generatorguy

Ah I didn't understand that a "no carbon grid" meant using electricity for transportation and was just thinking in terms of reduced demand for electricity regardless of whether the source was renewable or not.

Presumably companies that supply carbon free energy still get paid only when they actually supply energy. Even though they may not have to purchase fuel they would still make no money and have all of their operating costs. I don’t see why the effect of reduced demand on those generation companies wouldn’t be the same as the price or electrical energy went to zero - unless rate payers have taken on all the risk and pay whether or not any energy is generated.

Schematics show you where a wire begins and ends. Wire ducts with no covers so people can ‘trace’ wires is a sign that either a) they don’t know how or can’t be bothered to read schematics or b) poor maintenance practices such as making modifications and not updating the schematics.

Wire ducts are popular because they are faster to make a bundle and put it in a duct and not worry about exactly how it looks, but our panel shop is still zip tying wires in bundles that behind and end in the same general vicinity to keep the wire ducts tidy in large panel line ups - say 5 cells each 1m wide.

I was actually thinking of Alan Cox!

for some reason I always thought russ cox was 60 years old (even 15 years ago) with a big grey neck beard. boy was I wrong!

You’ll be happy to know my runny nose has gone away!

the video on their web page shows an external antenna, looks like a dipole.

It sounds like you agree 900 MHz will be much better than 2.4 GHz in this non line of sight application so long as the obstructions are trees and foliage and not terrain.

I would expect to be able to send a few bytes between two stations maybe 400m apart through non-line of sight forest with 900 MHz and both stations at the same elevation. Certainly the grandparent quoting miles would be for mountain top to mountain top.

915 MHz goes a lot farther than 2.4 GHz.

At very low bit rates you need very little SNR.

There is probably very low noise out in hiking environments.

Yes, attenuation due to terrain is going to be a killer, but my experience with non line of sight 900 MHz links blasting through trees leads me to believe it would be workable for low bit rate data between a series of hikers along the same trail.

It is sending only location and text messages so intermittent link status or re-tries due to temporarily terrain/foliage obstructions will not cause degradation in service that you would experience trying to watch netflix over this mesh.

Easier but factories are unfriedly to WiFi with all the giant metal structures, high,medium,low voltage power cables, emi noise from motors and VFDs, etc.

WiFi is more difficult to troubleshoot whereas Pretty much anybody can use a cat5 cable tester.

And there are already cable trays and raceways going to all of the different equipment because it uses electricity.

So in the industrial processes I’ve been involved in radio was only used outdoors and when communications cable would have had to have been strung up on poles.

Reliability and ease of troubleshooting are characteristics industry values more than labor saved running cat5, in my experience.

The climb acronym from the article, it is same reason we can’t build nuclear plants on time or or budget anymore.

I only know from my own experience and I’m essentially self taught, so I don’t know what industry norms are only what has worked for me and my customers.

The instruments and controlled devices are wired to a PLC such as Allen Bradley control logix or Schneider electric m580. The PLC generally reads the inputs, executes the program, and updates the outputs every 10ms. HMI software running on a computer such as inductive automation ignition, vtscada, wonderware, citect, etc reads data from the PLC to display to the operator and record for history. Protocols are often modbus or common industrial protocol (CIP) which is also called, or some flavor of it, the ridiculous name of Ethernet/IP, but that’s the kind of shit you get in industrial automation.

I generally set the HMI software to record my 2500 values once per second.

During testing it is common to use a data acquisition system that can sample even much faster than the PLC runs, eg 1 kHz.

I haven't assembled a PC since the pentium 200 days. I recall hard drives, floppy drives, and the motherboard had their own power connections but not the CPU or GPU of the time.

Still a single pin is probably something like a #18 gauge and would only be good for 10A before it gets too warm for comfort.

thanks for the links.

We only create an alert if there is a problem the operator can solve, otherwise there is no point in waking them up at 3 AM, so if anything our thresholds are set as loose as possible instead of as tight as possible.

However there are many instances where the operator could be alerted earlier that the machine operation is abnormal. For example the stator windings are rated for operation up to 155 degrees C but the machine is lightly loaded for a long time, the ambient temperature is normal, and the windings are 140 degrees. No alert would be generated from the stator winding temperature but something is amiss.

I think this is the case where some ML/AI/hypeword techniques might be applicable, for the controller to know that based on half a dozen variables the expected value for other variables based on past operation.

I haven’t read anything that said sniffles or runny nose was a symptom. I have a runny nose and was told by the ER on the phone in British Columbia not to worry unless I get a fever.

to deliver 1500 watts at 12v through one pin would be 125 amps. 5 pins each with 25A I would think you’d want at least 14 gauge per pin and even then I think they would be rather warm.

I work on power stations which normally have about 1000 monitored variables per turbine-generator and another 500 for the plant in general. So typically 2500 for a two unit plant.

Alarms are generated if a variable exceeds a threshold, or a binary variable is in the wrong state.

Is Orbiter something that would benefit power plants?

Insurance?

Chromecast audio

They still work great though! you can’t buy more from google but they are on eBay and craigslist etc

If you have a factory you run wires to the things that are important for your factory to run.

Ctrl + s works great for me

I use genutax works great, free, updated every year and uploads your return for you!

It will still cost money to produce and transport even if demand is low so the price will not be negative. Who is going to pay you to take gasoline when they could just burn it themselves very cheaply to get rid of it? Presumably supply will also decrease, refineries will shut down. It may even become more expensive as economies of scale are lost.

In the short term as demand decreases I imagine governments will ramp up taxes to keep the price steady or climbing in order to avoid encouraging people to increase consumption.

I had a co-op position at Nortel in the late 90s for three years. While I was in a sysadmin group maintaining 10,000 hp-ux and 10,000 sunos workstations (the servers were auspex’s in the basement in rooms with a glass wall along the hallway) other friends were working in labs full of optical spectrum analyzers and cutting edge networking gear under development. There was an old room called an aneroic (sp?) chamber or something that had giant fiberglass spikes coming out of the walls and ceiling to absorb all sound in order to test the quality of phones. The one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by the cord sounded like a swarm of bees. If you and friend faced back to back and shouted all you could hear was a library voice.

The sysadmin group taught me to program and many other life lessons that really helped set me up for success.

It is sad that so many lost their jobs, their pensions, and that other teens don’t have the same opportunities that i did.

It is hard to believe all those buildings in Ottawa now house government workers, I believe nortel had 140,000 employees when I was there.

I am glad to see some more attention being paid to exactly how it all collapsed so quickly.

Text entry fields with no border are the worst, if they are blank you can’t even tell they are there.

The notes field on a contact in IOS is a good example of this unfriendly design. the amount of tapping I’ve done to try to figure out how to enter a note on a contact...

I think because in the hardware world the cost for being wrong is so much higher since you can’t push out an over the air update or update your saas or whatever. So if you don’t know you stay quiet instead of being wrong.

they are turbine generators in hydro electric power plants - they are live buildings; the floor and walls are resisting all of the torque from the generators and the forces exerted by the water flowing through the building, and the machines are vibrating at 1 mm/s velocity or about 4/1000" displacement. So it isn't completely stationary, everything is just kind of humming and rumbling - unless there is a short circuit out on the power system and then massive forces are exerted on the generator and power conductors, or if the machine becomes disconnected from the power system and has 10 MW coming in and 0 MW going out it tends to speed up quite rapidly and shake a bit more - but for the most part I can't imagine any conductors wearing through their insulation, ever. No wires are ever exposed to sharp edges.

that sounds better. I thought a point was 1D, a line was 2D thinking of a plot with X and Y axis, and a surface was 3D - but a totally flat surface would be 2D, and a totally straight line i guess is 1D. a point must be 0D.

I’m trying to imagine what a 1D conductor looks like. just an atom? They call it a waveguide in the abstract.