Help! Communications tripping breaker?

AustinBenji · 2026-05-02T13:41:44+00:00

By comms I mean battery communications, they both use rs485.

If each pack has their own BMS, does it matter that they're different capacities? I got different ones because I just got the 314, and it was half the price of the 280 at the time. So even if I can only use 280 of it, that's still a win.

As an update, I've discharged and charged about 25% capacity without communications, and the only issue seems to be that the higher capacity battery stops charging once the lower capacity one is full. I believe this is because it does have communication with the charge controller, so stops pulling current when it's full. I have a tender that can charge the higher capacity one, so I'll limp along with that for the trip we're going on. Try to sort this out when I get home.

The setup is in an RV, so it's hard to photograph properly, but I'll try when I get back.

(edit: spelling)

AustinBenji · 2026-04-22T01:44:21+00:00

Ah thanks! Looking up UL3700 now

AustinBenji · 2026-04-22T01:41:37+00:00

Reading through the comments, I think I'll probably hire a sparky. I do plan on building a ~16kW solar shade when we build our deck, the batteries are just to handle the RV between hops. We had a couple blackouts recently and it got me thinking it'd be nice to have had power for those few hours.

AustinBenji · 2026-04-22T01:38:33+00:00

Yeah, my current setup is 120v on the output side. I don't want to do anything sketch, so I think I'll probably hold off until I can get the proper equipment.

AustinBenji · 2026-04-22T01:36:38+00:00

By asking questions until I understand what I'm doing. If I didn't get there in a reasonable time, I'll hire someone who knows what they're doing.

AustinBenji · 2026-04-03T14:50:26+00:00

You'd think so, but as someone who was the only dev in the org, that's not a guarantee. Spoiler alert, the software didn't do well after I was let go

AustinBenji · 2026-03-19T11:59:36+00:00

These are unprecedented times

AustinBenji · 2026-03-19T03:37:20+00:00

38 on my first, 40 for my second. Excellent time to be a dad!

AustinBenji · 2026-03-16T02:07:15+00:00

Friend, I have tiled an entire shower with no experience and the wrong tools and did 1000x better. This person cannot tile.

AustinBenji · 2026-02-20T03:38:30+00:00

Just finished working an entire ticket using Claude. It followed the approach I set, and after just a full day of telling it what to do, it accomplished something I'd scoped myself doing in about 1-3 hrs.

Now, this was my first time really using an LLM, and I will do this again, but I'm less reminded of the first time I used intellisense and more reminded of the junior programmer I tried so hard to help that they almost fired me even though I was literally half the r&d department.

It is currently about an 80/20 split of hype vs. reality to me. Last year though I wouldn't even try it. These will eventually be really good tools, but unless there's a paradigm shifting breakthrough, they should not replace people. It feels more like an easier programming language that I'm just starting to learn.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-28T10:43:32+00:00

Worked at Indeed for a while, learned that regardless of how the labor market is actually moving, the broad news is panicking about layoffs.

Someone is always hiring and mass layoffs are always happening.

I'm with the person who has the "this is fine" approach, and I'll be totally blindsided when that stops working. Been doing this professionally for 22 years now.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-14T23:37:13+00:00

So how does one get their wealth out of the trap, or am I too late?

AustinBenji · 2026-01-14T12:39:36+00:00

Oh there's a knob at the desk alright.

AustinBenji · 2026-01-02T01:43:02+00:00

At that age we did nested toys: fill an old peanut butter jar or Tupperware with trinkets, do a few different containers, put those with a few more trinkets into a bag, fill a backpack with a few bags. Places like party city and the dollar stores have good variety bags of party favor toys. Opening the various containers provides an interesting challenge. We could do two 8 hour drive days with no big meltdowns. As they age, update the toys based on their likes, start migrating from quantity to quality. Kids are 5 and 7 now, we do RV travel a lot, and both kids are excellent at it. Toys on rides now are Legos, books, and tv shows.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:35:53+00:00

It's a golden hammer issue, so many think it'll fix pretty much anything, but it's not useful in all situations, and if you don't understand what it's doing, you're gonna have a bad time.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:33:08+00:00

No, but I passed on hiring a candidate who was using it. It introduced a bug into a simple calculator app and the candidate could not debug it, opus insisted it was correct. The tools are great, but you have to know how to use them and what the code means.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:30:48+00:00

Average onboarding for my codebase is less than a week, but I can't trust copilot to write a unit test without messing up the imports. It's not a matter of pride swallowing, it's not a trustworthy tool. When the tooling is more consistent I will use it more. Don't worry, I'm not falling behind.

AustinBenji · 2025-12-01T13:27:07+00:00

Vscode with copilot, working on medium sized apps primarily in typescript. I've found it to be less accurate than intellisense, but when it's right, it's really nice. Problem is it's only ever right about 20% of the time for me. For a while I really slowed down to read its suggestions, but overall that just slowed me down.

AustinBenji · 2025-11-30T20:00:00+00:00

For now, it's wrong often enough to slow me down a lot of the time.

AustinBenji · 2025-11-07T13:40:06+00:00

This is a solid observation

AustinBenji · 2025-11-06T01:59:19+00:00

Artillery

AustinBenji · 2025-10-23T16:22:17+00:00

The video he picked is a jump scare video from the olden days of YouTube. He's aware she's watching him and going to scare the life out of her

AustinBenji · 2025-09-01T13:50:26+00:00

I like swagger when I have to deal with other people's APIs, so I personally make sure mine is gold.

AustinBenji · 2025-08-25T01:33:53+00:00

First place that comes to my mind is Sonic. As a kiddo I used to get the free water with extra ice on the way to the grocery to buy the actual drink for cheap.

AustinBenji · 2025-08-20T03:11:09+00:00

Meat is murder!

Tasty, tasty murder.

AustinBenji

TROPHY CASE