warning: technical geekery ahead

THose of you who can’t stand such things should probably skip this entire entry. I’ll try and make it a lj cut

Well, good things and bad things have happened today..

On the bad things list, we’ve discovered a flaw in the charger boards [or our calculations, or something] which will require soldering a capacitor across a surface mount part on all thirty. Rats and shucks and drat and such.

On the good news list, Lee has, in yet another moment of brilliance (he has a lot of those.. ) figured out a way around BOTH the nasty-heavy-ugly-transformer circuit for transferring energy and the nasty-ugly-get-rid-of-too-many-watts circuit.

One wire. Probably can carry network data as well.

How does he do it?

Well, I’d probably better not divulge any of the details since it’s not my idea and he might want to patent it or something.. I haven’t yet gotten a definate ‘yes, sheer, you can use this’ but he doesn’t seem massively adverse to the idea either..

So hold onto your seats, it looks like the SheerREg has become the ‘Scotty’ [the name has to do with the cheapness of Lee’s latest brainchild] and can actually _move power around_. Series battery regulation never had it so good.

I’m not sure if I”m happy that we’ve found a new and far, far better solution to the problem (I even got Electronics Workbench to admit that it will work – and if it will admit that it will work, it almost surely will – it won’t even admit that a AM radio will work. ;-)).. well, Lee’s found a new and better solution, I haven’t done much except list reasons why I can’t believe it will work..

or unhappy that the Tango chargers will not, in fact, be done at the end of this week –

and can’t run the nifty token-ring version of the bus I envisioned even if they were done.. it’s just too tanj fast.. or they’re too tanj slow..

I mean, these things have trouble communicating at 9600 baud. It’s truly pathetic..

Well, two more days in sunny, warm Minnesota, then it’s back to (brrr) seattle and (boring) parking meters. IT’s been a good semi-vacation, and I’ll be hopefully all recharged and ready to knock out some serious parking-meter-age..

S.

5 Responses to “warning: technical geekery ahead”

  1. brassratgirl Says:

    save time for our dates!
    p.

  2. jcurious Says:

    I don’t know if it’s been done before, but if it’s similar to power over ethernet.. it’s been done..

  3. sheer_panic Says:

    No.. POE is obvious, just use some extra wires to send your power.

    THis is much less obvious.. among other things, it has to get over the fact that the two sides of the pack are 300V away from each other..

    I replied to your other comment, too but I used the ‘post a new comment’ so you probably won’t get notified of it.

    Just to repeat, your motto was ‘my car is my room’.

    S.

  4. anonymous Says:

    phantom power?

  5. sheer_panic Says:

    Getting closer. 😉

    But phantom power just takes advantage of the fact that there’s three wires in a XLR, and only two of them are used for signal.

    No, this is really new.

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