Viewing profile — s_tec

It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't. Each time the frontier models get better, I see another w…

Location: San Diego, CA, USA Remote: Hybrid preferred Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Electronic design (KiCad, Verilog, SPICE), Embedded Linux (U-Boot, Yocto, Kernel drivers…

Nifty! I recently bought a RISC-V VisionFive 2 Lite SBC, which required a lot of mucking with firmware and talking to the U-Boot serial console before it would boot Linux for the f…

This is more of a compressed-air battery than a sand battery, except that the "air" is CO2 and it's "compressed" enough to cause a phase change. Heat-based energy storage is always…

Thermoelectric cooling is pretty inefficient, because the materials need to balance competing requirements: - Good thermal insulator - Good electrical conductor - Good semiconducto…

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that silicon really loves to be with lithium, which makes it a really energy-dense anode material for batteries. It's also cheap and abun…

This isn't the charging circuit - that goes in the charger. This circuit is responsible monitoring the state-of-charge (for that little LED bar graph on the front), disconnecting t…

This is an excellent idea! It would probably make the most sense to perform these adjustments on April 1.

I assumed the post title meant nanometers. Why? Floating-point rounding bugs. A nanometer is about 9e-15 degrees of latitude, which is right about where a double-precision floating…

React Native added auto-linking years ago, which solved the native dependency problems. Just `yarn add` whatever you need, and if it has native code, the the Android side will inco…

Each OS process has its own virtual address space, which is why one process cannot read another's memory. The CPU implements these address spaces in hardware, since literally every…

Just because some people do bad things does not mean you get to paint the whole group with those crimes. Imagine if you had said, "Black people are criminals, because a black perso…

Nah. When I am taking a road trip, the last thing I want to do register an account for some random charging network I'm never going to use again (because I'm in a different part of…

I recently build my own a level 2 EV charger from an OpenEVSE kit. The heart of the charger is a big mechanical relay, which connects and disconnects the charging cable based on wh…

Please explain. I keep hearing this meme, but the arguments don't make sense. For instance, people will say things like, "New World Order wants us all to use electric vehicles so t…

This seems like a good idea. We have used gas taxes for a long time, but electric cars don't pay this tax. If we want to pay for roads based on how much people use them, we will ne…

The National Electrical Code contains the rules for this sort of thing, plus whatever extra rules your local jurisdiction adds. I bought a copy of the code itself plus an "Illustra…

I installed the solar first, which cost about $10k for parts, plans, and permits. I got quotes between $18k - $26k for the same-sized system professionally installed, so this was a…

I like the distributed architecture. Each solar panel has its own inverter, as well as each battery. If I want more panels or batteries, I just add them in parallel with the existi…

I recently installed an Enphase home backup system as a DIY project (crazy, I know). The biggest problem with any home-backup system is moving the loads onto their own sub-panel. W…

Well, that just makes it worse! OP strongly implies that there is no good variable-speed solution, but if the industry already has an assortment of products, what exactly are they …

Normal wiring is terrible, though, since it only supports turning the equipment on & off. If you have a variable-speed fan and variable-speed pumps, it would be nice for the thermo…

I feel like this is an obvious idea, but we simply haven't had the 3D printing technology to make things like this before. Casting this using traditional methods would be extremely…

The main reason to keep hydrocarbon fuels in a green-energy future is for their energy density. Rockets and airplanes will always want the best density and weight available, and th…

The same thing occurs with Web standards. If some old IE version did things a certain way, even the most modern browser will want to do things in a similar way to remain compatible…