UK fuel theft

You substitute insults for thinking, and aren't very good that.

Discuss some electronics. That's the topic here.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I live in flat in Sydney. There's no roof that I could put solar panels on.

Australia hasn't got a nation wide grid - the gap between western Australia and the rest of the country is too big to be worth bridging - but the two halves of the country have both had grids for more than century now. Australians who live in house with roofs mostly do have solar panels, and anybody who has them and has the capital to buy a home battery (they aren't cheap) has got one. My oncologist friend and his statistician wife moved house recently to a place without stairs (they are as old as I am) and their new house has both solar panels and a battery. They bought the battery.

My electric car is going to have to wait until the little Mercedes my wife bought in 2011 wears out. It is still doing fine and I don't use it often enough to worry about the carbon dioxide it emits.

Get him to add a power wall or something similar, and his electricity bill will go down at lot. That makes the solar panels a lot more attractive.

You probably don't talk to your neighbours about that sort of stuff. You don't know enough to do it well.

You experience uncongenial intellectual insights as insults. They aren't designed to be insulting, no matter how much you dislike them. so you are judging them against an inappropriate criterion.

I do that quite often. Much of what I do post does seem to go over your head. Your contributions to the very long low distortion sine wave oscillator thread weren't impressive.

You didn't try to join in until it had been running for quite while, and you never did seem to get the point.

It's not difficult nowadays to make a variable-frequency 1- PPM-distortion sine wave. The problem is measuring it.

It would be an interesting hobby.

Did you ever build your low-distortion oscillator? I wouldn't trust a Spice sim at that level.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Sure I talk to him. We take care of one anothers houses when someone is on vacation. We have door keys. We swap baked goods. He stays in our cabin in Truckee, as do some other neighbors.

He has a fancy digital front-door lock that stopped working a few weeks ago. Dead battery? Code crash? I let him into my back yard, he jumped the fence, climbed up to a deck, and got in the back way.

His solar panels don't make much power in our climate at our latitude. And they need maintanance.

He parked the entire array on our roof when he had his roof repaired. That was crazy expensive.

We don't have many hurricanes or tornados here, but panels get ripped off roofs where people do.

Electric car and solar panel purchases are mostly driven by government financial incentives here. China is the main beneficiary.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Same in the UK.

Wait until enough people are committed to electric cars and the fuel revenue to the government drops - then they will have to start taxing electic cars and we'll see a fair comparison in running costs with petrol and diesel cars.

Car makers are getting tired of losing gigabucks on electric cars.

Ford, GM, Honda, Porsche.

Not to mention the Jaguar suicide. Apparently a 95% drop in sales is a clever marketing strategy.

Maybe electric cars are a novelty buy. Like Miatas and PT Cruisers. Once the fans have all bought one, the sales die, and nobody wants a used PT Cruiser.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Sure. You just don't have technically informed conversations.

But the power that they do make more than covers the interest on the investment they represent. Finding somebody to buy it when they are making power is difficult - the utility companies don't like doing it for you, and won't pay much for it.

Putting in a couple of kilowatt hours worth of battery can mean that you buy a lot less power from the utility company, which means that you get the retail price for the power you do generate, which is a lot hogher than the feed-in rate.

You have to design the mounting arrangements to cope with the worst cases stresses they are likely to see. Tornado take off roofs, so it seems that Americans don't bother designing for them.

That's not true in Australia. The fossil carbon extraction industry has a vested interest in lying to you about that, and we know that you are gullible sucker for their propaganda.

Electric cars run at less than half the cost per mile of their combustion-engined equivalents. Hybrids - which run their combustion engines close to maximum efficiency- also offer useful savings.

The batteries are expensive and don't last forever, but don't come close to cancelling out the advantage.

BYD seems to be making a bundle. They went to the trouble of developing the blade battery technology for their cars, which does seem to give them an advantage over people who buy in old technology batteries.

John Larkin is a sucker for fossil carbon extraction industry propaganda.

The aim wasn't to make a variable frequency source, though it is possible to move the frequency a bit by feeding back a quadrature element in the same way you feed back an in-phase element to get the amplitude right. It is clearly possible and I have simulated it, but I don't know of anybody that has done it.

Fourier transforms pick out the harmonics of the fundamental that are the distortion, making measurement relatively easy. Very sharp notch filters to get rid of the fundamental would do the same sort of job, but you probably would have to tweak them non-stop to keep the notch at exactly the right frequency.

One ppm isn't a hard target to hit with a low distortion op amp. Jim Williams did better than that in one of his application notes using a FET as a variable feedback resistor as his gain control element. The main point of that exercise seems to have been to demonstrate how good the low distortion op amp really was.

Not all that interesting.

Never got around to it. I've still got the bits. There do seem to be people around that built similar circuits that did validate the Spice models.

My Audi A3 rocks. Custom-ordered from the factory. 240 HP v-6 with the Borg-Warner dial-clutch 6-speed tranny. AWD. It screams up mountainsides at altitude.

Great ski car, except for the tiny ground clearance. I can drive right through chain controls.

Small enough to be a good city car too.

Of course it does. The electric-powered equivalent will probably be just as nice to drive, but Audi hasn't yet invested the money in batteries designed explicitly for electric cars.

But obsolescent all the same.

I wouldn't want to be stuck on the upgrade to Donner Summit, in a slow line, at 15 deg F, in an electric car. With the heater off.

Teslas are rarely seen in Truckee in the winter.

Unfortunately so. Most Audis are now the dinky 2 liter turbo, a torqueless wonder.

I plan to rebuild my A3 forever.

People leave notes on my windshield offering to buy it. No.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Why would you turn the heater off?

Their owners are more nearly sane than people who buy Audi's?

People do get invested in their cars. It's just a lump of machinery. The rational approach might be to find out how much the buyers was willing to pay, but a note under windscreen wiper can also come from a scammer, and the risk-benefit analysis probably favours binning the note.

A decent engine. Some units have a forged crankshaft and are very popular for modding. With the addition of aftermaket forged pistons/rods and a turbo it can achieve over 800bhp with a remap.

Most mass market cars with V6's and above have been taken off the UK market in recent years.

To save battery energy in hopes of passing the summit at 7200 feet. It might take 20 hours to get a tow truck in a blizzard.

Batteries don't work well at low temperatures, and charging stations are far apart. If you park at a ski area all day, things cool off.

We have seen some Teslas in clusters, looks like mutual aid convoys. Sort of electric wagon trains.

Shoppers at the Truckee Safeway park in the charging stalls, since they are rarely used.

Some people have an appreciation for dynamic motion, roller coasters and skiing and cars and motorcycles. Some get nauseated. I enjoy violent motion. I don't get seasick. The Audi has great dynamics and is fun.

How about you? Do you enjoy 3D motion and acceleration? I think the same brain parts that enjoy swoopy motion also visualize circuit dynamics.

It's not for sale.

One note included a $20 bill. I gave it to a beggar lady.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Since you aren't much good at visualising circuit dynamics, this probably rates as one of your bad ideas.

I played field hockey for decades and there's a lot of 3-d motion in that - I played goal-keeper quite a lot and the incoming ball does tend to be moving in all three dimensions. It didn't strike me as having anything to do with visualising circuit dynamics, where my time scale was a lot slower.

I did say "the rational approach". Being rational is hard work, and few people bother.

There aren't all that many of them on the streets in Australia. There are welfare services that look after people who need support, and begging is frowned upon as way of making a living. The UK and the Netherlands worked the same way.