What if we have the Muses wrong? What if they are cursed to forever have lesser men claim their work and get relegated to the acknowledgments?
Thursday, March 16, 2023
Thursday, January 30, 2020
grounding experience
I bought a Clipper Creek HCS-40 charging station for my BMW i3 about five years ago and it worked continuously and reliably for about four of those years. As of this week, it appears to be working reliably again.
It started throwing intermittent power faults a couple years ago. Its user interface reminds me of an old HP inkjet printer I once beat to death. That printer indicated all status with a single LED. The Clipper Creek has four. One means that the station itself has power. One means that the car is charging. One means that there has been a power fault. One means that there has been a charging fault. A variety of exceptional conditions are indicated with patterns of blinks by one or more of these lights.
The manual says that 'power fault' means that my house wiring has a fault. That's it. It says nothing detailed about what particular blinking sequences mean. The intermittent power faults thrown by my unit became more regular and then turned into a series of blinking codes. I took the unit apart, drained water that had accumulated inside it, drilled a weep hole, and replaced some corroded ground screws. It worked fine for a few days and went back to a state of permanent power fault. The blinking codes are irrelevant. They mean warranty replacement or Congratulations! A Blinking Unit That You May Keep. Clipper Creek offered no advanced diagnostics over the telephone. They did offer to have me send a thing the size of a cat sarcophagus back to HQ for repair at my expense. I declined.
My charging station is mounted outside on the wall of my freestanding workshop building. The workshop is connected to the back of the house with underground conduit. The service to that conduit runs the length of the house from the panel at the front. I gutted the house in 2018 and replaced the main panel and nearly every wire in the house. The utility replaced the meter and replaced the lines from the street at that time. I did not really want to revisit any of it.
While the Clipper Creek was out of commission, I charged the car using the L1 charger that came with the car. It never reported a power problem when using the same electric service in the workshop.
My theories were that the Clipper Creek had either lost its mind or there was a loose ground or neutral somewhere. I couldn't find one. I expected I would replace the Clipper Creek but I was in no hurry because the cost of a new EVSE is a notable fraction of the total cost of the electricity it will ever dispense and because I already had holes in my outside workshop wall for the Clipper Creek.
About a year before we remodeled, the water utility replaced our 3/4" lead service line with a 1" copper service line. They brought it into the house and broke up the concrete and soil in the basement right under the electric service panel where our grounding rod was. They installed a pressure regulator beneath the bonding wire that tied our copper domestic water line to ground. The regulator had a threaded union wrapped with teflon tape. The combination of dielectric union and disturbed grounding rod meant that the house apparently had a very marginal ground.
I noticed that whole situation only because the charging station came alive just for a day. I jumped on the forums and found a suggestion that Keurig machines especially might generate enough noise to confuse the charging station. Clipper Creek tech support made the same Keurig suggestion to me on the phone. If I had a Keurig, I would probably deserve this punishment. I don't but I did start spending hours at the service panel flipping circuits on and off to see if I could poke the charger back to life again.
A culprit may have been a Smarthome-branded Insteon lightswitch in the basement that had recently absolutely lost its mind. It was the only lightswitch left in the house from before the remodel. All of the other Smarthome stuff had died years earlier and been thrown away. In fact, this switch had stopped working as a switch years earlier and I just didn't care. I pulled its local disconnect and the car charger came to life.
As part of the remodel, my wife made me promise that no light switch would cost more than about two dollars. That was one of the best decisions I made. I use these.
Everything I ever bought from Smarthome turned out to be like something from Radio Shack laundered through the SkyMall catalog. I regret every single transaction.
As for Clipper Creek, I'm happy my unit is working again. I'm happy its Power Fault LED turned out to be right. I'm happy the fix didn't involve me re-trenching my back yard. I'm disappointed in a user interface that did nothing to build confidence. The EVSE LED is no more persuasive than the LED on a handyman's outlet tester that says ground is fine. I've been inside my HCS-40. Like all L2 EVSE, it's a simple product built around a microcontroller, a contactor, and some sense transformers. The cordset is probably the most expensive component. I suggest that Clipper Creek could bundle their same power fault algorithm (whatever it is) in their existing microcontroller architecture into a cheap plug-in tester with a 1-line LCD to prequalify installations and troubleshoot existing installations. They already sell a dummy EVSE tester, so it's a small leap. The majority of electricians doing residential installs own little test equipment and bring even less on calls. With manufacturers like Clipper Creek now offering plug-based EVSE, the substantial majority of EVSE installs will be done by handypersons and homeowners who have none.
It started throwing intermittent power faults a couple years ago. Its user interface reminds me of an old HP inkjet printer I once beat to death. That printer indicated all status with a single LED. The Clipper Creek has four. One means that the station itself has power. One means that the car is charging. One means that there has been a power fault. One means that there has been a charging fault. A variety of exceptional conditions are indicated with patterns of blinks by one or more of these lights.
The manual says that 'power fault' means that my house wiring has a fault. That's it. It says nothing detailed about what particular blinking sequences mean. The intermittent power faults thrown by my unit became more regular and then turned into a series of blinking codes. I took the unit apart, drained water that had accumulated inside it, drilled a weep hole, and replaced some corroded ground screws. It worked fine for a few days and went back to a state of permanent power fault. The blinking codes are irrelevant. They mean warranty replacement or Congratulations! A Blinking Unit That You May Keep. Clipper Creek offered no advanced diagnostics over the telephone. They did offer to have me send a thing the size of a cat sarcophagus back to HQ for repair at my expense. I declined.
My charging station is mounted outside on the wall of my freestanding workshop building. The workshop is connected to the back of the house with underground conduit. The service to that conduit runs the length of the house from the panel at the front. I gutted the house in 2018 and replaced the main panel and nearly every wire in the house. The utility replaced the meter and replaced the lines from the street at that time. I did not really want to revisit any of it.
While the Clipper Creek was out of commission, I charged the car using the L1 charger that came with the car. It never reported a power problem when using the same electric service in the workshop.
My theories were that the Clipper Creek had either lost its mind or there was a loose ground or neutral somewhere. I couldn't find one. I expected I would replace the Clipper Creek but I was in no hurry because the cost of a new EVSE is a notable fraction of the total cost of the electricity it will ever dispense and because I already had holes in my outside workshop wall for the Clipper Creek.
About a year before we remodeled, the water utility replaced our 3/4" lead service line with a 1" copper service line. They brought it into the house and broke up the concrete and soil in the basement right under the electric service panel where our grounding rod was. They installed a pressure regulator beneath the bonding wire that tied our copper domestic water line to ground. The regulator had a threaded union wrapped with teflon tape. The combination of dielectric union and disturbed grounding rod meant that the house apparently had a very marginal ground.
I noticed that whole situation only because the charging station came alive just for a day. I jumped on the forums and found a suggestion that Keurig machines especially might generate enough noise to confuse the charging station. Clipper Creek tech support made the same Keurig suggestion to me on the phone. If I had a Keurig, I would probably deserve this punishment. I don't but I did start spending hours at the service panel flipping circuits on and off to see if I could poke the charger back to life again.
A culprit may have been a Smarthome-branded Insteon lightswitch in the basement that had recently absolutely lost its mind. It was the only lightswitch left in the house from before the remodel. All of the other Smarthome stuff had died years earlier and been thrown away. In fact, this switch had stopped working as a switch years earlier and I just didn't care. I pulled its local disconnect and the car charger came to life.
As part of the remodel, my wife made me promise that no light switch would cost more than about two dollars. That was one of the best decisions I made. I use these.
Everything I ever bought from Smarthome turned out to be like something from Radio Shack laundered through the SkyMall catalog. I regret every single transaction.
As for Clipper Creek, I'm happy my unit is working again. I'm happy its Power Fault LED turned out to be right. I'm happy the fix didn't involve me re-trenching my back yard. I'm disappointed in a user interface that did nothing to build confidence. The EVSE LED is no more persuasive than the LED on a handyman's outlet tester that says ground is fine. I've been inside my HCS-40. Like all L2 EVSE, it's a simple product built around a microcontroller, a contactor, and some sense transformers. The cordset is probably the most expensive component. I suggest that Clipper Creek could bundle their same power fault algorithm (whatever it is) in their existing microcontroller architecture into a cheap plug-in tester with a 1-line LCD to prequalify installations and troubleshoot existing installations. They already sell a dummy EVSE tester, so it's a small leap. The majority of electricians doing residential installs own little test equipment and bring even less on calls. With manufacturers like Clipper Creek now offering plug-based EVSE, the substantial majority of EVSE installs will be done by handypersons and homeowners who have none.
Sunday, September 1, 2019
long term
The UN IPCC estimated recently that there are about ten years left to avert a major climate catastrophe. That's twice as long as I have now owned my 2014 BMW i3 electric car. With that in mind, here begins the long-term review:
I bought an early i3 in 2014 and wrote a contemporary review. At the time, I thought it was a great 25 thousand dollar car looking for a way to break out of its introductory 50 thousand dollar pricing. I think I was about half right. The price never did fall but BMW steadily increased the range with denser batteries at the same price.
In short, the car works. It does all the things it could be expected to do and it solves the problems it could have been expected to solve. It's an extrapolation of my experience with a 2004 Prius. That car is still running on its original battery with no hybrid-specific maintenance in 200000 miles.
The i3 does not solve the problems that it cannot solve. It is several feet shorter than the car it replaced but not usefully narrower. It is, therefore, never in traffic. It is the traffic. It has cameras and computers that let it parallel park itself but it does not solve the problem that parking is killing cities.
The way to think about the i3 is not as an electric car. It's an interurban car. Its electric motor, battery pack, carbon fiber frame, and thermoplastic body panels just solve a bunch of packaging and noise problems. The interurban car builders at the end of the 19th century came to similar conclusions about electric, though they built for rails.
The plastic interurban family car pod is a retro-futuristic vision. Our pod goes to Annapolis or Baltimore and back, cities served by original electric DC interurban railways, but not Frederick or Richmond without a charge or use of the gas range extending motor.
This is the part where I might say that the electric drive train is low maintenance. That's true, though the on-board charger did melt once under warranty and was replaced with no trouble. One of the little strings that holds up the rear parcel shelf broke. The enormous lightweight windshields crack easily and few shops want to hear about replacing a windshield in a carbon fiber car. Of all the fragile and moving pieces that make up a car, the drivetrain is just a part. The fact that the i3 has no CD player, rear speakers, or operable rear windows will probably color my perceptions of its reliability just as much as its electric drivetrain.
In the long term, a set of four tires for the car costs a cargo bike. Electricity works. What doesn't work is cars. If you are shopping for a replacement car, consider eliminating that car. If you need to buy yourself a couple of years to figure that all out, consider a used BMW i3.
I bought an early i3 in 2014 and wrote a contemporary review. At the time, I thought it was a great 25 thousand dollar car looking for a way to break out of its introductory 50 thousand dollar pricing. I think I was about half right. The price never did fall but BMW steadily increased the range with denser batteries at the same price.
In short, the car works. It does all the things it could be expected to do and it solves the problems it could have been expected to solve. It's an extrapolation of my experience with a 2004 Prius. That car is still running on its original battery with no hybrid-specific maintenance in 200000 miles.
The i3 does not solve the problems that it cannot solve. It is several feet shorter than the car it replaced but not usefully narrower. It is, therefore, never in traffic. It is the traffic. It has cameras and computers that let it parallel park itself but it does not solve the problem that parking is killing cities.
The way to think about the i3 is not as an electric car. It's an interurban car. Its electric motor, battery pack, carbon fiber frame, and thermoplastic body panels just solve a bunch of packaging and noise problems. The interurban car builders at the end of the 19th century came to similar conclusions about electric, though they built for rails.
The plastic interurban family car pod is a retro-futuristic vision. Our pod goes to Annapolis or Baltimore and back, cities served by original electric DC interurban railways, but not Frederick or Richmond without a charge or use of the gas range extending motor.
This is the part where I might say that the electric drive train is low maintenance. That's true, though the on-board charger did melt once under warranty and was replaced with no trouble. One of the little strings that holds up the rear parcel shelf broke. The enormous lightweight windshields crack easily and few shops want to hear about replacing a windshield in a carbon fiber car. Of all the fragile and moving pieces that make up a car, the drivetrain is just a part. The fact that the i3 has no CD player, rear speakers, or operable rear windows will probably color my perceptions of its reliability just as much as its electric drivetrain.
In the long term, a set of four tires for the car costs a cargo bike. Electricity works. What doesn't work is cars. If you are shopping for a replacement car, consider eliminating that car. If you need to buy yourself a couple of years to figure that all out, consider a used BMW i3.
Monday, August 5, 2019
twiti
In the months that followed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, I thought about something concrete I could do for gun control. Local politicans here in DC have passed about as much legislation as we can manage post-Heller. Some local pols have worried aloud about the menace of 3D-printed guns. I worried that this fear will manifest itself not in bans on gun possession independent of provenance but in restrictions on hobby fabrication equipment.
On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.
Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.
I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.
I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.
On 10 July 2019 -- less than a month before Connor Betts murdered 9 and injured dozens in Dayton with his rifle and drum magazine, a litter activist found this retail packaging for a cheap Glock-compatible drum magazine in a DC street can.
Please, people, do not put your household trash in public cans pic.twitter.com/kITBTD58Qs— Julie Lawson (@srfrjulie) July 10, 2019
Whatever the specter of homemade 3D-printed guns was going to be, FedEx seems prepared to deliver something wilder.
I woke up thinking that the answer is ban self-loading firearms. A year ago, I would have packaged that up into one or two-hundred-odd characters and said so on twitter. Today, after the President of the United States blamed mental illness, video games, and online hate for the massacres in Toledo and El Paso, I thought the better first step was to quit twitter.
I have lots of other ideas that could have been packaged into little twitter message confections but it's all obvious. The concrete thing you can do is vote and you can't do that on twitter.
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
martin luther style
My latest hundred or so dollars to Apple for developer signing certificates has finished evaporating and the apps on my kids' ipads are now non-functional. The answer, obviously, is the one Steve Jobs gave while still in corporeal form: web apps. Alas, you can't be a prophet in your own house, your own town, or perhaps even the whole state of California where good web apps are concerned.
I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.
I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.
The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.
The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.
In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.
A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.
I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.
I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.
The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.
The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.
In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.
A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.
Friday, December 15, 2017
computing, again
I wrote a lot of words two years ago about the search for a computer for my daughter. That search
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.
Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.
I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.
Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.
Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.
I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.
It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?
I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.
I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.
ended with a 12" Macbook running Chrome and a Raspberry Pi. They work fine for her, though
I wished for a machine that was a cross between the Macbook and a convertible Chromebook.
Apple introduced the iPad Pro in the meantime and they have even refreshed it once since. It may not be exactly a viable hybrid of the Macbook and convertible Chromebook, but it is probably at least the arithmetic mean of the two.
I dinged Apple in 2015 for missing WebRTC, WebMIDI, packaged web apps, and some other
Chrome goodies. Apple delivered on WebRTC and even has a thing they call multitasking now. My version of LOGO runs in Safari adequately and even works with the Apple Pencil.
Would I buy my daughter an iPad Pro today? No. It basically sucks at computering. Offline web apps still suck and web pages saved to the home screen aren't just the second-class citizens that regular web pages are -- they are some kind of third class entity. Safari is now happy to use the camera to take pictures of your credit card and auto-fill web forms for you, but has matched none of Chrome's progress in talking to fun things like little robots or craft cutting machines like those from Silhouette using WebBluetooth and WebUSB.
Fortunately, my daughter's rig will probably last another three years. I'm in the market myself now and I find that I want most of the same things a child should expect. I have been struggling with some vision problems and I can't decide if I should upgrade from my 13" Macbook Pro to a new 15" machine or get a smaller touchscreen machine that I can put my face closer to. I think I would love a convertible 13" Macbook Pro.
I already own a 9.7" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard. It totally sucks at computering. It's such a bad computer that it moved me to tears this afternoon. Its hardware is fantastic. LTE is seamless. Its keyboard is pretty great if you can learn to live without the escape key. Its speech-to-text is fantastic. Its web browser is easily in the top three. But it's just phenomenally user hostile. It hates me. I'm nothing more than a sack of meat capable of holding a credit card up to its camera. A Mac lets me drag a song out of iTunes and into Safari. iOS turns that drag out of Music into a hyperlink into the iTunes store. The iPad Pro is almost exactly the philosophical opposite of the One Laptop Per Child OLPC.
It's so bad that it makes me wonder if anyone left in Cupertino ever actually had a good computer. Are the Macbook Pros built to be good computers, or do they merely fail to prevent happy computing? An oversight, perhaps?
I think the right answer is to use Cordova to build a WebKit-based computing environment that supports all the missing pieces and the idea alone exhausts me. In the past, I could download a BLE-enabled browser for iOS, or a WebMIDI-enabled browser, or a WebRTC-enabled browser, or a Kiosk browser that revealed certain parts of the machine to Javascript but none of these let me build a machine with the I/O abilities of a Commodore 64 with BASIC and PEEK/POKE.
I don't have the answer yet, but I hope to by the end of 2018. I'm sick of hoping that somebody will take all this amazing hardware and decide to make a computer out of it.
Monday, September 11, 2017
fragile
We recently decamped to Woodley Park so that we could complete an overdue home renovation project. As we packed, I placed digital cameras and a microscope together in a box and labeled it 'optoelectronics' for the movers.
My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.
My wife crossed that out and wrote 'fragile'. Hers was the better label.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)