When you close your car door, the lights may go out immediately, fade or they may stay on interminably while you stand there wondering if you closed the door all the way. Bill Bowden has devised a gadget that lets you take control of your interior lights. Bowden’s Automobile Interior Lights Fader lets you determine whether the lights go out right away, fade or stay on for a few seconds. You can even program the fade times to fast-on, slow-off or vice versa. The device’s circuit is intended for cars that have a door switch that supplies a ground to the interior lights with one side of the lights connected to the positive side of the battery through an appropriate fuse. With a few modifications, the device can also be used without a door switch.
The first vehicle I had with the delayed off was a 97 GMC van. I was unaware of this feature and looked all over the place to find how to turn the lights off. Finally I read the owners manual (instructions are only for people who do not know what they are doing) and it mentioned the delay. So I closed the door and timed the light, 13 seconds. Only after doing that several times, did I feel confident to just walk away.
Of course when one of the kids left a dome light on, no one noticed until a neighbor phoned about 4 hours later, but that is a story for another day. I like that your device allows the owner to reassume control. What a novel idea.
The Department of Defense and the Office of Naval Research are funding the design of Web applications that will help protect and police coastal waters.
This year, when Indy teams search for a competitive edge on the track, they're going to have to dig deeper into the mechanical aspects of the car than ever before in the history of the race.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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