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- Dave has a dead car. He will likely be getting the Mitsubishi Miev (which he has gotten a tour in before). It has a range of 150K.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8P4w9hnKls[/tube] - Dave says he would rather get a Holden/Chevy volt because it has a built in engine. Chris thought that Bob Simpson talked about a 2 stroke motor that could charge the battery bank on his car.
- mPower is a startup that wants to use plugged in cars to help balance the grid.
- Batteries are still the thing holding back electric cars and startups don’t seem to be making any breakthroughs.
- Thunderf00t, a controversial YouTuber and chemist PhD, recently followed through on his assertion that sodium doesn’t chemically explode…it turns out that it is a coloumbic charge release.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmlAYnFF_s8[/tube] - On the EEVblog forum, they were talking about how to measure the charge from something like this.
- The Voltera just released on Kickstarter. It’s a great looking project, we were questioning how much it would get used in prototyping (because of turnaround times).
- Bolt and yCombinator just announced a partnership. They will open a second location in San Francisco.
- Macrofab is a new service out of Houston TX that automates assembly using an online interface. It looks low cost and friendly. It seems similar in scope to Circuithub (Andrew Seddon was on the show in the past) but with more automation on the assembly side, not just the sourcing.
- Dave did a breadboard build using the VCP200.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFth9K_IvwA[/tube] - The VCP200 is a MaskROM chip using the 68HC04. Chris found Dave the datasheet.
- It reminded Dave of the PIC16C84 which was UV erasable.
- Dave wrote a video overlay program into 1K of memory.
- The Raspberry Pi 2 has an issue with a xenon flash.
- Shahriar did a 3 part video with LeCroy involving their 100 GHz scope.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3w_EWgGQuk[/tube] - We found out the RISC-V (Rocket Cores) processor has been taped out in 28 and 45 nm silicon.
- We like the schematic tattoos!
- The analog aficionados dinner is coming up on February 22nd.
Thanks to Don Graham for the picture of the jalopy
Regarding the VCP200:
It remembered me of an article in Circuit Cellar from February 1998, about a low-cost voice recognition system based on a 8-Bit microcontroller.
You can download the the article as PDF here: http://img.cmpnet.com/edtn/ccellar/e016pdf1.pdf
Source code here: ftp://ftp.circuitcellar.com/pub/Circuit_Cellar/1998/Issue_91/tinyvoice.zip
If you look at the article you will see similarities between the circuit and the VCP200.
It uses about 1k of program memory + 512 byte for voice patterns stored in the EEPROM.
The link to the ‘analog aficionados dinner’ is dead..
Why is Thunderf00t a controversial youtuber? I also couldn’t find where he thanks his patreon supporters 🙁
The Voltera ink is 40x the COST of copper?
The Berkeley ed-x robot course:
https://www.edx.org/course/artificial-intelligence-uc-berkeleyx-cs188-1x-0#.VN59rObF-aY
Woo, thanks for letting us know. Fixed the AA link. Voltera ink is 40x the resistance, not the cost. No idea how much it costs (early reports are that it’s reasonable though).
Dave, the Chevy (Holden) Volt is totally the way to go. For your short daily commute it’ll be a purely electric car, but for occasional longer trips out of town you’ve got an economic petrol car with no range anxiety. I’ve had one for almost a year, and can’t recommend them highly enough for the right use case. (I blogged about my one here http://www.sowen.com/851/the-future-i-am-in-you/ )
Great insight! Glad to hear about such a positive experience. So you think Dave should be investing? Seems like the wear and tear could really be a bonus in a beautiful climate like Sydney as well, increasing the lifespan of the vehicle (less so on the salted roads of Cleveland).
Dang, Dave wasn’t kidding about the price in Oz, holy moly: http://www.carsales.com.au/loc/holden/volt/new-south-wales-state/sydney-region/
And that’s for used cars!
Plus they put the steering wheel on the wrong side! What a ripoff! 😉
Wow, at those prices, I’d be happy to drive my Volt all the way to Aus to sell it! (obviously stopping every 50 miles for a 4-hour recharge!) 😉
A 1k contest would be great! I don’t know if you know it, but in the demo scene there are already such contests. One of my all time favorite is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE (well, this was a 4k contest, but there are even 1k PC demos). Would be cool to see what people do for a 1k microcontroller contest. This can be done with 1k on an ATtiny15 microcontroller, running at 1.6 MHz and using 32 bytes RAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4-kF-MkP0A