janosch_123

Metcor | AI Engineer | London, UK | hybrid | £120k

https://metcor.co.uk

You will re-shape how real engineering work gets done at the UK's leading facilities management company: how our jobs get scheduled, how we predict and prevent outages before they hit our clients. We are 600+ people serving thousands of client sites. Our competitors are watching AI happen. You will extend our lead.

You will be the second person in our AI team: what you build and how you build it becomes how Metcor does AI.

Your budget for AI tools is unlimited, as long as you can show the business outcomes.

https://metcorgroup-my.sharepoint.com/:u:/g/personal/janosch...

I was reading the article and got SAP/ABAP flashbacks.

- source code in database: yes

- own IDE for questionable reasons: you bet!

- custom table objects: we got your back.

- strange forks of common python libraries: would you like warnings with that?

His letter is from 1986. Mercedes W123 and R107 clusters had triangles pointing in the filler direction in the 1970s already. (Granted, not quite as clear as his next iteration).

Https://allye.com are assembling a 1 megawatt hour unit. I got a tour last week, super exciting.

They raised another $2.5M round too.

Fellten and Allye are the biggest two here in the UK I think.

just ordered "The Managers Path" because of your post here, looking forward to read it.

> My flight out is in 6 weeks

Where are you going?

Not sure about that. If you accelerate a 2t vehicle to 60mph and then decelerate it back to 0mph then they would stress the tyres in the same way, no matter if you do EV & regen, EV no-regen or ICE, right? (I am keeping the weight constant).

Prompted by your comment I had a look at vehicle weights and two facts stood out

- ALL new cars are getting heavier EVERY YEAR because we keep adding more stuff (average car weight, and average SUV weight trend upwards from 2016 to 2023)

- The average electric car is heavier than a petrol equivalent but is lighter than an SUV

Weight certainly a problem, but the focus on EVs for weight is generally blown out of proportion.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13588773/Ne... https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/weighty-issue-of-e...

For DIY EV conversions (I built some cars) you usually hook up the "regenerate braking" to the brakelight switch.

So as soon as you tap the brake pedal just a little, you start regenerating and see the amps flow back into the battery (I have a little display on my dashboard). Only when you press the pedal further, do you start engaging the friction brakes.

I have no statistics on brake pad differences because we didn't build enough cars/didn't cover enough mileage to measure, but it is obvious that you would cut down on brake pad usage.

Everything I know about EVs and the tech behind it I share on: youtube.com/@foxev-content

Of course. It is an intriguing idea, but a local maximum.

- The panel sits at open-circuit voltage of 48V

- That then needs to be converted/boosted to 400V (conversion loss)

- The converter needs to talk to the BMS to make sure batteries can be charged at this moment (component that is live all the time and is a current draw)

- Need to think about it, but you want another set of contactors between panel and HV-Bus where the battery sits (current draw)

1km of driving is 150Wh so 1kWh gets you 6.6km or 4.1 mi

Let's be generous and say you have a 500W panel(punchy) for 8 hours at full blast (doesn't happen), you get 500W x 8 hrs = 4kWh. Lets say isolated converter loses you 10% so you are at 3.6kWh Thats 24km or 15mi of driving in perfect conditions.

2x Gigavac contactors, keep them closed costs you 24W, so that lowers the input further to 476W * 8hrs = 3.8kWh, less 10% = 3.42kWh ...

Someone who studied EE might be able to make this more accurate. Back of the napkin math, not totally impossible, but not worth adding it for a trickle charge. Adding components that can break, adding weight etc.

There are interesting solar cars out there where you reduce the weight heavily and fold out big solar sails. Then you are getting somewhere, for a city car you don't have enough surface. For an SUV or American Style Flatbed truck you have so much weight it's not worth it either.

I built my own electric cars and calculated if this would be worth it. Roof of car is curved and you get the conversion losses (needs to be bumped to 400V to charge batteries).

You add a lot of complexity for marginal gains. Peak time you get maybe 500W which doesn't go very far.

I haven't made video about solar yet, but I am sharing what I know on https://www.youtube.com/@foxev-content

Excellent! I lived on a boat like this for many years and never knew about the risk of sudden tsunamis.

I like that you can go under the trees.

I finished the Spanish course many years ago (is finishing still possible?)

Thanks for reminding me it had page translations, I did a few of those and enjoyed it! Shame it went.

I build my own electric cars and a family friend asked me: Do electric cars still need a gearbox?

The question is excellent, because many people think you can just skip the transmission altogether and drive the wheels directly from the motor, but that is not the best solution. A gas car will have five gears, a big truck maybe even ten. This is to match the speed and torque as good as possible. Too little torque and you stall. To low a gear and you can't go fast. Even though electric motors have a lot more torque than petrol engines, it still makes sense to have a reduction gear with them.

The reversal: You could build a big petrol engine that does not need a transmission and has all the torque ready to get the car moving, but that would be expensive, wasteful and costly, you would end up with tractor like engines sticking out of the bonnet of your car.

Much better to pair a much "smaller" (can still be a V6 or v12) engine with a gearbox reduction. This is what every auto manufacturer does, no matter if electric or not. The simplification with EVs is that you only need one gear, so it is not operated by the user anymore.

If's to the top as guard statements.

Add asserts to the end of the function too.

Loop's can live in the middle, take as much I/O and compute out of the loop as you can :)

I am quite happy with this to be honest - I am hoping for a viral post of course, but I do get noise out of it and (previously) strangers are looking at what I do.

Like, how else should it work? There is of course always Google Ads but that strikes me as more short-sighted than building a backlog of content to refer back to.

In 4 months I published:

  - 22 YouTube videos

  - two LinkedIn posts a week

It has to be said that I was well plugged in to niche forums and subreddits.

Now I have:

  - 100 signups

  - 28 demo completions

  - 500 subscribers on YouTube

The product is: https://foxev.io (learn about electric car tech like you learn languages with duolingo).

Oh of course the investor buys $75 of debt for $73, I get it now.

I somehow had it in my head the other way around that he can borrow $75 for $73 which wouldn't make sense.

Thank you.

I didn't understand this section, why would they pay $73 for $75 and where do the $25 come from?

"Investor Economics: Assume a $100 BNPL loan. $25 is paid upfront by the Consumer, so an Investor pays $73 for a $75 loan, discounted for risk, fees, and return expectations. The Investor receives $75 from customer repayments over 6 weeks minus servicing fees of $0.25. A $1.75 profit on $73 investment over 6 weeks is a 2.4% return, or 22.8% annualized (52 weeks/6 weeks = 8.67 periods each year; annualized return = (1+0.024)8.67 - 1)."

excellent, this also worked on ChatGPT4o for me just now

Congrats to Anthony and the team! What an amazing milestone.

Very cool, I thought about this when testing regenerative braking parameters on the electric cars I put together.

I ended up just spinning the motor with a hand drill and later fine tuning in an empty car park.

Your solution is much better to get engine hours and a proper load on your test piece in a lab environment!

Not taking payments yet, ETA was Q1 but it's slipping to Q2 as my day job has kept me busy

You can sign up interest and I will send you an email when it's ready.

Thank you means a lot :)

I am sharing what I learnt building electric cars.

On YouTube: https://youtube.com/@foxev-content

In a learning app: https://foxev.io/academy/

On a physical board where people can explore electric car tech on their desk: https://foxev.io/ev-mastermind-kit/

Backstory: from 2018-2023 I converted London taxis to be electric and built three prototypes. We also raised £300k and were featured in The Guardian. I have a day-job again these days and am persisting what I learnt and sharing it. YouTube is super interesting for me because of the writing, similar for the web app actually because the code isn't that complicated, it's about how do I present it in a way that engaged users, so I am thinking mostly about UX.

Actually why not, here is the intro to the first module (100 questions about batteries - ends in a 404): https://foxev.io/academy/modules/1/

Replacing the whole pack is the way to go in battery replacement.

Key problem is the battery management system needs to send exactly the same messages as the previous one and at the same time handle the new cells correctly.

Someone would have had to reverse engineer the i3 BMS communication with the rest of the car for this to work. (I believe there is a repo on GitHub).

Similar swapping can be done with the Nissan Leaf.

Filtering I haven't seen, but I am sure some manufacturers heavily sanitise their output.

Taking a log and annotating the values while opening the window, stopping and starting the car is exactly how you go about reverse engineering components. The problem is you can never be sure you really found all messages.

A (hopefully) concise & practical introduction:

2 min theory followed by 2 min of listening to an existing network followed by 2 min of common pitfalls when building your own network.

I built my own electric cars from 2018 - 2023 and am now sharing everything I learnt with you in a series of videos and on https://foxev.io/academy in a learning web app :)

I hope this helps someone!

Super interesting, message me on hello@foxev.io if you want.

Stack was leaf batteries, motor & inverter with our own gearbox modification (swapped direction), inverter with Openinverter.org Tesla model S A/C charger, Tesla DC/DC and then my own STM32 based control unit orchestrating all that.

Send me an email please, if you work in or with big auto I want to show you more of the app and get your opinion!

Putting content in the right order and hitting the right abstraction level.

Keeping the reader/user in the zone between being bored and overwhelmed while you teaching them, without knowing something about them (only data as feedback if they are using a tool that you built,rather than them raising eyebrows or nodding in a classroom).

I think it's hard but also fun. For the EV stuff that I look at there are a few problems compounding this:

+ Overwhelming buzzwords and complexity

+ Wrong intuition for HV systems

+ Unclear where to start

+ Capital requirements are high

+ Dangerous tech

Yes!!