Tesla’s Megapack Battery Burned For Days In Grid Storage Fire

August 12, 2021 by 174 Comments

Lithium rechargeable batteries have been heralded for their high-density energy storage, enabling all manner of technologies to come to fruition. From drones to practical electric cars to large-scale grid storage, the applications are endless.

The fire as seen from a drone overhead. Source: Twitter/@FireRescueVic

However, the lithium rechargeable battery has always had one major flaw–flammability. Pushed outside their operating range or otherwise tipped into thermal runaway, and they can burn ferociously as a result.

This came to pass in late July, at the Victorian Big Battery in Geelong, Australia, and it took significant effort to extinguish the blaze. Let’s take a look at the project and see how this came to occur.

Grid-Scale Storage

The Victorian Big Battery is a grid storage project similar in construction to the Hornsdale Power Reserve in neighboring South Australia. However, where the Hornsdale facility fields 194 MWh of capacity and 150MW peak power delivery, the new project aims to go much further. The Victorian project aims to install 450 MWh of capacity and deliver a peak power output of 300 MW.

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Who Needs Pin Headers?

August 12, 2021 by 31 Comments

[Martin] sent this query, along with the lead photo, into the tip line, and he makes a good point. Most development and evaluation boards have multiple rows of pin headers, often arriving loose in the package — soldering is left to the user. In an abundance of caution, we usually design our prototype boards with many pin headers for debugging and testing. But as [Martin] reminds us, there are other alternatives to solder.

  • Yours truly once worked with a prolific designer of PIC microprocessor boards. Long before the advent of solutions like the Tag Connect family, [Ralph] would program his boards by just inserting a pin header into the PCB and applying gentle pressure with his thumb until the code finished flashing.
  • You may have seen the staggered offset PCB patterns that hold your pin header securely while you solder. You could tweak this a little bit to put more pressure on the pins, making a solder-less connection that is sufficient for temporary testing.
  • Taking the opposite approach, you can get solderless connectors with press-fit pins, a method we tested a few years ago on a Raspberry Pi Zero. Anyone who has worked on Eurocard-based systems like VME can appreciate the time-savings and improved reliability of 96-pin DIN-41612 press-fit connectors.
  • Or, as [Martin] proposes, you could use one of these inexpensive pogo-pin clamps. These are available for less than $10 from your favorite Asian electronics distributor. They are about the size of a large clothespin, and are available in several different pin configurations.
Tag-Connect Style of Connector
Uncle Pete’s Footprint Experiments, Sparkfun
Press-FIt 96-Pin DIN
Pogo-Pin Clamp Fixture

These techniques won’t help you if you need to plug your board into another card, such as a hat onto a Raspberry Pi. But when you just want to grab a few signals for a serial port or probing some digital I/O signals, having a few of these clips in your tool box can save you the time and headache of soldering down a header. Do you have any tips for making soldering pin headers easier, or even avoiding them altogether? Let us know in the comments below.

Review: Mini AMG8833 Thermal Camera

August 12, 2021 by 29 Comments

In our ceaseless quest to bring you the best from the cheaper end of the global electronics markets, there are sometimes gadgets that we keep an eye on for a while because when they appear they’re just a little bit too pricey to consider cheap.

Today’s subject is just such a device, it’s a minimalist infra-red camera using the 8 pixel by 8 pixel Panasonic AMG8833 thermal sensor. This part has been around for a while, but even though any camera using it has orders of magnitude less performance than more accomplished models it has remained a little too expensive for a casual purchase. Indeed, these mini cameras were somewhere above £50 ($70) when they first came to our attention, but have now dropped to the point at which they can be found for somewhere over £30 ($42). Thirty quid is cheap enough for a punt on a thermal camera, so off went the order to China and the expected grey parcel duly arrived.

The interface on this camera is about as simple as it gets.
The interface on this camera is about as simple as it gets.

It’s a little unit, 40 mm x 35 mm x 18 mm, constructed of two laser-cut pieces of black plastic held together by brass stand-offs that hold a PCB between them, and on the front is a cut-out for the sensor while on the rear is one for the 35mm OLED display.At the side on the PCB is a micro USB socket which serves only as a power supply. It’s fair to say that this is a tiny unit.

Applying power from a USB battery bank, the screen comes up with a square colour thermal picture and a colour to temperature calibration stripe to its left. The colours adapt to the range of temperatures visible to the sensor, and there is a crosshair in the centre of the picture for which the temperature in Celsius is displayed below the picture. It’s a very straightforward and intuitive interface that requires no instruction, which is handy because the device has none. Continue reading “Review: Mini AMG8833 Thermal Camera” →

Minimum Viable Quad Build Shows What Starting From Nothing Can Accomplish

August 12, 2021 by 11 Comments

While it’s great to be experienced and have a ton of specialist knowledge needed to solve a problem, there’s something liberating about coming at things from a position of ignorance. Starting at ground zero can lead you down the path less traveled, and reveal solutions that might otherwise not have presented themselves. And, if [Robin Debreuil]’s exploration of the “minimum viable quadcopter” is any example, some pretty fun failure modes too.

The minimum viable product concept is nothing new of course, being a core concept in Lean methodologies and a common practice in many different industries. The idea of building an MVP is to get something working and in the hands of users, who will then give you feedback on everything wrong with it, plus, if you’re lucky, what you got right. That feedback informs the next design, which leads to more feedback and a whole iterative process that should design the perfect widget.

In [Robin]’s case, he wanted to build a quadcopter, but didn’t know where to start. So his first version was as simple as possible: a motor with a propellor and a small LiPo battery. No chassis, no control electronics — nothing. And it worked just about as well as expected. But fixing that problem led to different designs, the process of which was fascinating — we especially liked the quad with opposing motors controlled by mercury tilt switches to sense attitude changes.

In the end, [Robin] took a more conventional tack and used a microcontroller and BetaFlight to get his popsicle stick and hot glue UAV airborne. But the decision to start with a minimum viable design and iterate from there was a powerful learning experience in tune with [Robin]’s off-beat and low-key outlook, which we’ve seen before with his use of bismuth for desoldering and his scratch-off PCBs.

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3D Prints Of Steel — Um — PLA, Rather

August 12, 2021 by 24 Comments

Need a steel beam? You can 3D print PLA beams that are as strong as a steel beam of equivalent weight according to [RepRap]. The Python code for FreeCAD generates a repeating structure especially well suited for belt printers that can print a beam of any length. Keep in mind, of course, given two things that weigh the same, if one is made of steel and the other PLA, the steel one will be physically smaller.

The beams are repeating tetrahedrons which are quite strong with a lot of material on the outer faces to resist bending. Each beam end has a neat block with a wiring hole and a ring of small holes that allow you to mount the beams to things or each other with 30 degree increments of rotation.

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Thrashed, Damaged NES Controller Gets Brought Back To Life

August 11, 2021 by 6 Comments

Electronics might as well be a magical black box to some people. Where some would see a broken NES controller destined for the bin, [Taylor] saw the opportunity for a repair. Thus, the damaged hardware was brought back into useful service.

The controller was bought as part of a job lot, and was heavily damaged when it entered [Taylor]’s ownership. Nintendo built its hardware tough in those days, but the controller had nevertheless been smashed apart, with the case cracked and split and the PCB itself snapped in two.

For someone with basic electronics skills, though, repair was simple. The broken PCB was glued back together with epoxy. The broken traces had solder mask scraped back so that jumper wires could bridge the damaged area and return the circuit to functionality.

From there, it was a simple matter of 3D printing a new case, and the controller was back in service. The case in question was designed by [Alexander Myrman], and has a neat little inset Mario design that’s made visible by paint-filling the inlay.

While it was an easy fix, to the uninitiated in the electronic arts, it might as well be magic. It pays to remember that there are always new people joining the electronics hobby, and projects like these are a great way to learn. It’s also important to note that bringing back old retro hardware is often of great value, as in many cases, they’re not making any more! We see some great restorations around these parts, too. Video after the break.

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Materials For Self Learners

August 11, 2021 by 13 Comments

[João Nuno Carvalho] is a passionate learner. Software engineer by day, he studies all different branches of science and engineering in his spare time. He has organized an impressive list of study / reference materials on a wide variety of subjects that interest him, from aeronautical engineering to quantum mechanics and dozens more in between. In fact, his study lists themselves became so numerous that he collected them into a list of lists, which can be found here on his GitHub repository. These include categories on “How to learn…”

  • Modern Electronics
  • Modern Linux
  • Modern Embedded Systems
  • Mathematics from the ground up
  • Physics from the ground up
  • Modern Compressive Sensing
  • Modern [C, C++, Rust, Python]
  • Modern Machine Learning
  • Modern Aeronautics and Astronautics
  • Guitar on a budget

Another interesting thing we found in his repo was a list of common electrical components. If you can’t remember off the top of your head the part number of common 100 V PNP bipolar transistor, [João]’s list will point you towards a BD136.

It’s quite an impressive list of resources, and we can’t help but wonder how large [Joã0]’s personal library is if it contains even half of the materials from these lists. Check these out if you want to brush up on a topic — they include not only text books and reference volumes, but forums, blogs, YouTube links, etc. On the topic of learning, we wrote a piece back in 2017 on how learning differs between hobbyists and students. Do you have a favorite list-of-lists that you turn to when you want to brush up or learn about a new subject? Let us know in the comments below.