I took this with my phone as proof that driving carefully will save you quite a bit of gas. I'm not an environmental nazi but I am happy to save a bit of gas especially since it's expensive. To achieve this average I did the following: *Turn off the A/C - Turning A/C on will easily drop you by at least 5 MPG. Leaving the windows closed helps as well. If it is a nice temp outside just using the vent will help keep you comfortable while keeping the car aerodynamic. If you must choose between A/C or windows down, choose windows. I've noticed only a small drop in my MPG compared to the instant drop of 5-15 MPG as soon as I turn on the A/C. If you must use the A/C, make sure to set it to recirculate (called MAX on some cars) and turn it on for a few minutes and off for a few minutes. My A/C pump doesn't turn off when the cabin reaches the chosen temp, it only turns the fan down. *Use cruise control as often as possible - Let the car decide how to slow down or accelerate. It seems to do a good job of being efficient. * Brake as little as possible - Only slow down when needed and slow down by canceling the cruise which puts the car into light regenerative breaking. * Think ahead - Knowing when to cancel the cruise and coast to a red light works in any car. In a hybrid it happens to charge the batteries, save brake wear, and if you are lucky you'll still have forward momentum when the light turns green preventing you from having to launch again. * Coast down hills - Let the car handle the breaking. Just take your foot off the gas or trust the cruise. If you have to hit the brakes just touch them lightly as this puts the car into heavy regenerative braking slowing the car down or at least holding you at the proper speed. * Accelerate before a hill - This is another think ahead. If you are approaching a hill, speed up before you hit the incline. This will allow you to loose a little speed while going up hill and still be at the proper speed limit when you reach the top and of course coast down the other side. * Use Auto Stop - If your vehicle has the Auto Stop feature use it. You would be surprised how much time you spend stopped at red lights so having your engine turn off till you take your foot off the brake adds to the savings quickly. * Travel lightly - I used to cary nearly 150 lbs of tools in my trunk. This requires more force to accelerate the car to speed. Leave your tools at home, or just take the essentials. I cary a small socket set, set of screw drivers, a couple kinds of pliers, and a gallon of water. A lighter air compressor will soon join the collection as well. Yes this will at times irritate the vehicle behind you but you can be happy in the fact that you are probably saving him gas as well. Just relax and enjoy your drive. Message me with questions if you'd like.

There's a lot in this simple image. The machine screw, though with metric threading, matches in size with a 4-40. It came from a PC Board Standoffs pack from Radio Shack (part #276-195), and has shown me just how cramped this board idea is. This board is about .8" wide. The one I've designed to order is .7", which just shaves in a bit on the outer edges of the SIP socket rails. The pins of the dual alphanumeric LED displays are at .6" centers, as are the rails above. I'll be using 48 8-bit serial-in/serial-parallel-out latching shift registers (74HC595), one per display across the 48" long, 48 dual display covered PCB. One nice thing about designing this way is that as I solder in each new shift register and insert its dual alphanum display, I can see if it works. The shift registers chain together, and the information passes through them like a train on a track, so each display along the rails works even if the rest aren't in place. This is my first PCB design, so I have no idea if it'll work yet. I just got in a set of very highly precise Schaedler rulers that let me figure out the "shank diameter" of this screw as .24", which allowed me to design in the mounting holes, and then in a somewhat ugly fashion move the traces around it. I designed it so the ground rail runs right down the center, so the padded hole goes right in the path of it, saving me having to reroute that line, which helped me fit things, but on a board this small, sticking the .25" hole in place really gouged out a chunk of useable trace area. You can see the somewhat overtall metal standoff below the screw, which would normally go through a hole in the board and screw into the standoff. Obviously, the hole needs to be centered nicely between the chips, as there is no room in either direction between the two shift registers. I think I have it lined up correctly in the design :) The very astute nerd will notice these are 4094 chips, and not the 595s I mentioned, but I only just noticed that in the photos. No worries - they're both 16 pin DIP packages. The purple wire was me realizing I could take advantage of the fact that these LED displays only have 13 pins in the space that 18 could fit. Because of the height of the displays' leads, the shallowness of the socket heights, and the little legs on the bottom of the displays' corners, certain sockets can be used in this way to jump traces from one side of the board to the other. I didn't end up using it, but it may come back into play. I'm not 100% done with the design yet. It's a nice last-resort if nothing else.