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Elon Musk is Driving Tech Forward - CoT 053
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Come along as we count our blessings, such as truly broadband Satellite internet, brain implants, solar power at your local fueling station, leadfoot electrical generation, powering an entire island with the sun, astonishing advancements in weather satellite tech, and of course a dash of Deathwatch, Content I Like, and Today I Learned.
Satellite Internet That Doesn’t Suck
- Satellite Internet sucks
- Latency galore Data caps
- Current solutions are capped around 15Mbit (50GB peak traffic, 50GB off-peak)
- 600-750ms is standard for current satellite solutions
Controlling Your Environment With Your Mind - Progress
- Your brain generates electrical signals. When you think, certain areas of your brain are engaged. So, if you can sense the electricity generated in certain parts of your brain as you think about specific things, you could use that generated signal as an instruction set. Interpret the electrical input with software, and you could then use your mind to impact the world around you. Software is programmed to react to your input and make something specific happen. One application is for people who are locked-in. By locked-in, we mean they can’t interact normally using limbs, their voice, etc. They may have no muscle control due to quadriplegia or disease, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. If all you’ve got left is your ability to think, then an interface that can react to your thoughts can help you interact with the real world. Communicate. Get work done. Cost and complexity have been an issue with these sorts of interfaces in the past. But now, there’s a simpler, cheaper system that is working for an anonymous ALS sufferer. The system consists of two electrodes planted beneath the skull onto the brain. One electrode is over a region stimulated when controlling the right hand. The other is over the region stimulated when counting backward. Both are not required. One is considered a backup for the other. The subject is leveraging the electrode used for controlling the right hand, and trained it by playing Pong. The electrode monitoring the “counting backward” section isn’t in use yet. The electrode is hard-wired to a small box in her chest, that translates the signal into a software input read wirelessly by a tablet running the software. The system lets her spell out words. The software interface monitors the electrical patterns of her thoughts, and she can move a selector box around a screen to choose letters and spell out words. It’s slow. With practice, she can select a letter in about 20 seconds, meaning it can take several minutes to spell a word. But that’s not nothing, and the time has improved from about 50 seconds. This is a backup to her primary eye-movement tracking system, which she might lose the function of due to ALS, and which doesn’t work that well in bright light, such as outdoors.
Solar Infrastructure Coming to a Gas Station Near You!
https://electrek.co/2016/11/15/oil-company-solar-panels-gas-stations-convert-ev-charging-station/
- Total, the French multinational oil & gas company announced $300 million USD investment in Solar They aim to install 200 MW of solar PV at 5,000 of their fueling stations around the world. That’s 40 KW per station The official line from Total is:
- “The project is fully aligned with Total’s ambition of becoming the responsible energy major and its commitment to developing solar power. It will reduce our carbon emissions by 100,000 tons per year and cut our electricity bill by $40 million per year. The panels will be supplied by our affiliate SunPower, which offers the world’s most efficient solar technology. This project demonstrates Total’s confidence in SunPower, especially its ability to bring our customers competitive, clean energy.”
- 40 KW at full tilt will generate 40 KWh per hour, so in areas with 4-7 hours of “peak” sun (most of North America, for instance), that would generate many hundreds of kilowatt hours of electricity per day. The average “full EV” battery pack can hold 60 kwh of electricity. Could this be a play to simultaneously eliminate Total’s electrical bills and prepare for the coming electrification of the global vehicle fleet? Seems plausible to me. Slap some PowerWall or similar storage in place to make sure the generated electricity doesn’t go to waste and then install some DC fast charging stations and you’re in business.
Fat people rejoice - recovering footstep energy is now possible!
- EnGoPlanet is selling a tile that, when you walk on it, can charge a battery. 4-8 watts can be recovered, which I take the mean that the heavier you are (or the harder you step), the more energy that can be recovered. This is used primarily for street lighting right now, although there’s more energy input to the system than just foot traffic. There’s also more energy output than light. The system is also solar, so in addition to the footstep energy recovered, the sun contributes. In addition to lighting, the system also offered video surveillance plus USB and wireless charging. Currently, there’s a pilot system installed. “Four streetlights in a plaza off the Las Vegas Strip.”
Tesla / SolarCity Provide Solar to an Entire Pacific Island
https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/22/tesla-runs-island-on-solar-power/
- Tesla has officially been greenlit by its shareholders to acquire Solar City As a show of what the soon-to-be singular company is looking to do in the power generation & storage field, they installed a solar microgrid at 1.4 MW for the Pacific Island of Ta’u (part of American Samoa) 5,328 Solar Panels 60 PowerPacks
- PowerPacks are the industrial & utility grade big brother to the PowerWall Storage capacity of 6 MW ~3 days of cloud cover without issue (though that’s incredibly rare on Ta’u)
- Preventing the burning of ~300 gallons (1,135 liters) of diesel every single day.
- Cheaper (long term) Cleaner More reliable (diesel shipments can be delayed, etc.)
Better weather satellites going into orbit
http://noaasis.noaa.gov/NOAASIS/ml/genlsatl.html
- NOAA has been putting weather satellites into orbit for decades. There are at least two major kinds. Polar orbiters and geostationary orbiters. Polar orbiters are relatively close to the ground. “The orbits are circular, with an altitude between 830 (morning orbit) and 870 (afternoon orbit) km, and are sun synchronous.” Geostationary are “35,800 km (22,300 miles) above the Earth, high enough to allow the satellites a full-disc view of the Earth.” Back in the day, I used to listen to NOAA polar orbiters with my all-frequency receiver. The trick was to be able to receive the transmission consistently, which would vary in strength as the satellite came up over the horizon. There were some fancy antenna schemes out there to improve reception, including a double-helix design that I all but built before I ended up moving into an apartment. The signal was similar to a fax machine, where scan lines were broadcast. I could send the audio output of the receiver into a soundcard input on my PC, and some open source software would decode the satellite scanlines into a picture and colorize it. To predict when a given NOAA satellite would be overhead, I used software that used orbiter datasets from NOAA, and would then draw lines and coverage areas over a map. You could use that map data to determine when the satellite would be overhead, and how high in the sky it would be. Then it was a matter of tuning to the right frequency and waiting for the pass. Somewhere buried in my photo archives, I have a picture direct from a NOAA satellite of Hurricane Georges passing overhead when I lived in Pensacola in September 1998. The new satellite that NOAA is launching is the first in a series dubbed GOES-R. It will cost about $11B to launch these between now and the end of the program in 2035. GOES-R satellites are more capable than existing weather satellites. “The GOES-R improves every current GOES satellite product, while adding new information about lightning, smoke, fires, and volcanic ash, among other variables. The images it produces of weather systems on Earth will have four times the resolution of its predecessor. And with its new Advanced Baseline Imager, the satellite will have the capacity to scan major storm systems every 30 seconds and the entire western hemisphere five time faster.”
Hughesnet & their ilk.
- They may be the only option a lot of people in remote locations have now... Within a few years, that should change, if SpaceX has their way. Why? 3 L’s - Latency, Low speed, and Limits
Content I Like
Udemy
- Want to learn something? Udemy probably has a course for it. Software Development, IT certifications, photography, languages, health & fitness, music theory & instruments, marketing, finance… the list goes on. I scored several classes during their Black Friday “Binge Learn” event for $13 each, so if you can grab a course during a sale, you can get some great content pretty cheap.
Today I Learned
LOLCats date back to the 1870s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat#History
British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s. To these he usually added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal.[4]
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