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Showing posts from August, 2016

Designing a better diesel tuning box - part 4 - improved design results

If you are following the project you might've seen that the new source code for the firmware and (Android) client application are up: Arduino firmware:  https://github.com/ligius-/DieselTuningBox Mobile UI:  https://github.com/ligius-/DieselBoosterClient With that out of the way, I've had about a month of testing with the new prototype and several months already with the old one. The definitive result is that there are significant fuel savings. Outside city limits I now get better than 6L/100km, at highway speeds (130 km/h) better than 6.5/%. I believe the highway consumption can be further improved but I haven't used the car so much lately to be able to fine-tune the settings. Previously I would get 7.6L/100km at best on country/county roads and 7.4/% on highways. So that would be a 12% mileage increase on highways and 21% on slower roads. Inside the city is where the story changes since that's where I did most of my driving and had time to tune the pa

Cost analysis of a Lexmark inkjet printer

Six years ago I bought a Lexmark Pro205 all-in-one printer, one of the few affordable ones that had WiFi. This has proven a disastrous investment, so let's go quickly through the numbers: purchasing price (10 Mar 2011): 140 EUR black cartridge replacement (21 May 2012): 12E full ink refill set (21 Dec 2013): 18E full cartridge replacement (25 Mar 2014): 13E full cartridge replacement (12 Mar 2015): 12E In total 195E , there might be other expenses as well. Electricity costs are not included and the printer is not very economical in standby. Printed pages - as per printer counter - 691. I would estimate the total number of usable pages to be ~200 , out of which ~15 were full-color photos. This is because most of the pages from beyond number 80 had streaks and the printer required at least 50 deep cleaning cycles. About one page in five is usable , but certainly not great. So running costs until now are 1 EUR / page . That's definitely the most expensive prin