A vibrator helped me debug a motorcycle brake light system

I used one to find the location of rattles in my car.

I too have repurposed a similar machine to try to help me solve a nagging problem.

One of my vehicles uses a hydraulic clutch. By design, air bubbles can be trapped in the master cylinder due to factory bends in the lines and the orientation of the master cylinder when it is properly installed. If this happens it will be impossible to shift the gears (manual transmission) until the air is bled from the lines.

I tried multiple air burping procedures without success. Part of the procedure involves tapping on the hydraulic lines to help dislodge air bubbles so they can flow up and out of the lines into the fluid reservoir. The area is tight and in order to do this efficiently you must remove the master cylinder from the vehicle.

I decided to avoid that removal step and employ a Sharper Image back massager as a tool to dislodge air bubbles with the system in place in the vehicle. Since that massager is huge it would not fit into tight places under the hood so I used a length of PVC pipe held tight to the lines to transfer the vibration to the lines. This allowed me to get large air bubbles out of the lines. In the end I was not able to remove enough air using this hack because an O-ring near the bottom of the system is missing or bad and that allows air to enter and flow up so i could vibrate that thing all day and never get anywhere. It was a shot in the dark anyway. If that O-ring were not missing or bad I know it would work.

> the sensor has its own built-in sample rate, 400 times per second. If I read it too quickly, I might just be grabbing the same number twice

The author is configuring the sensor wrong i think. The usually way is you setup sampling rate of register, setup fifo inside register, wait for interrupt from sensor(through GPIO pin), then read from FIFO. Just blindly read data from sensor will get you in trouble, like reading duplicate value

Mildly related:

"Evan and Katelyn" is the name of a youtube channel where (amongst other less mature things) they make a bunch of small things with concrete and epoxy, like a concrete keyboard. Both materials (especially concrete) need some assistance in flowing into small spaces and getting bubbles out. For the size of project they often work on... a personal vibrator seems to work damn well.

Concrete keyboard video as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUSG5ohV0nY

Sheesh, talk about "taking a break"...

I for sure approve this creative way to test things

> Interestingly, adaptive brake light technology already exists in high-end vehicles.

Isn't this mandatory in the EU?

Edit. No. Only for passenger cars

This is a blog post, so it should be a regular submission even if you’re the one you wrote it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.