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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2025

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  • Yeah I’m not actually talking about the “Please place the item in bagging area” part, I’m talking about the second or two after I place it before the system registers the weight and re-activates the scanner.

    Sometimes I’ve seen this disabled, on certain tills at certain supermarkets, and I can scan breezily. Not sure if the weight check feature was disabled completely or what.








  • Not quite. A commutator kind of pulses the supply to the rotor, eg a brushed motor would have two brushes up against the commutator, the brushes deliver DC voltage which energises a coil, creating a magnetic field that pushes against a stator that’s made of a permanent magnet. This rotates the rotor and commutator, which then moves the brush around to the next contact on the commutator, engergising a different coil so that the next coil pushes the motor around. The brush maintains a constant DC voltage, but the commutator connects this to different coils as it rotates.

    This is a DC brushed motor, with windings on the rotor and the stator is just magnets:

    And this is a commutator on top of a universal motor (which can run on either AC or DC):

    The stator you have has its own windings, so it would be the stator that pushes against the rotor in that motor, rather than the rotor pushing against the stator like the brushed motor. So you just need to supply an AC voltage to the stator windings and you’ll get a rotating magnetic field, which can then move things inside with their own magnetic fields, eg a magnet, or the rotor it came with.

    I wouldn’t really suggest doing this though hah. For starters, messing with supply voltages and bare windings can be very dangerous, and second if the magnet isn’t balanced it could fly out. And I’m sure there are a bunch of other risks as well lol. There’s also no telling why the motor didn’t work anymore, and it definitely won’t work as well as with the rotor that was designed for it.

    Here’s some fun with a mitre saw motor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTcjMKs5mek




  • It’s a bit more nuanced. If you’re in North America, it’s more likely than not that you’ll have a Californian tomato. If you’re in Asia, it’s probably Chinese. If you’re in Europe there’s a lot of clout for Italian tomatoes, but you’ll probably see a lot of local produce front and centre, with maybe some budget options from another country or in the off-season.

    But ultimately water shortages in Cali are going to have little effect on Europe. Prices on the shelve are so far removed beyond cost that a global market price rise caused by the shortage won’t have a massive effect on the price consumers pay - we’re already paying as much as they can get away with charging, at this point it doesn’t really matter much what excuse they use to raise the price because they were already planning to do that anyway.