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- The Hyper Encabulator (natural successor to the Turbo Encabulator and later the Electro Turbo Encabulator that Dave was part of)
- DALL-E is the AI art engine that made our artwork this week.
- The cool thing you missed at the Tesla AI day (eevblog)
- Laura from Oxide Computer was on the show talking about servers
- The “Open Compute Project” is the FB project Chris was thinking of.
- Robotic Ice Cream Fail
- Fast food robots are being promoted in the press currently. But that’s nothing new! NYtimes has a history of “robots doing jobs” at fast food places.
- Jack of All Trades
- Chris is working on what he calls a “Lego” prototype, basically PCBs to replace just point to point wiring between other breakout boards.
- He has been working on an IoT Trashcan Monitor Reference Design and also wrote about the process (and made a video about it)
- The NXP RT1062 is on the Teensy 4 and is a beast of a part…600 MHz microcontroller
- Chris is also looking at getting a milling machine again
- Past guest John Saunders got started with a milling machine in his NYC apartment (hence NYC CNC)
- Dave made a video about how to shop for enclosures…and forgot he made it because of Chris!
- Dave is looking for an enclosure with an angled screen.
- Shopping for boxes is the only activity we’d consider in the metaverse
- Chris has been working on remote hardware training, including build systems for firmware.
- Dave has been doing low power auditing in the home, looking for power leaks.
- X vs Y cap
- Romex is a commercial term for power cables in the wall in the US
- The Smart Grid episode with Paul Zawada is a good reference for people learning about power
- Dave made a recent video about the financial viability of battery backup in the home.
- Vampire power
- Federal Pacific Panels Blow up! Chris had one in the house he bought in 2009 (it was replaced)
- Video of the measurement
I highly, highly recommend the IotaWatt WiFi electricity monitor for measuring home power draw and energy consumption. (https://iotawatt.com) It’s for permanent installation in your breaker panel (or “fusebox,” as the case may be) and not a temporary device like the Kill-a-Watt. It has 14 current transformer inputs so you can measure power on your main feed as well as just about every large load you might have in the house, perhaps even a few small ones. It’s extremely accurate as I find that the kWh measurements my unit integrates over time line up almost exactly with the readings my utility meter provides – within a kWh or two over a month’s time. (I can download and compare 15-minute intervals from my utility’s “green button” web page.) It will display real-time voltage, current, real power (Watts), and power factor. It can also graph those quantities as well as reactive power (VARs – NOT “imaginary” power), apparent power (VA), and frequency over time as well. You can export the data to Emoncms.org, PVOutput.org, or your own InfluxDB database. (I can only vouch for the Emoncms.org integration, but I hope to get an InfluxDB database going at some point.)
If the functionality that comes with the Iotawatt isn’t enough, it’s all open hardware and software to boot, so if you want to add something, go right ahead. However, you don’t have to build anything – if you prefer something ready-made, you can buy it all ready-to-go off the Iotawatt store, including a variety of CT sizes.
The *one* issue I have is that my unit has locked up after a power outage a couple of times… It took a bit of finagling to get it to boot again each time. I’ve been meaning to put in the latest firmware to see if the issue has been addressed, but the power outage issue hasn’t been a big enough of an annoyance to push to me to do the upgrade. That and it cannot seem to measure the amount of sinusoidal repleneration reduced by the introduction of a drawn reciprocation dingle arm on my encabulator.
–zawada