2 gadgets explained in 2 mins!

Hey friends, Happy Thursday!

Last week, I reached India to spend time with my family and friends back here for a month. So I took an extra day to get ready for this week’s newsletter issue :)

Answer to the question I posed last week

Last week, I asked how buildings and terrains are represented in 3D on your Google Maps. This is done by extracting 3D point clouds from multiple images taken from different viewpoints and then reconstructing the 3D model.

I aim to write my newsletter issues in a way one can follow them while traveling on a bus, having a coffee, waiting for food, etc. Let's jump in!

What are turbine vents?

All of us must have seen this grey spinning thing on the top of some buildings and wondered what they were. Well, these are turbine vents!

Figure 1: Turbine vent on a building

During summer when it’s high temperature, the building under the roof starts to get very hot. These turbine vents are fans that rotate on the outside because of the wind in the environment outside. These are not actively powered to rotate. This creates a vacuum and sucks the air from the inside and pulls them outside thereby making the building cooler!

During winter, the opposite happens. The low temperature can cause frost so the water vapour is removed by these fans.

How do Car Wipers work?

Figure 2: Car wiper mechanism simulation.

The car wiper works using a motor that rotates a small lever, which in turn oscillates the wiper arm because of the way the mechanical linkage connection is set up. This is also technically called a Four bar mechanism as there are 4 individual linkages used to make this possible.

Finally, the arm that rocks back and forth is connected to a rubber film which then cleans your Windshield.

Thank you for reading!

Have a nice rest of the week, and take care!

Until next Wednesday,

Chendur