Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity”→
Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.
As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.
With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant into commercial operation, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?
Of all the rabbit holes we technical types tend to fall down, perhaps the one with the most twists and turns is: time. Some of this is due to the curiously mysterious nature of time itself, but more has to do with the various ways we’ve decided to slice and dice time to suit our needs. Most of those methods are (wisely) based upon the rhythms of nature, but maddeningly, the divisions we decided upon when the most precise instrument we had was our eyes are just a little bit off. And for a true time junkie, “a little bit off” can be a big, big problem.
Luckily, even the most dedicated timekeepers — those of us who feel physically ill when the clock on the stove and the clock on the microwave don’t match — have a place to go that’s a haven of temporal correctness: radio station WWV. Along with sister stations WWVB and WWVH, these stations are the voice of the US National Institutes for Standards and Technology’s Time and Frequency Division, broadcasting the official time for the country over shortwave radio.
Some might say the programming coming from these stations is a bit on the dry side, and it’s true that you can only listen to the seconds slip by for so long before realizing that there are probably better things to do with your day. But the WWV signals pack a surprising amount of information into their signals, some of it only tangentially related to our reckoning of time. This makes these stations and the services they provide essential infrastructure for our technological society, which in turn makes it worth your time to look into just how they do it.
I recently had the opportunity to purchase an early version of a new display, and it happened to be just the thing I needed to make a project work. That display is the Elecrow 11.6″ CrowVision touchscreen slated for release in 2024. Preorders are being accepted on Crowd Supply.
I had an idea for a retro-inspired PC build that was just waiting for a screen like this. I’ll talk about the display and what’s good about it, then showcase the build for which it was the missing piece. If you’ve got a project waiting for something similar, maybe this part will provide what you need or at least turn on some new ideas.
What Is It?
The CrowVision 11.6″ 1366 x 768 touchscreen has an HDMI input, USB output for touch data, and accepts 12 V DC. It’s made to interface easily with a Raspberry Pi or other SBC (single-board computer).
Personally I consider a display like this to be the minimum comfortable size for using desktop type applications in a windowed environment. Most displays in this space are smaller. But aside from that, what helps make it useful for embedding into a custom enclosure is the physical layout and design.
Since I was looking for the largest display that could be flush-mounted in an enclosure without a lot of extra space around the display’s sides, it was just what I needed. The integrated touchscreen is a nice bonus.
As both beginning hackers and Silicon Valley investors alike keep discovering, there are a lot of differences between hardware and software. One important difference is cost of iterating over a design. In software, you can comfortably rerun your build process and push updates out near instantly to tons of users. In hardware, all of that costs money, and I do mean, it costs way more money than you’d want to spend.
When I see people order boards that could never work because of some fundamental design assertions, with mistakes entirely preventable, it hurts. Not in an “embarrassment” way – it’s knowing that, if they asked someone to take a look at the design, they could’ve received crucial feedback, pulled the traces on the board differently or added some components, and avoided spending a significant chunk of money and time expecting and assembling a board that has a fundamental mishap.
Every thing like this might set a beginner back on their hacker journeys, or just have them spend some of their valuable time, and we can do a ton to prevent that by simply having someone experienced take a look.
By the end of the decade, NASA’s Artemis program hopes to have placed boots back on the Moon for the first time since 1972. But not for the quick sightseeing jaunts of the Apollo era — the space agency wants to send regular missions made up of international crews down to the lunar surface, where they’ll eventually have permanent living and working facilities.
The goal is to turn the Moon into a scientific outpost, and that requires a payload delivery infrastructure far more capable than the Apollo Lunar Module (LM). NASA asked their commercial partners to design crewed lunar landers that could deliver tens of tons of to the lunar surface, with SpaceX and Blue Origin ultimately being awarded contracts to build and demonstrate their vehicles over the next several years.
Starship and Blue Moon, note scale of astronauts
At a glance, the two landers would appear to have very little in common. The SpaceX Starship is a sleek, towering rocket that looks like something from a 1950s science fiction film; while the Blue Moon lander utilizes a more conventional design that’s reminiscent of a modernized Apollo LM. The dichotomy is intentional. NASA believes there’s a built-in level of operational redundancy provided by the companies using two very different approaches to solve the same goal. Should one of the landers be delayed or found deficient in some way, the other company’s parallel work would be unaffected.
But despite their differences, both landers do utilize one common technology, and it’s a pretty big one. So big, in fact, that neither lander will be able to touch the Moon until it can be perfected. What’s worse is that, to date, it’s an almost entirely unproven technology that’s never been demonstrated at anywhere near the scale required.
A few weeks ago, I found myself the victim of flights from hell. My first flight was cancelled, leaving me driving home late at night, only to wake again for a red-eye the next morning. That was cancelled as well, with the second replacement delayed by a further hour. All in all I ended up spending a good ten hours extra in the airport surrounded by tired, sick, and coughing individuals, and ended up a full 16 hours late to my destination. On the return, I’d again tangle with delays, and by the weekend’s close, I’d contracted a nasty flu for my trouble.
All this had me riled up and looking for revenge. I had lost hours of my life to these frustrations, and the respiratory havoc claimed a further week of my working life. It had me realizing that we could surely improve the performance and hygiene of our airliners with a simple idea: a website called Flights From Hell.
