently and consistently over time. With burn out, I feel the same dynamics apply, but with different 'fuel' and 'hydration'. And every person is so different that the rate of replenishment needed should and have a wide variance.
What really helped me get out was, ironically COVID, when I couldn't do anything about my startup and I had to stop it and rest. The bleeding with my IBD just went away during the peak of lockdowns. Started to build and buy stuff, for leisure, that I enjoyed and had postponed away in my hustling years.
On hope: The human body and brain has a remarkable capability to recover and heal itself. But one does need to give it the right input: hanging out with wholesome or wise people, exercise, eating well, getting medical intervention when needed etc.
I have a similar story. Burnt out and thought my brain was cooked. Then I got my sleep apnea sorted. Then found out I had celiac (the apnea might be related).
Getting that all sorted is like an insane nootropic. I'm smart again and can work real fast.
I believe parts of the subsea industry uses a similar concept, i.e., gyroscope based for inertial navigation.
Obtaining position & veocity: I think it even more interesting when one compares the difficulties of getting these fundamental navigation data in an aerial, ground and undersea platforms.
I have led efforts building Chinook style tandem rotors with 2 sets of blades from a size like the Trex 800, powered by a 2 stroke engine, as well as 40kg max takeoff quad-planes with both electric quadrotor and 2 stroke engine (for forward motion).
But because I was the main lead and pushing the pace so fast, I wished I did it with a more rigorous aero-engineering to it. I started both projects with barely any experience developing aircraft.
Thinking about your question, here are my 2 cents:
The biggest thing I stugged with is how the vibrations and the accompanying harmonics on the sytem as the rotors spin up and down. I could see it on the logs as the rotors spin through certain Hz, there's would spikes in virbational ampiltudes at predictable frequencies. As the blades get bigger the forces (probably) goes up. Sometimes, these frequecies (especially the lower ones) are at the range where its very hard to find the right materials to damp it out of the control and sensing electronics. Ingenuity probably deals with a virbration range that well into the hundreds/thousand of Hz and I do remember that renge is not a difficult range to damp out, vis a vis the low tens of hertz.
Also, the harmonics is related to ground resonance. I had built my tandem with "skids" that are rigidly attached to the rest of the frame. When the system made contact with the ground on just one skid, that one skid becomes a pivot, the vibration has no where to go and I witnessed first hand, first time, what ground resonance can do to mechanical systems. I can never forget seeing M4 through to M8 hex holt beads being sheared clean off after the resonance event. Only later did I find out that in full scale systems, they have dampeners between the main body and the skids of the aircraft. See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IIC-oBzLYhQ ;
Staying in flight is not as hard. But getting the ssytem to land and spin down proerly was big pain without understanding ground resonance and its effect on mechanical design. When I saw the little puny legs of Ingenuity, this experience of mine came into mind and I was glad they had legs like to damp out vibrations as it came down to land.
Then there is the relation between the mechanical vibration regimes of the system, the polilng rates of the foundational flight sensors and the freqency of the main flight stability and movement control loop itself.
With bigger systems, the cables (for signal and power) could run longer too (becoming long long antennas), which means you can run into problems with noise of various origins. If I'd do it again, something like CAN bus would probably be something I look at seriously. Bigger systems also draws more power, and that can have an impact on how much management is needed for noise. Bigger power draw usually also means heavy power store & delivery system, which affects CG management, when then means you can't move things around to management noise. At some point, I felt like I was doing dancing a multi-factorial show.
I wished I could be clearer. Perhaps someone more qualified can chime in.
Works flawless in Seoul and Beijing. A month in South Bay and flawless too.
There is no signal for this back home in Singapore. What I do - since we also don't know when they're gonna shut off the radio towers - is use an app on my Tab S8 Ultra, set my watch's time zone to Tokyo, leave watch right next to speaker and go do something else. After some beeps and minutes : my watch time is readjusted.
