Neat comparison at the top of the page between the original SNES controller and the modern Switch controller inside the same enclosure. The battery and wireless system can all fit in the space left from miniaturization.
The wiring base is the coolest part of this IMO. In the video Tony talks about how the leaf spring connectors physically reconfigure the circuitry when a wire is plugged in.
They don't really reconfigure the circuitry, they are themselves reconfigured when a wire is plugged in. What he's talking about is similar to technology that's been in 1/8" jacks for years and years: plug detection.
And in almost every headphone connector since the 60's or so... That's how it used to switch the sound from the speakers to the headphones when you just plugged them in.
Well, that depends. Prior to finish planing they are exactly 2" x 4", and that's where they get their name. You can buy these in bulk straight from the sawmill or lumber wholesalers. But most lumber is sold neatly planed and then the outside dimensions change.
As noted in my comment, never noticed 1/8" before (and am American, so no particular metric bias...). All e.g. MP3 players historically called them 3.5mm jacks, is what my brain is telling me.
Some googling:
3.5mm jack - 49million results
1/8" jack - 63 million results
3.5mm stereo jack - 19 million results
1/8 stereo jack 5.9 million
1/8" stereo jack - 5.47 million
Evidently, it's a common term! Guess once I decided what I was calling them, that's what I searched for, and what I skimmed technical details for.
Right .223 Remington has the same bullet diameter of .222 Remington; namely 0.224 inches.
Metric dimensions of rifle-cartridges, however, seem to reliably be the land-diameter: 5.56x45, 7.62x51, and 7.62x39 all have eponymous land-diameters.
Ok, I went into a on-off rabbithole this afternoon due to mistaking your comment as a claim that the 3.5mm jack had microphone as a standard in the 60's. Findings:
* Regarding "Jack" In February 1884, C. E. Scribner was issued US Patent 293,198 for a "jack-knife" connector that is the origin of calling the receptacle a "jack". . . . The current form of the switchboard-plug was patented prior to 1902 . . . It is today still used on mainstream musical equipment, especially on electric guitars. [0]
* 3.5mm connector There are at least four different varieties of 3.5 mm plugs and jacks, each with its own purpose and application. . . . TS, TRS, TRRS . . . The letter T stands for Tip, and the R stands for Ring (like a ring on your finger, not like ringing the telephone). . . . a TS plug has two conductors, a TRS has three, a TRRS has four, and a TRRRS has five. . . A TRRS or Tip Ring Ring Sleeve plug has four conductors and is very popular with 3.5mm, and can be used with stereo unbalanced audio with video… or with stereo unbalanced audio plus a mono microphone conductor. . . . Unfortunately, there are two conflicting standards associated with its use with stereo unbalanced audio plus a mono microphone conductor. [1]
No, the older ones are much larger, and still in common use in audio studios and for musical instrument connections. They are exactly the same form factor as the ones used for patching and routing phone calls on the old switchboards, as your comment lists, and the addition of switches behind and next to the plug to be operated by the insertion of the plug is a pretty old practice as well. I've never seen a TRRS or a TRRRS in 6.3 mm but in 3.5 TRRS is pretty commonly used for the headset connector (and, just like in the days of old, when you plug it in the sense switch will disable the speaker and mic on the phone and route the signals through the plug instead).
I still have an old phone (not a smartphone) that uses a 3.5 mm TRRS jack for that purpose and I would not trade it for any Bluetooth gizmo, it works perfectly, you just need to be a bit careful with the cable. But no stress about the earpods running out of juice.
The first time I saw a 3.5 mm was in my 1975 six transistor Japanese little 9V AM radio. It came with one of those weird pinkish earpieces.
Can you recommend a 3.5mm TRRS headset that doesn't suck? All the ones I've tried have a terrible in-line mic that I think is supposed to work as a Lavalier, but in fact makes it sound like I have several layers of cloth over my mouth.
I use an original Nokia headset (the old ones from before the crash-and-burn), it works very well. Finding them could be an issue though, I got mine from the junk bin at one of those phone repair places, it was brand new and still bagged.
Ah yes, you are, I'm in Europe. The one I have is called the HS-45, the multimedia controls don't work with my current phone but the basics (mic, headphones, break connection and volume) do.
Microphone/headphone combos with a single TRRS jack are fundamentally going to be poor, because the microphone line isn’t balanced. Microphone signals are very low level and pickup noise easily.
You might get better luck with mic-in-cable jacks, my headphones came with one (TRS plug on headphone side, TRRS on other) but they can be bough as separate items.
That's interesting and somewhat surprising. I'm not knowledgeable about battery design by any means, but I would have thought that there would be a better way to make a battery pack for a car than connecting thousands of small batteries together.
if I remember my basic chemistry, batteries don't deliver voltages at the level of 10/20/100v directly often, its more commonly 1/2v or 0.5v class voltages. You have to have a much more 'aggressive' chemical reaction to deliver higher voltages. And, the same with current: a single surface between two reacting things delivers less current. Its a function of surface area. Same with capacitance: you sometimes need 'more' surface to big up the effect.
Therefore all you have is stacking it up. parallel or serial, thats what there is to get higher voltages, more current draw, longer life per-cell.
Inside a lead acid battery its multiple surfaces, sub-cells. It's normal. inside almost any domestic battery I suspect its sub-cells, sub-cells all the way down.
A giant roll of surface, to increase the area in contact might be one way of getting "more" in terms of current draw or lifetime. I bet that its voltage remains close to the constant in this, hence Tesla "stacking" up the rolled cells, to boost voltage.
The Nissan Leaf uses larger cells [1], each roughly the size of a ream of printer paper. So there are real car designers who agree larger batteries are worth considering.
Of course, the Leaf makes a bunch of other decisions that are different to Tesla - lower price point, smaller battery/reduced range, air-cooling batteries instead of water-cooling, a (now abandoned) battery lease scheme, and suchlike.
Using standard form factors and manufacturing techniques made it much easier for Tesla to get batteries off the ground through their partnership with Panasonic. The extra space left by the gaps between cells also has the advantage of being ideal for cooling (battery performance and safety is correlated to temperature).
This strategy is one of the remarked upon things when I first heard of Tesla (something like “this California startup is powering their electric car with laptop batteries”) ironically laptops have almost all transitioned to lithium polymer (pouch cells) instead of the 18650s they used back then. Not all car manufacturers use teslas standardized cell technique, as it does have some downsides. I guess time will tell, but I doubt Tesla will abandon this technique any time soon.
Separating the cells allows makes it easier to cool them. It also provides more inert metal between them in case of fire.
A certain amount of stacking is necessary to get up to a decent voltage, as others have pointed out. But even "100 brick-sized cells" would be a more dangerous prospect than "thousands of 18650 cells".
