The comments from the VASAviation video [0] seem to indicate that it wasn’t the DL but instead the WN plane that caused the scrub. The DL was routed north of the zone and the WN was routed south of the zone. The launch path is southerly, so it seems like the WN was the more likely offender, but I guess we won’t know specifically until we hear from the RSO.
I would add the nano-texture display option on the M4 iPad Pros (1TB+ SKUs only) and the newest MacBook Pros. I recently bought an iPad Pro with the option and it’s been really nice. I can read outside in direct sunlight with it. The downside is a slight loss in contrast and very small loss in crispness but frankly for my use cases it still looks really good. My next MBP I’ll be getting this option.
Eh, as a controls engineer, I get a bit of Gell-Mann amnesia watching his content on drives and motors. There's a complete lack of tuning described in the video, it seems a lot of his performance complaints are due to conservative out-of-the box defaults.
The stuff he builds very cheaply with little more than some wood, Python, and Raspberry Pis is impressive, and he deserves all the kudos for building cool shit and putting it on the Internet (I'm just a consumer and critic, not a creator in comparison). But serial control from an interpreted script instead of CAN/Ethercat messaging from a motion controller or PLC is not the way these products are typically used in industry, and most people don't run the defaults.
There's definitely a niche for hobbyist-grade, student-grade, or lab-grade motion products that name brands like Beckhoff, Omron, Fanuc, Rockwell, and Siemens largely ignore. You could get 4 axes from DMM for the price of 1 from most of those vendors. And while simple serial commands can make interesting things happen with the DMM unit, you'd have to scale a daunting cliff of a learning curve just to get a motion axis initialized in their massive, standardized, proprietary, legacy ecosystems.
Again, no disrespect intended: I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job and instead of challenging myself, going to the workshop and turning on a camera when I get home, I've vegetated on the couch, entertained, and sometimes educated by his content building a milling machine or lathe out of wood. But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
> I've invested thousands of hours into building custom, multi-million-dollar machine tools at my day job
One key is find a hobby that is enough different from your day job you are not burned out of doing it. I can write code at home and sometimes I do - but most of the time I'm burned out after doing that for my day job. However I can still bend the sides of a ukulele, use CAD to design a new switch housing for some manual machine, practice trumpet, or other such tasks that are not related to my day job. I personally am not interested in editing a video (which takes a lot of time to do well) so you won't see me on youtube, that too is something I could do if I was interested in it.
Though with kids often all I have time for is cooking a meal before getting them to bed and then I'm off to bed myself. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but there is limited time and so there are a lot of things I want to do that I don't have time to do.
Please re-watch the video, but THIS TIME PAY ATTENTION. I do talk about the motion parameters, even show the code on the screen briefly. I even show the effects of changing the parameters.
> But this "servos vs. steppers" debate really only applies to low-cost, simple, hobbyist-grade equipment, and isn't such a big topic in the industrial space.
I assume these videos are targeted at hobbyists… I can’t imagine people in your position using him as a source of knowledge.
Yeah. The first (and only, so far) time I came up against a servo controller from AMC (https://www.a-m-c.com/) my initial thought was "why the hell is this so difficult?" Sure, the product manual has everything you need to know about how to program the device. But that manual is also practically unreadable unless you already know how to program the device
Contrast with Teknic where I could get the servo drive up and running in a few hours because of an actually readable product manual and plenty of sample code and a Windows DLL to make everything easy.
There's definitely opportunity at the lower end of the market.
Yeah Matthias is fun to watch because he does a lot of hack stuff with plywood that works better than you'd expect. He does a lot of stuff with a lot of confidence, a lot of it dangerous. He's a smart guy for sure, so for what the setups are, the data is interesting. However, the problem is that people extrapolate beyond the setup. It's rare that the way he does something is a _good_ way to do something. He doesn't demonstrate himself to be an expert in much beyond software and hacking stuff together with wood, and I don't think he claims much beyond that.
I’ve never seen him doing anything that I would call dangerous. Not in the sense that he, someone or something is at risk. He make things that can fail, but it will not reault in an injury.
I’ve seen quite a few. His pantorouter series is very good and I have a lot of respect for doing this sort of thing without CNC. His most recent series building a milling machine is asinine, but fun to watch.
If I’m reading the code right round trips (HTTP requests) go through queueForIdleConn which picks up any pre-existing connections to a host. The only time these connections are cleaned up (in HTTP2) is if keepalives are turned off and the connection has been idle for too long OR the connection breaks in some way OR the max number of connections is hit LRU cache evictions take place.
It should, but like the sibling, I haven't seen what Go does. I've seen it happen elsewhere. Exchange used to cache any answer it got until it restarted. Java has had that behavior from time to time if you're not careful as well.
Querying DNS can be expensive, so it makes sense to build a cache to avoid querying again when you don't need to, but typical APIs for name resolution such as gethostbyname / getaddrinfo don't return the TTL, so people just assume forever is a good TTL. Especially for a persistant (http) connection, it kind of makes sense to never query DNS again while you already have a working connection that you made with that name, and if it's TLS, it's quite possible that you don't check if the certificate has expired while you're connected or if you do a session resumption.
But innocent things like this add up to make operating services tricky. Many times, if you start refusing connections, clients figure it out, but sometimes the caches still don't get cleared.
I don't know about Golang but I swear I've seen this before as well - clients holding on to an old IP address without ever re-resolving the domain name. It makes me wary of using DNS for load balancing or blue-green deployments. I feel like I can't trust DNS clients.
It's been 8-10 years but when I was serving tracking pixels we were astonished how long we still got requests from residential IPs for whole hostnames we had deprecated. That means I would not trust DNS caching anyway. I'm not talking days here, but months, with a TTL set to mere days.
The other reason: you have an open TCP socket that you're actively using. Unless you finish with that connection or it breaks, why would you re-resolve it when you're not running connect() a second time? The failure mode we noticed most when looking into why clients weren't following DNS changes isn't that they were long lived connections, like a server copying a large file or streaming logs. Which isn't unusual if you think about it, just not a short lived web browser or curl-esque connection.
TTL isn't universally respected. Consider the following path:
Your machine -> Local router -> Configured upstream DNS Server (ISP/CF/Quad8/etc) -> ? -> Authoritative DNS Server
Any one of those layers can override/mess with/cache in a variety of ways including TTL. This is why Cloudflare and a variety of other providers use IP anycast. They accepted DNS for what it is and worked around it.
Not only is the IP always the IP, the "global" BGP routing table actually universally and consistently updates much faster than DNS. Then whatever routers, machines, etc downstream from that don't matter.
This (social media harvesting) is really the only option.
They can’t be reactive and produce the required response to address the core issues, because they need lots of cops. Drones help, but even with drones predicting time/location will lead to a better outcome with regard to tracking than being reactive will.
I hope they’re not getting rid of the Zeekr because as far as I know Hyundai doesn’t make any vehicles that have wheelchair ramp conversions and Waymo was planning a wheelchair accessible version of the Zeekr. If Cruise hadn’t so colossally screwed the pooch their next-gen custom vehicle was going to have an accessible version too which I was excited for because they were already testing it.
In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.
It's the lack of curiosity in not taking the small extra mental step of thinking "what niche does this clearly physically different product address?" that's the most galling/disappointing. Or having done the search and found very cheap alternatives thinking, "clearly the person setting up a business creating and with a partner that using these products daily missed that this already exists" immediately instead of looking at why JerryRigEverything might not be an idiot wasting his money.
Custom fit lightweight wheelchairs are expensive. My Ti-Lite (one of the most popular lightweight chair brands) Aero Z starts at $3k and goes up quickly with wheels and backrest and casters and various other options that I need for sitting 16 hours a day without creating more problems. Insurance covers this for me every 5 years, but of course that's not a luxury every one has. Most plans don't cover DME 100%.
What Zack and Cambry are doing is great.
(edit) I’d like to add that I think part of being able to drive costs down is that they’re not offering these via insurance so they sidestep the need for FDA approval to market it as a medical device (hence the company name), CMS approval and HCPCS coding and all the regulatory costs that come with that.
Now don't get me started on power wheelchair cost...
I just want to add some context here because i feel like there is a large gap in understanding of what a wheelchair actually is. Please click through these and get an understanding of the level of detail required to be properly fitted for a wheelchair.
https://permobilwebcdn.azureedge.net/media/hjvhuqlw/tilite-p... - component list / prices. There are almost 11,000 individual parts that are available for purchase for years after the chair is sold so it can be supported through the expected life of 5 - 7 years usually.
And through all of this you are working with professional therapists that are trained to properly size all these measurements, because an ill fitting chair can cause more harm than good.
This is a bit like saying that an ill-fitting bicycle can cause more harm than good: technically true but missing the point. Sometimes it's valuable to have a cheap bicycle that you can expose to the elements without worrying about messing up the high-end components on your more expensive bike.
These seem to be mainly intended as secondary chairs or for part-time wheelchair users, rather than as primary chairs. My wife has three wheelchairs and I can see a case for buying one of these as her fourth.
Mind you, the situation with electric wheelchairs is very different. Many electric wheelchair users are at elevated risk of pressure sores, may not be able to get in and out or reposition themselves independently, etc. The profit margins on these chairs are still inexcusable, but the amount of custom fitting and memory foam everything is warranted because the user may well be in this chair, in that position all day every day. The cupholder and the umbrella mount are must-have accessories.
A manual wheelchair is less complex than a bicycle, and I can get a decent bicycle for a few hundred bucks. The fact that basic wheelchairs are crazy expensive has little to do with the chairs and a lot to do with insane bureaucracy.
You probably don’t want to sit on that cheap bicycle for 16 hours a day. Almost guaranteed it won’t fit property and at best will give you saddle, sores and worse cause back knee issues.
Interesting, only 1 billion bicycles? I would have expected more than that. In most of the places I lived (Europe, Asia) there seems to be more than one beater bike per person lying around somewhere (and some nice bikes, too, but much fewer).
I'm actually surprised it's 1 billion, when you remove children, elderly, people simply out of shape for a bike, people unable to afford a bike no matter how cheap, people with disabilities incompatible with bikes, that billion is like 75%+ coverage of TAM.
Is that 1 billion adult bikes in particular? Because in the US, anywhere outside of big cities or college towns, children are ALMOST the only people who ride bikes regularly.
Many (most?) children have bikes, and lots of elderly people have some bikes somewhere in a shed back from when they used to be able to ride.
Almost everyone can afford a beater bike. That's why they are so common in the third world.
I'm not sure how out of shape you need to be not to be able to ride a bike? In any case, I wasn't wondering about how many people actively ride bikes. I was wondering how many bikes there are.
If you look on ebay there are loads of wheelchairs for sale from about $100-$200 (£80-150 if british). They are mostly made in China and I think work ok - I bought one for £80 to use with my dad and it was fine. But that was for occasional use. I guess if you were to use it all the time you might want something fancier.
That raises a whole host of other issues. They're $200, because they don't have to pay their employees or provide a safe environment, the Government is subsidizing the manufacture or other unsavoury reasons. You can make things really cheap if you don't care about your staff.
The Chinese government subsidising the manufacture of wheelchairs doesn't sound as nefarious as you're making out. I would be proud if my government did the same thing.
Complete speculation, you’ve downed too much propaganda.
Manufacturing is cheaper in cheaper countries because of less taxes, inflation, bureaucracy, and a dozen other factors that aren’t negative socialist bullshit. Their workers get by just fine with the wages they’re paid.
When you have all the components for a cheap bike made in 100s of thousands by ie Shimano, the price goes down dramatically. Wheelchairs? Unless there is 1 dominant manufacturer its not going to happen to smaller shops, and monopoly has its own issues.
When you have regulatory tape which require some steep price hikes to cover some specific aspect (which may not be that important), combined with above you get what you get.
I was recently wheelchair-bound for a month due to my recent paragliding accident (crutches now for at least 1 month more, overall an interesting experience of various limits lying everywhere you don't even realize until you are there), and can appreciate even basic wheelchair and its various functionalities. Its simpler than bike for sure, but its also foldable (at least mine) and relatively easy to pack into trunk of any decent car in a minute (not for me of course but accompanying person).
Third party payment markets tend to have prices spin out of control. Usually the end user demand is fairly inelastic, and the third party is not driven by cost efficiencies in the negotiation. Getting into those markets as a new supplier is very hard as typically a select few incumbents have longstanding relations/deals with the third party.
Some of these comments are so bizarre that they could only be made by AI
Do people here really not grasp the difference between a disabled person being forced to use a wheelchair - which they can’t get out of casually and stretch about - vs a fit person willingly using a bicycle?
> I don’t think most bicycles are designed for 16 hours of daily use…
Was stated. The answer directly to the statement was:
> In nations where bicycles are the norm, I would not be surprised if many of them get used 12+ per day.
NYC is awash in bicycle couriers, and they probably ride all the time.
No AI needed.
Looks like it might be necessary for interpretation, though. That's not something I have any control over.
BTW: I am quite familiar with Serving disabled folks. That's pretty much my job, at home.
I’ve noticed that the most racist, ableist, you name it, individuals are the people who most claim to defend the group in question.
I guess this might be because strong opinions are best formed from a surface level understanding of a subject, while intricate and complex opinions require deeper understanding.
Presuming that you mean "stairs", these exist and impress Hacker News users who think any problem can be solved with enough overengineering, but nobody really uses them because they're so much worse at everything else. I've used one to board an airplane embarking from the tarmac, that's about all they're good for.
Why? The comfort level and ergonomics demands are completely different. Bicycles are for a few hours of weekly use. Wheelchairs are for 16 hours of daily use.
Sure, but those bicycles don’t cost 100 bucks they probably cost 5000+. The last bicycle I bought was $7000 and that was midmarket (my recreational cyclist standards).
I was recently in Rwanda where seemingly half the goods of this very hilly country are transported by bicycle, and those are single speed old english style bikes with steel frame reinforced with rebar. (they carry hundred of kgs on the racks). The bike are run 8 hours a day for years and cost $100.
The recreational market does spend a lot of money on bikes. Much of it is of questionable gain already, and in the context of Rwanda negative since the recreational bike generally compromises comfort for speed - a fine compromise for recreation but bad one for most Rwanda uses.
However some of what they are spending money on would make those bikes in Rwanda much better. Better/more comfortable seats can greatly ease the toll on your body. Disk brakes would stop the load much better and so make them safer. A couple gears would be nice (assuming it doesn't compromise drive train strength too much). Modern cargo bikes likely have a better cargo position as well.
This is the definitely the standard we should strive for when considering the needs of our wheelchair bound friend and family. If they want anything more than a 130lb wheelchair made out of old rebar they're just being selfish really.
In India millions of women are walking miles to fetch few gallons of water everyday. I don't get why people in California are screaming water shortage. Should be possible for Americans to live on a gallon of water if hundred of millions live like that in India.
It’s very hard to change your standard of living, and the standard of living in California is very different. We live off of tens of gallons of water a day or more. When you have to cut back, it’s difficult for your human animal to accept it. Population wide, it’s nearly impossible.
Yeah. This is why I’m so pessimistic about long-term prospects for the human race.
Living minimally is a skill that society has essentially turned into a negative trait.
Our planet can only support so much, and individual humans are very selfish. There are 8 Billion now.
Possible? Sure, and a lot oft of hippie/environmentalist types in America do live that way, both in cities and in rural areas.
Is it desirable? Not necessarily. The goal is to be more efficient with water sourcing, distribution, and usage so people have more water to use, not less.
I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers.
Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?
I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weirdness in the sensor outputs.
I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver
My mum recently had a curbside crash while she was riding an e-bike. This resulted in her breaking bones in both her hands, which resulted in a surgery in her left hand and various problems (tcl fracture related) with her right hand.
This makes me actually appreciate reliability in e-vehicles motor cutoffs etc.
I keep thinking if this could have been avoided with a better quality e-bike or if actually it would be even worst with a cheaper one.
Which makes one think, how often a wheelchair with cheap e-scooter parts would crash people into staris, cars etc
I know public use devices have their own problems with reliability, but I did almost cause a traffic accident a couple times over the years. Every time, the scooter's accelerator lever got "sticky" due to repetitive (mis)use, and would sometimes not go all the way to 0 when released. Stuck at ~10%, the scooter would brake normally and remain at halt under my weight, but the moment I stepped off it, it would suddenly launch itself at the cross traffic.
It's these little things that get you. The scooters all have some kind of debounce logic, disabling the accelerator until you're moving sufficiently fast - but the logic doesn't kick in when you stop without releasing the lever. A little bit of redundancy would've helped here.
A friend has an e-unicycle (I think the category devices has some other name as well..) and he wanted to try out how it behaves in a track.
He sort of knew, but didn't expect it, that when the roll of the device exceeds a certain threshold, the device will shutdown. Even if you're on a curve going with some speed. Broke his wrist. Since then he's also wearing wrist protectors that keep the hand straight.
Actually it was a bit unexpected that it would have known to do that; it must have used its complete IMU data to even know it was rolled, as plain accelerometer would have been pointing "down" as usual.
I'm an embedded software engineer with past experience developing robotics and motor control drivers.
Those e-unicycles terrify me. No way I'd trust my life to one. Once you're at speed, every failure mode results in instant passenger ejection. I see people flying through traffic on those things - they're just one sensor glitch or integer overflow away from serious injury.
> Actually it was a bit unexpected that it would have known to do that; it must have used its complete IMU data to even know it was rolled, as plain accelerometer would have been pointing "down" as usual.
That actually feels like overengineering based on well-intentioned, but wrong specs. You probably want to just use sideways acceleration for "falling over" detection, instead of roll.
The safety with ebikes does vary a bit although I'm not sure it's down to price. My one is quite a cheap one but has quite a lot of safety features - will only go if you pedal it, motor cut if you touch the breaks, 14 mph speed limiter etc. But I guess you can come off any two wheeled vehicle.
Assistive technology costs are high because consumers barely have an alternative. I am blind. In Europe, a 40-cell braille display starts a 6k. 6k, just for a monitor which displays 40 characters. Prices are largely unchanged since 20 years. Technological advancements are irrelevant. Resellers will squeeze the cow, thats plain capitalism man.
If that is the case, then there seems to be a place in the market for someone else who can sell these devices for cheaper.
However, as you have pointed out, since it is also a market where people have few choices, there is no incentive for any new player to significantly lower the prices. Even if they easily could. Because they know that they will get the customers anyway.
That seems to be the root cause of the excessive price problem. An existing oligopoly of rent-seeking companies. Or a cartel, if you like.
I think that one of the ways to disturb this market and bring the prices down is for some honest company to join it and price their products fairly.
Once there is one such company, I assume that everyone else will lower their prices as well. Because otherwise they will run out of business.
The problem is if you spend 100 million dollars to make one (which is about 30 engineers, 50 testers, and 20 other for a year) and sell 10,000 units (remember there is competition who will get come sales) you need $1000 each just to pay engineering costs. Lack of scale is what makes many products expensive.
If you don't mind educating a curious person — why are Braille displays still worth making when text-to-speech is free, everywhere, and communicates information much more quickly than Braille? I can understand that there might be special situations where you really need a device to be silent, but it's hard for me to see how the cost-benefit tradeoff would weigh in favour of a Braille display except in the rarest of circumstances.
Just from googling -- an orbit reader 40-cell appears to cost $1,700 USD, is there a reason this doesn't actually solve the same problem as the 6,000 euro display, or are these not available in your market for that cost? Sorry if my question is off the mark, I don't know a lot about this and your comment piqued my curiosity.
I’m sure the commenter meant well. You said “In Europe, a 40-cell braille display starts a 6k.” Which to me means that the most low quality, cheapest device starts at 6k.
Now i learn from you that that low quality device is so bad that you consider it a separate product class in itself. Can you tell us more what does it lack? In other words what features are you looking for when you are looking for a 40-cell brail display? (What is the minimum quality for it to be a “car” in your analogy?)
This is a fascinating potential wedge for an open-source initiative. Could you please elaborate as to what makes a device highly usable and of good quality, vs cheap and unpleasant to use?
I’ve long thought that open source would make a lot of sense for assistive devices, and that it has the potential to change incentives within the cartel of assistive device manufacturing.
There was a HackadayPrize 2023 competitor that worked on this [0]. He had to rethink the way those devices are built to bring the cost down.
That would be interesting to know if his solution could match the 4k$ in term of usability or if there is some issue like refreshing rate that make the piezo based system necessary for a good user experience.
That looks like a great project. I share your curiousity regarding the user experience of this vs the piezo units. Looking at it, it should be in the 50-100mS range for refresh times, maybe that is too slow? It seems like it would be plenty fast? I wonder if there are other haptic factors with the piezo, like vibration?
This is specifically like someone that has never seen or used a car or bicycle asking about why a bicycle wouldn't work for someone complaining about car prices, which I think is a pretty reasonable question!
I suspect a major difference is that those e-scooters, bikes, cars, etc are produced and sold by the millions, whereas wheelchairs are small volume by comparison. Another commenter mentioned the legal requirements, which complicates things.
That said, a quick google says there's 65-132 million wheelchair users worldwide so it's not a small market either.
I'm a big fan of his channel, but when I saw the price tag, it got me thinking for a moment. Wheelchairs are a great example of why niche products are expensive.
I think you're spot on with certifications.
I was stupid a few times and needed orthopedic equipment. Each time, the price flabbergasted me. But it didn't matter since the health insurance fully refunded it.
In a regulated market, if you can influence the cap, the item will cost exactly that, no less. And if the market is small enough to not allow any disruption, then it will stay that way forever.
I need to talk to my girlfriend who's a physiotherapist about it. But for now I'm hoping his YouTube fame would start a snowball effect.
Thinking he could do with the wheelchairs what Elon is pretending to do with EVs is truly exciting.
It’s not that small of a market if you consider how many wheelchairs the European public sector buys. Take your average Danish hospital and they’ll have at least 10 wheelchairs placed at every major entrance. They’re basically like shopping carts in a lot of public healthcare places. These are semi-regularity replaced because of wear and tear. If you could supply them with a cheap, solid be easily repairable version you could disrupt that market.
Of course you’re not going to have a very easy time entering the market. But even though they buy these things on regulated supply deals, they’re not cheap. If you could get a certified electric one on top of a (I’m not sure if it’s called regular), then you would be posed for disrupting the market.
$1000 is not cheap for an off the shelf wheelchair such as hospitals make available for patients (in the UK, at least). That was my first thought on reading the article - "$1000 for a wheelchair, really?" - and a quick Google shows that you can buy what looks like reasonable quality wheelchairs for less than that. But the ones on the article are custom-made for each buyer, which is clearly a vastly more expensive option.
But, to the point, hospitals don't buy custom wheelchairs.
No, you can't buy a reasonable quality wheelchair for less. You can buy what a person who doesn't need a wheelchair consider reasonable. If you had to use those cheap chairs for 16 hours a day, and pushing yourself even just for a mile of well paved roads, not even uphill, you would never consider those reasonable.
This is absolutely the point. You have to live sitting in there. That must be more comfortable than the best thing in your house. No way you can do it for less than 1k.
The OP isn't about hospital wheelchairs, but daily use wheelchairs. It's just most of the commenters here showing ignorance or ableism by suggesting the two are equivalent.
I'm not saying otherwise - my comment reaffirms this. There are two separate things going on here -
- You can buy a reasonable wheelchair for moving people relatively short distances across flat surfaces for less than $1000. E.g those used in hospitals and for the partially mobile.
- You cannot currently buy a reasonable self propelled wheelchair for full time use for less than $1000 (give or take the manufacturer in the article).
What about serviceability and spare/replacement parts?
I guy selling mobility scooters told me that most customers never service theirs as it is easier to get the health insurance to pay for a new one every x years. This results in a very limited second hand market.
Take aircrafts or (to some degree) a racing car. You need a screw. Sure you can get one at your local hardware shop for a penny, but for regulated market you need one with certification and that will cost you something close to $10.
I know it's crazy but that's how it works.
Difference being it doesn't fail and if it does you know exactly how it was made and under which process. There will be an investigation to see what went wrong - was it the screws fault or was more force placed on it than it was certified for.
Vs the one from the hardware store could have come from Alibaba and be a plastic core with a thin coating of metal for all you know.
I think it works in this case because Zack has a high profile YouTube channel and a high degree of trust in his workmanship from that. As they say, regulations are written in blood, and I would trust an approved device over a chair from some no name company somewhere because I have more faith that it won’t break on me while I’m out and about. Zack is obviously an exception to that because of his reputation which I think will help him be successful in this endeavor.
Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.
What do you recommend for my parent, they are using a crappy Medicare approved Medline wheelchair that’s like $300 on Amazon. They can’t use their right side of their body really due to a stroke paralysis.
The wheelchair is like starting to fall apart. What should I I get them that will last many years? Thanks!
You should really have an ATP evaluate them to determine what they need. Hemiparesis and a bad fitting chair is no joke. Unfortunately this is likely to be expensive (as noted in this entire post). You can try getting a lightweight chair like a TiLite or Quickie online, but the fitting and sizing is the most important part and in my experience a trained professional is the best route your first time around. After that, as you become more familiar with the needs of your parent you can make adjustments in the future.
