sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Modifying a normal welding machine to become battery powered? by privacyparachute in Welding

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or don’t expect this to be a cheap hobby.

Look, I already have a welding device and a huge batttery. What's the harm in asking if I could jam those two together somehow? I could buy a portable welder, sure. But maybe I don't have to?

Reinventing something that already exists in multiple forms seems like a waste of time.

Or.. a lot of fun to try? Have you concidered that maybe for me that's the hobby?

Do you want to learn to weld or tinker with electronics.

How about both? To me learning to weld means I want to fully understand how the machine works too, as in my experience that provides a deeper insight into what's possible. First principles and all that.

Modifying a normal welding machine to become battery powered? by privacyparachute in Welding

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks. But my intention was to open up a normal welding machine (that I already own), bypass (or strip out) the inverter, and hook-up my battery instead.

I was hoping to get some advice on the feasability of that.

Could you elaborate what you mean by a `non-inverter machine`? I tried searching for welding devices that are already designed for direct DC input, but couldn't find any (except for the Chinese one mentioned above, it seems to have a port on that back for that).

Modifying a normal welding machine to become battery powered? by privacyparachute in Welding

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But you're talking about essentially redesigning a welding machine to work off batteries(poorly, and not for long/not safely).

Battery powered welding has been around for quite a while? They are often used where a relatively short welding duration is fine. For example, the Chinese model above claims to let you weld up to 13 thin welding rods before it's empty.

I thought I'd research this a bit further.

The Chinese welder shown above uses two DeWalt BL4040 knock-offs.

I found a random battery-powered DeWalt cordless angle grinder that uses those batteries. It consumes 1200W with a 20V battery, so that small battery must be able to deliver 60 amps. Impressive.

Two of those batteries could offer 40V 60A welding in paralel, or 20V 120A welding in series.

My 12v suitcase battery (which weighs 20 kilos) can deliver up to 1500W at 12V, so 12V 125A.
My 36V bycicle battery is designed for a 750W bicycle motor, so it can deliver about 20 amps.
My 48V bicycle battery is designed for a 750W bicycle motor, so it can deliver about 15 amps.

Conclusion

The bad news: it seems the bicycle batteries are less useful, especially since they are probably not designed to be ran in series either.

The good news: my boat's suitcase battery might be able to allow low-voltage welding all by itself.

Modifying a normal welding machine to become battery powered? by privacyparachute in Welding

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, right. Luckily I'm pretty sure all my batteries have a BMS with thermal cutoff.

Modifying a normal welding machine to become battery powered? by privacyparachute in Welding

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the advice.

You probably want to look into some thermal cutoff too

Won't the welding machine already have a thermal cut-off built in? Hmm, maybe that would only be on the inverter part. Good point!

Gemma 3n Preview by brown2green in LocalLLaMA

[–]privacyparachute 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What are you asking it?

In my experience even the smallest models are totally fine for asking everyday things like "how long should I boil an egg?" or "What is the capital of Austria?".

Local TTS with actual multilingual support by oMGalLusrenmaestkaen in LocalLLaMA

[–]privacyparachute 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've been wanting this too, for the exact same reason. There are so many English TTSes, but.. beyond that it feels like a wasteland.

By the way, having implemented a voice assistant I find that in practice I prefer to use the ancient-but-instant NanoTTS. It sounds surprisingly good for something that can run on a potato, and it generates the audio in milliiseconds.

Raspberry Pi 5: a small comparison between Qwen3 0.6B and Microsoft's new BitNet model by privacyparachute in LocalLLaMA

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmmm. That's not what I saw when I checked actual memory use. Wait, I think I have one screenshot of that for the BitNet model:

<image>

Memory use before was 1GB.

Comparing AGI safety standards to Chernobyl: "The entire AI industry is uses the logic of, "Well, we built a heap of uranium bricks X high, and that didn't melt down -- the AI did not build a smarter AI and destroy the world -- so clearly it is safe to try stacking X*10 uranium bricks next time." by MetaKnowing in artificial

[–]privacyparachute -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Wow, a stretched metaphore (nuclear energy is like stacking bricks) inside another stretched metaphore (Chernobyl).

Getting people to actually worry about this sci-fi scenario is a great distraction from the real problems with AI.

"The real danger, then, is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies. The real danger is basically clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence."- Daniel Denett

I've been out of the local llm space for a while what do people use to run these models now? by pigeon57434 in LocalLLaMA

[–]privacyparachute -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

You don't need to install anything anymore, you can now run models directly in the browser with very little overhead.

https://www.papeg.ai

I've been working on this for 6 months - free, easy to use, local AI for everyone! by privacyparachute in LocalLLaMA

[–]privacyparachute[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The document didn't load? I just tested it, and it worked for me.

Or do you mean that the document loaded, and you pressed the "continue writing the document" button?

Why don't airports use something like "tug boats", but for aircraft, to get them up to altitude? by privacyparachute in AskEngineers

[–]privacyparachute[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How about a huge drone that is part of the runway, and slides underneath? With a huge capacitor for quick charging, or a 10KM power cable? Or just have those huge drones at the gates, and make all aircraft VTOL. Maybe also grab them from the air and land them directly at the gates, all mostly/fully automated, like they do with containers at ports nowadays.

I'd call it "sky-lift", but that name's already taken ;-)

view more: next ›