pc486
I’m not car-free, but I do all my grocery shopping without a car. In fact, I’m at my local grocer as I type at 1.7 miles away taking 250 feet elevation gain and 210 feet loss. I understand your pain!
Here’s why I still think a bike fits your situation. Namely an inexpensive folding bike with a front basket and rack.
Hills are conquered in the same way as a cart: walking uphill. Also known as “hike a bike.” Folding bikes are usually also allowed on busses, so you could take a bus one way. You could time your departure to a bus schedule and shop knowing you don’t have to rush or spend a long time at the store.
Folders can be brought inside and consume about the same space as a folding trailer.
My overall point is a folding bike is a trailer that you can ride downhill in. Electric would be a nice upgrade, but it’s not necessary.
I have 1400 miles on my non-regen bike which has burned through three sets of pads (1.5 mm currently left). I’m slowly trying better/harder pads which won’t eat rotors and don’t cost as much. $25 every 500-ish miles isn’t great (10k miles is $500 in pads) . Suggestions are welcome!
I think a key difference is my neighborhood is quite hilly. I’ve never smoked and glazed a set of pads before moving in. That was a quick learning experience for me.
I agree it doesn’t make sense to pick regen for extending range. Just buy a bigger battery if that’s the biggest issue, say a rarely used bike but long ranged when needed.
To me it’s the brake pads that add up. Replacing two pairs of pads every few hundred miles is way more expensive than the system and any additional battery wear. $500 isn’t that many sets of pads.
Considering I don’t charge my batteries much beyond 80%, yeah, there’s plenty of room to put that extra energy early in the ride. I’d rather charge a battery than to grind pads into dust.
Grin is co-developing a mid drive regen. It has a neat design.
It’s not common, but it does make sense to do! No, not in charging the battery but in braking. Regen slows down the bike without wearing down your brake pads, which is extra important with a heavy bike. I cannot even manage 900 miles without changing my longtail’s pads. I have yet to replace the pads on my regenerating e-trike.
The extra 20% range is nice but I’m more happy about the money and hassle I’ve saved in not replacing brake pads.
These disks were designed to self-destruct in the presence of oxygen. They literally rust away.
Oxygen and its O2 form does like to sneak into everything. Even sealed in the original packaging, there’s a limited shelf life. Flexplay claimed stability of only one year, which isn’t much given it comes sealed in a plastic bag.
The COVID vaccine is not sterilizing, meaning it does not guarantee prevention of disease. Instead it prevents serious infections that’ll put you into the hospital or worse. The flu vaccine works the same way.
I absolutely will take a shot that turns a COVID infection from hospitalization into a bad cold.
You’re probably decoding noise or in the middle of the bit stream.
What you’re looking for is called “preamble.” That’s a sequence of bits used to synchronize the decoder (marks the start of data, useful in modulation schemes for clock recovery, and a few other things).
Looking at minimodem’s manual, try using the sync-byte option. Prepend your tar stream with a string of bytes, like 0x01, before sending to minimodem for encoding. Then use the sync code option to mark the start of the tar bit stream. This is as simple as cat preamble.bin myfiles.tar | minimodem --tx …
Other things to consider: start small with 300 baud BFSK before speeding up. Test with wav files before attempting physical tape or speakers and a microphone.