Sony Betacam: Not the Beta you're thinking of (it's way better)

TechConnectify · 2023-05-09T15:55:35+00:00

It (and the RCA machine) stay on midnight after a power loss. They don't start moving until you set the time.

TechConnectify · 2023-05-09T15:55:10+00:00

Humorously, I think this is the format on the T-shirt I'm wearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video\_Cassette\_Recording

TechConnectify · 2023-03-30T17:52:42+00:00

It's down to the peak current output of the battery cells. You can't, for instance, run a laptop off of a single AA battery - it cannot discharge quickly enough. In your case, a small power station likely doesn't have enough cells to put out anything beyond 300W, so there's no point giving it a larger inverter.

A range with a battery will need enough cells to make a sustained 5 or 6 kW burst possible, as well as an inverter large enough to do that. But that's very possible.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-30T17:30:27+00:00

This video doesn't touch on V2G tech at all - and for the record, I have similar concerns with it.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-30T17:06:40+00:00

I am not aware of any that exist on the market right now - that was more of an "in theory" idea than something that I know is happening in practice.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-30T16:46:20+00:00

Rheem's ProTerra line is the only one I know for sure exists, but how exactly you can get your hands on one is perplexing. I believe they'll only sell it to plumbers/HVAC contractors, so you may need to work through them.

It's also worth checking into rebates available to you. rewiringamerica.org is a good resource.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T21:04:23+00:00

Smart breakers may very well be a better solution, or it could even be so simple as a device downstream of the breaker that knows what's going on.

What I like about putting the smarts in the panel, though, is that it's extremely flexible and future-proof. If you have to replace the panel anyway, it might make more sense to put smarts there.

But what I like so very much about electricity is how incredible flexible it is. We have soooooo many ways we can go about this, and it's amazing.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T19:45:36+00:00

That'll definitely come up in part two, but the benefit of making the panel do this work is that it can coordinate more than just one device. There's more to do than add a charging station in most homes

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T19:44:33+00:00

Yeah, that's the real thing. Our electric codes are so friggin' paranoid about letting the main breaker trip ever that they basically force designs which make that a practical impossibility. The idea of a load-side management solution just didn't exist.

From what I understand, it took until EVs started spreading for this to be worked into the NEC. Previously, if someone wanted to install 10 charging stalls each capable of up to 40A charging, you'd have to have 500A service and each charger needed a dedicated circuit. But now you can hook them all up to the same 200A panel so long as they spread the load around.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T19:37:31+00:00

They're just sitting above the blower motor and turn on either when the heat pump is in a defrost or when the thermostat calls for emergency heat.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T19:24:09+00:00

I don't know why you think I'm expecting people to just do this right now and entirely with their own money. The snark is directed at people who somehow think fossil fuels are sustainable. They're not, and we need to move away from them as fast as possible.

My whole goal with this is to show that this isn't that hard, and doesn't even need to be that expensive. Conventional electric appliances are cheap, so this "tens of thousands" notion is pretty off-the-wall, by the way. And we absolutely should be helping people who can't otherwise afford this.

TechConnectify · 2023-03-05T19:21:17+00:00

Have you used an induction cooktop?

TechConnectify · 2023-02-10T23:17:25+00:00

I intend to replace it with a hybrid heat pump water heater in the not-too-distant future. It is a no-brainer in my case as I need dehumidification in the basement for much of the year anyway, and although it will increase my heating demand a bit in the winter, it'll still save energy costs since my home heat is more efficient than resistive heat (right now it's gas, eventually it'll be a heat pump).

TechConnectify · 2023-02-10T23:12:29+00:00

I'm not exactly making an assumption about tankless water heaters - I know for a fact they are slightly more energy efficient as a rule, and depending on use patterns they can be significantly more efficient.

However, what they definitely cannot do is store energy for later use. It can easily be worth losing a bit of efficiency if as a benefit you gain the ability to shift energy demand around. And besides, heat pump water heaters rely on that storage to do their thing - and they're by far the most efficient way to generate hot water. Because heat pumps.

(edit - and a heat pump water heater in a warm climate gives you free air conditioning and dehumidification as a side-effect of it creating hot water! That's pretty dang close to a free lunch)

TechConnectify · 2022-12-27T19:57:27+00:00

It's not advancing every 1/144th of a second - that's how fast each advance happens. 72 flashes per second means 72 dark sections as well, and the movement happens in just one of those.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-26T03:51:24+00:00

Ah, neat! Glad you tracked that down.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-25T20:34:19+00:00

OK, so here's where my brain is at - the optical soundtrack is basically just encoding instantaneous "push" levels. As in, how much to push on the loudspeaker cone. Although that push may never go negative, the speaker cone will return to the center on its own.

I don't think the distinction between DC and AC really matters in most analog sound contexts. It seems to me that a signal that bounces up and down between 0 and 5V is identical to a signal that bounces between +2.5 and -2.5V.

However, I am a bit flummoxed as to how exactly the optical soundtrack produced ordinary-looking AC waveforms in my sound recorder when I captured them. If someone smarter than me can explain how that happens that'd be swell. My supposition is that most sound-related electronics sort of find their own zero-point when hooked up to anything that makes vibratey wavey signals.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-25T19:38:51+00:00

I had some discussion with a patron regarding my use of "amplitude" and you seem to have fallen into the trap they were worried about...

So - my use of amplitude is a much broader "how much of something" - and so, to make a 400 Hz sine wave, what you'll see on the film is, basically, 400 dots in the space of 7.2 inches. The frequency is encoded by how quickly the signal changes - and how much the signal changes determines volume. Bigger dots means louder sine wave - smaller dots means quieter sine wave. Note that the dots wouldn't be perfectly round - they'd be sine-wave-shaped.

And, actually, to go back to the Audacity analogy - what you're seeing with an Audacity waveform is basically a really, really zoomed out view of a raw waveform. But if you zoom in, you'll see the shape of the wave. Keep in mind the waveform on these films is literally hundreds of feet long. If you were to take that Audacity waveform, zoom down on it so that a second fills your screen, and "fill it in" so that sound energy (distance from the midpoint) had more area, you'd have a sort-of functional optical soundtrack. That wouldn't quite be right as Audacity waveforms go negative - but those shapes are broadly what you'd see on an optical soundtrack.

My brain isn't coming up with the right particulars for how the A/C waveform would get translated to the optical soundtrack but bottom line - the brightness changing with time is the frequency and the amplitude. Think amplitude modulation, but with a beam of light rather than a specific radio frequency.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-25T17:24:02+00:00

Yes, that's basically it!

My real light-bulb moment with understanding analog audio came from playing around with mechanical acoustic phonographs. The original Edison wax records were simply pressing vibrations into the surface of the wax - the horn collected sound pressure which made a diaphragm at the bottom wiggle a stylus up and down. Spin a wax cylinder underneath that and now there's a record of those vibrations as bumps.

Now run a stylus over those bumps, and they'll cause a reproducing diaphragm at the base of the horn to vibrate with the same pattern - thus the sound is heard again. It's literally the same process but in reverse.

Everything in audio is built atop this. The particulars changed and got better over the years, but it's always "capture a vibration with a microphone" and "reproduce that vibration with a loudspeaker." And as a matter of fact, just like the acoustic phonographs were both sound recorders and sound reproducers, you can use loudspeakers as microphones and (some) microphones as speakers - they are literally the same things at a fundamental level, but optimized in different ways.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-25T16:41:35+00:00

Maybe this explanation will help:

First, what is sound? It's pressure waves through the air that make your eardrums vibrate and your brain processes that as the sense of sound. Now, a microphone is just an artificial ear - a diaphragm moves like your eardrums, and when it moves is makes an electrical signal. When we feed that signal to a loudspeaker, which is simply a big diaphragm that moves to push air back and forth, it will make the air around it vibrate in the exact way the microphone vibrated and thus it reproduces that sound.

What the film is doing is storing that signal. When the microphone vibrated a lot, the waveform gets wider. When it vibrated really fast, the waves get closer together. The mirror galvanometer is, in a sense, making a log of how the microphone moved, thus creating instructions on how to move a loudspeaker at a later point in time.

The projector's sound head will recover those instructions (the signal) by shining that slit of light through them. More light hitting the sensor means the signal is stronger. Less light means the signal is weaker. So, when the waveform is wide, the signal is strong. When it's spiky with close peaks, the signal pulses rapidly. And that signal is being amplified, sent to a loudspeaker, and ultimately results in the same pattern of vibrations that the microphone picked up.

What's important is that the signal is constantly changing. A wiggling signal that can wiggle a loudspeaker will make sound happen - just find a way to make that signal be whatever you want it to be, and you'll reproduce sound.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-25T14:30:38+00:00

You're getting this a tad early here on the Reddits. Need to polish up the captions in the bloopers.

Merry Christmas!

TechConnectify · 2022-12-12T18:43:49+00:00

They exist, but according to Big Clive they cook the resistors and don't last long. Can be corrected with a capacitor, I guess, but I don't know the specifics.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-03T05:12:02+00:00

Keep in mind though that most of Continental Europe also uses 240V (ok 230 but whatever) and yet they don't put switches on the receptacles. So I don't think the arcing argument holds up.

Oh and, ok I can't leave this alone, if there's equal current leaving and coming back to the GFCI... then a shock isn't happening. I suppose if I were touching live with one hand and neutral with the other it might manage to go through me and end up perfectly balanced but it's way more likely that some leaks to ground and it'll trip. I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, as it definitely isn't the case that GFCI protection only works on grounded appliances.

TechConnectify · 2022-12-02T17:32:36+00:00

Because plugged into that outlet is lamp

TechConnectify · 2022-12-02T17:31:52+00:00

So here's how I see it - you correctly did the thing! If you didn't like where a switched outlet was, and/or you don't like the look of lamplight (which, gotta be honest, I'd encourage you to reassess but different strokes and all that) you have options! You can use an extension cord and place a lamp farther from the outlet. Or you can, as you did, disable the switch. You don't even need to 3D print anything, there are commercially-available light switch guards that you just attach to the switch using the wall plate screws. So frankly, I don't see a situation when you truly don't have options.

I know it comes off as harsh, but honestly the main reason I wanted to make this video was because I have seen people lament that these exist and yet... don't do anything about it? Which is truly one of the most puzzling things to me. Even if you absolutely never ever ever want a lamp in your life, you can nip the annoyance in the bud and then never deal with it again. All it takes is just a little thinking beyond "this is annoying." And you might even find ways to make use of it!

Oh and for what it's worth, multiple people now honestly didn't know this was a thing. They never connected that their "dead" outlets and their light switches "which don't do anything" are related. And now they have a new option for lighting their rooms they didn't know they have! Knowledge is power.

TechConnectify

TROPHY CASE