Tyre Pump Software: Protecting Over Inflation

You’ll have heard of hyper inflation in relation to post war Germany, and perhaps the disastrous economies of some dictatorship led and corruption infested countries, but how about when you’re talking about vehicle tyres?

It’s a very common problem that faces motorists, with wheels needing new tyres much more regularly than should be necessary in the more extreme cases.

The problem is, people over inflate their tyres, and that is something they so in the mistaken belief that it improves fuel efficiency. What’s actually the case is that vehicle manufacturers spend a lot of time and money working out the optimum tyre pressures for each of their vehicles. That’s why you see those intimidating looking tables in your car’s handbook.

If you put too much air into your car’s tyres, there may be a marginal improvement in the fuel efficiency, but it’s likely tiny. The bigger issue is that it introduces two very serious safety hazards too.

Hazard 1: Acceleration and Braking

The first is that once your tyres go above the recommended pressure, the wheels get closer and closer to a perfect circle. Under the recommended conditions, the weight of the vehicle causes the bottom of the tyre to flatten slightly giving a larger contact with the road. That means that you have better grip, especially when acceleration, braking and steering. By over inflating tyres, you’re going to reduce that extra surface area that you’re in contact with the road, meaning that it takes longer to stop when you brake. A little extra air may make little difference, but if you’re deliberately over inflating, you’re likely adding far too much air, possibly as much as several extra PSI.

That’s also the reason why your car handbook might recommend more air when you’ve got a fully loaded vehicle – normally measure in terms of multiple adults and luggage being carried in addition to the weight of the driver. That extra weight pushes down more through the tyres and makes more contact with the road. You do have to remember though, once you return to a more normal load in the car you need to return tyre pressures to normal as soon as possible.

Hazard 2: Things Go Pop

The second safety issue with over inflation is simply that tyres aren’t designed to be over inflated. Just like keeping blowing up a balloon eventually causes it to burst, there’s the same issue with a tyre – they can only take so much pressure before they fail. It’s going to take a lot to explode a tyre as you pump it up, but adding too much and then needing to do an emergency stop form 70mph on the motorway can put a huge and possibly catastrophic strain on the rubber.

How To Measure Pressure

Every driver should know how to do this, but it’s clear some don’t. There are three easy ways to measure your tyre pressure (four if you have a new car that’s got some fancy features).

Option 1: Let Your Car Tell You

The first is that fancy feature so let’s chalk that one off straight away. Check your dashboard display, as some vehicles will tell you the pressure of each tyre. Many still don’t though, even though its now a requirement for new cars to be manufactured with tyre pressure management systems as standard.

Option 2: The Cheap Gadget

The second is to buy a simple tool that gives you a pressure reading by removing the dust cap and pressing it onto the valve of each wheel. They’re usually available to buy for a few quid from high street stores like Argos, and maybe even the DIY or motor aisle if you live near a large supermarket.

Option 3: The Petrol Station Forecourt

The third is the most common choice for most people, and that’s to use the machine on the forecourt of your local petrol station. Usually the price ranges from 20p up to a quid a go, which is why this is no longer the option we recommend, instead it’s the next one!

Option 4: The Tyre Inflator

It’s surprising these haven’t caught on sooner given they’re actually relatively cheap for what they do. They’ll not only give you a pressure reading for your tyres (just like option 2), but they’ll also pump up your tyres too. They use a compressor as a pump to drive air into your tyres, and many of the good ones can be programmed to stop when the target pressure is reached. They might be a little out, but they’re certainly good enough to rely on to keep the pressures on your vehicle tyres monitored, and will mean you can do so from home, rather than hoping you remember when you next fill up with petrol. You can find some reviews of the best car tyre inflators at https://www.cartyreinflator.co.uk/ if you’re wanting to buy one. we’d recommend carrying them around everywhere in the back of the car as they’re able to operate from the 12V power supply in the vehicle itself, so you don’t need to plug it in to use it.

Our Latest Project

Here at Alarm Software, we’ve been working recently on the software that drives these inflators, and are looking for ways to make them even better. Currently we’re working on adding wifi support, which will mean that you can just enter your registration plate and the inflator will automatically know what pressure each wheel requires.

We’re hoping that in time things will be able to be easier still, with the machines being able to get the information they need straight from your car without the need for you as the user and vehicle owner to do anything. That overcomes a common problem we’ve heard from drivers, where they’re not sure which vehicle they’ve got when looking through the tables of tyre pressures in the car owners handbook.

If you’ve got any more smart ideas for the Alarm Software team on how to make your tyre inflator even more helpful, we’d love to hear from you.

What You Need To Know About Data Backup And Recovery Processes

There is so much that needs to be known when it comes to computers and computer systems, and that includes the matter of data backup and recovery, as well as the data backup and recovery processes that are evident here.

Basically the data integrity processes are used in case something happens to the computer, in case it shuts itself off for instance, so that your files will not be automatically deleted, but rather they are put in a secure state within the computer, so that they can be retrieved later if the user wishes to.

Welcome John, Our Latest Team Member

Alarm Software are pleased to welcome our latest addition, John, who joins us today in our software development office.

John is a keen coder, with a particular interest in network security, one of the main reasons why we were keen to bring him in to work on our MBP26 eSecurity project. His experience includes working on firmware for home router technology, helping to keep your data away from prying eyes when its flying through the air around your home. He’s also provided a lot of support in improving the stability over wifi networks, reducing the tendency for your connection to drop out and need to reconnect. It hopefully goes without saying that both of these skills and areas of experience are something we can draw on with baby monitor software, so hope you will join us in welcoming John to the team.

Outside work, you’ll often find John on the beaches of Cornwall, scouring for coins and other items of value. His passion for exploring with his metal detector has resulted in him being a respected contributor to detectorist websites, sharing his extensive knowledge and personally developed techniques with the wider community.

Finally he’s a keen golfer, which fulfils our final requirement in the AS office, as we’ve finally got someone on board to play a round with the clients that isn’t going to show themselves up before even reaching the first hole!

Video Baby Monitors: Are Parents Right To Be Concerned?

If you take a loot on the web, you’ll find a whole host of sites about baby monitoring. Some are nothing more than shops, selling products from the likes of BT, Motorola and Samsung, while others are more in depth resources, providing video baby monitor reviews, going to varying lengths. In some cases, you’ll find a lot of effort has gone into the material, including videos about the products they’re featuring:

Where we take a particular interest, is the communication between the camera near the child, and the handset that the parent carries around with them. It’s of critical importance that the signal is encrypted in some way, just like you’d want security on your wireless internet router while you’re doing things like internet banking.

Children are one of the few things in life we’ll do anything for, so that’s why we put huge emphasis on helping identify flaws in the security of these communications between devices to keep your children safe. By definition, it can never be impossible to crack, but it’s about making that as difficult as possible to do, without impacting on the usability for parents. That’s an important balance to get right, as if you make these devices complicated to use, parents might be put off using them at all, and they perform an important safety role as well as providing peace of mind.

Looking at an example, Motorola have a huge amount of experience in the mobile device market – you might remember the popularity of their RAZR phones a decade or so ago. Their baby monitor the MBP26 has an option to buy with motion pads that detect if a baby stops breathing – clearly a huge parenting benefit to monitor the health of your baby. However, you still see comments on sites like Amazon for parents worried about people listening in. No matter how much manufacturers invest in technology and they’re reassured by those Motorola MBP26 review pages, the fact of the matter is that as long as there as parents and children, there will be concerns about their welfare. All we can do, is make sure that the video baby monitors are as safe and secure as they can be!

Watching Over Your eSecurity

Barely a week goes by without hearing a big news story about the theft of personal information from a big company. We’ve seen targets made of big social networks, FTSE 100 companies, and even companies that specialise in security.

Some people question how much of this happens that we don’t find out about, given that these sprawling companies have huge teams of tech staff, how many tiny companies leak our details that we don’t know about?

Actually it’s probably not as big of an issue as it sounds – hackers like big prizes, and they’re unlikely to be interested in a few hundred email addresses from a small e-commerce store selling electronics. It’s the corporates that know the true value of ever more detailed personal information, so that’s where the criminals strike.

The internet is still very young, so plenty more mistakes will come to light, that’s inevitable, so Alarm Software is here to help.

Where we’re really placing our focus right now is to help baby monitor manufacturers create products that are as robust as possible to reassure parents that no-one is snooping around where there children are concerned.

We’ll give more detail in our next update.