Musical Intervals Visualized

I love making music, primarily guitar and piano (Fun fact, I was a music composition minor!). I’ve always been fascinated by theory and I finally sat down to visualize what is happening when notes are put together. Ever wonder what the standing waves for our most common intervals look like? Click the image to see more!

C Major chord (red) vs. C Minor chord (blue)

E-Sled Electric SnowMobile

I am continuing to explore Nordic innovation. Whilst visiting Rovaniemi, Finland, I met the world’s only consumer operating Electric Snowmobile company, Aurora Drivetrains. These 115HP sleds have held their ground competing against gas-counterparts in several events and I was thrilled to have a test-ride and discuss their tech. The high-performance in adverse environmental conditions give the drivetrains huge potential to be transferred into other vehicles such as ATVs, Side-by-Sides and JetSkis. I have been working with drivetrains and electric vehicles for several years so there’s a lot I could dig into here.

I took this opportunity to discuss with their lead Mechanical Engineer and Co-founder some unique design challenges:

• Extreme Temperatures [-40degC to +30degC operating zone]

  • Batteries: Cold temps reduce max discharge, prohibit charging, and adversely affect cycle life. They’ve come up with a liquid glycol heating system integrated with the batteries and along with a standby heater to get started. Once moving and hot, the glycol system is regulated with ambient air to keep cool.

  • Motor: Due to cold ambient temps and using their temp regulation system, they are able to squeeze over 115HP out of a custom brushless motor the size of a gallon ice cream tub.

  • Traction Belt system: The rubber belts must not crack at cold temps and overly soften at higher temps. Currently they are using industry standard cable-backed tracks running on PPE sliders. Friction and deformation as it rolls quickly heats the belt snow is intentionally kicked up by the front skids to cool the belt. They are working on increasing the efficiency of the sliders.

• Environmental / weather sealing

  • Currently using mostly standard automotive IP66 connectors but the goal is to make the entire system fully submersible… and since it’s electric it doesn’t need air to keep driving!

I was impressed they have developed so much with just 3 engineers. All the parts are made in-house. The dozen or so vehicles are already in use with researchers in sensitive arctic ecosystems and local tour companies which provide a great testing grounds for future production and exposure with the public. The upcoming challenges are streamlining/cost reduction and getting market momentum for these high torque, stealthily silent, and zero-emissions snow machines.

Hunting Aurora

I dabbled quite a bit in astrophotography and timelapses but aurora are harder to catch but much easier to photograph ( if the conditions are right! ). It takes some diligence and planning so Here are some quick tips on catching aurora:

• Download an aurora tracking app [I use ‘aurora’ and ‘northern lights’]. Finland also has a SMS alert option you can subscribe to online for instantaneous notification.

• Solar activity is measured on a ‘KP’ scale ranging 1-10. Regions closer to the poles require a lower KP to show aurora. It seems to average 2-3 KP each day, but every couple weeks there’s a few days with KP 4 or 5. I haven’t seen anything above a KP 5 yet.

• In Rovaniemi Finland I’ve seen the aurora on a few evenings at KP of 3.6 and a reported ‘chance of seeing’ at 30%.

• Time planning: short to long term

  • Aurora showing may only last 15minutes and occur once or twice in an evening. If your app reports high chances, stay vigilant or just wait outside for a few hours with some Aquavit to stay warm.

  • The sun rotates every ~27-31days and has a with it a few streams of cosmic stardust

  • Time of year: Winter darkness is better with longer nights. However I have heard the closer to the vernal and autumnal equinoxes also present good activity. Forget about summertime.

  • Solar activity is generally believed to cycle every ~11yrs with the next solar maximum (more sunspots and aurora) around 2024 :(

• Photography

  • The built-in phone camera may capture ~80% of the magnificence of an aurora. To get more out of your phone, download a ‘pro’ camera app that allows you to force longer exposures up to 1-4 seconds. You’ll need a tripod or steady base as well.

  • dSLR: these obviously work great. You can get decent handheld shots and even video. Keep in mind a wide lens and tripod are ideal. Additionally a hot-pack may help to prevent the lens from fogging if you’re doing some extended timelapse captures.

I used to waste a lot of time capturing timelapse videos and developing motorized camera dolly’s, I would’ve loved to snag a sequence of the aurora— too bad my batteries died due to the cold!

There’s a lot more on engineering and my design projects, take a look around the site!

see the blog for the latest posts: https://asaweiss.com/journal

Let's get this started!

Hi there! This is the first post, scroll no further!

Let’s set the scene:

My Wife (Jane), My 5 month old daughter (Lucia), and I have moved to Jyväskylä, Finland for my wife’s Fulbright grant during Spring 2019.

We’ve been here just over a month, learning and reflecting on so many things we never anticipated.

I’m taking a break from my work as a Mechanical design engineer in Silicon valley. Initially it was hard to leave but I’ve found some great things to spend these days on:

• Trekking to daily adventures on ice and snow with Lucia

• Deeper exploration of engineering topics (such as: applied composites, CFD, Advance FEA, PCB layout)

• Visiting companies to discuss innovation

• Teaching an engineering workshop for students

• prototyping some of my own potential kickstarter products

Thanks for your interest in this kind of stuff, let’s get in touch! Email me or find me on linkedin / facebook / instagram / youtube (there’s too much to keep up with these days…)