A Great Horsepower to Torque Conversion Chart

I was just working on a project tonight – and ran across this great chart.    It’s an old-fashioned draw-a-line 2D calculator.

So it’s possible to have 100HP at with 10000lbs of Foot-Pounds torque at 60 RPM.  Then you break your engine.  Enjoy!

Thanks to the electric toolbox http://www.elec-toolbox.com/ for the graphic.

Horsepower to Torque Conversion Chart

The days are getting shorter – Perl Script to Calculate Sunrise and Sunset

Hi Everyone;

I made a great perl script to calculate sunrise and sunset times in Toronto for the whole year with a graphical output. I wrote this in my dead-time during a work order tonight… so I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Notes:

• my brother’s birthday, which is right around the corner is day 286.  That’s a g33ky number.
• Here’s a day-of-the-year number calendar .
• does not account for Daylight Savings Time changes
• the output is in decimal form (.1 hours is about 6 minutes)

How to understand the output

————-***********************————–      Day: 286 , sunrise: 7.46371983255512 , sunset: 18.6748421708946 

•  
  • The —– is darkness (night)
  • The ******* is sunlight (day)
  • sunrise 7.46371….  is the time local to toronto at GMT -4 (7.46 = 7 oclock + (.46 * 60 minutes) = 7:27am

 

Sample output.  If you scroll through enough lines, an “hourglass” shape starts to appear:

# ./sun.pl
----------------******************----------------      Day: 1 , sunrise: 8.8499964506844 , sunset: 17.8363243941365 
----------------******************----------------      Day: 2 , sunrise: 8.85157917721863 , sunset: 17.8505635052382 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 3 , sunrise: 8.85247026342554 , sunset: 17.8653183755327 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 4 , sunrise: 8.85266811641787 , sunset: 17.8805734993673 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 5 , sunrise: 8.85217187255689 , sunset: 17.8963130190473 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 6 , sunrise: 8.8509813847397 , sunset: 17.9125207658933 
---------------*******************----------------      Day: 7 , sunrise: 8.84909720761213 , sunset: 17.9291803019326 

Here’s the perl code to support it.  A lot of it was based on http://www.adventist.org/sun/sun.pm .  Obviously, i did a lot of reworking of the ideas into my own script.  Click MORE for a special suprise (and the code)

Home Made Inclinometer

I made a DIY inclinometer for astronomy. This sometimes is called an “altitude measurer” and can be used to spot how high a model rocket goes.

Mine’s a little Newtonian, and I love it.

I printed out a picture of a protractor, stuck it on a board with tape, and now I can “sight” along the top of the board. That’s right, I can read the angle i am looking at from a string dangling on the side.

That string has a weight on the end. I have a plumb-bob that I like. NICE and heavy.

The string can pendulate, so you can slow it down. When it’s stopped, clamp the string in place along the protractor notches.

And that’ll give’r yer angle.

Here’s the graphic of the protractor. You can scale it and print it out on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper. When you attach it to the board, hang it down a bit from the top. Drill out a hole in the wood and slip a string through.

Click on the image to enlarge.

 

See my recent article where I used it: http://realworldnumbers.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/hunting-for-comet-holmes-at-home/

Here’s a link for another inclinometer from Make Magazine, but it just doesn’t look as sexy or as rugged mine.