đź”— Articles: Thursday 28.Mar.2024
Just Have a Think (YouTube): Battery prices just fell off a cliff!
Lithium-ion batteries often get a bad rap in the media these days, blamed for high cost, unwanted fires and poor working conditions in the supply chain. But the fact remains that this chemistry provides the power for billions of devices around the world, from the tiniest pacemakers to the largest utility scale stationary energy storage, and the manufacturers are making great strides to improve their systems. So can they do enough to stay at the top of the pile?
Adafruit: Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040 : ID 4888
What’s smaller than a Feather but larger than a Trinket? It’s an Adafruit ItsyBitsy RP2040 featuring the Raspberry Pi RP2040! Small, powerful, with a ultra fast dual Cortex M0+ processor running at 125 MHz - this microcontroller board is perfect when you want something very compact, with lots of horsepower and a bunch of pins. This Itsy has sports car speed, but SUV roominess with 8 MB of FLASH and 264KB of SRAM.
ItsyBitsy RP2040 is only 1.4” long by 0.7” wide, but has 6 power pins, 23 digital GPIO pins (4 of which can be analog in and 16 x PWM out). It’s the same chip as the Feather RP2040 and Raspberry Pi Pico but really really small. So it’s great once you’ve finished up a prototype, and want to make the project much smaller. It even comes with 8 MB of SPI Flash built in, for data logging, file storage, or CircuitPython/MicroPython code
CBC: Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX founder, sentenced to 25 years in prison in crypto fraud case
‘My useful life is probably over,’ Bankman-Fried said in remarks to court.
CBC: Ontario school boards sue Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok
Four major Ontario school boards are taking some of the largest social media companies to court over their products, alleging the way they’re designed has negatively rewired the way children think, behave and learn and disrupted the way schools operate.
The public district school boards of Toronto, Peel and Ottawa-Carleton, along with Toronto’s Catholic counterpart, are looking for about $4.5 billion in total damages from Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd., which operate the platforms Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok respectively, according to separate but similar statements of claim filed Wednesday.
NYT: A Simple New Technique Could Make Your Eggs More Humane
Every year in the United States, more than 300 million male chicks are hatched. But because they don’t lay eggs or produce valued meat, they are typically killed within a day, usually shredded alive in industrial grinders. The practice, known as chick culling, is replicated on a huge scale around the globe, with an estimated 6.5 billion male chicks killed each year, or around 200 each second.
NYT: Berkeley Will Repeal Its Landmark Ban on Natural Gas in New Homes
The city of Berkeley, Calif., has agreed to repeal a landmark climate rule that would have banned natural gas hookups in new homes, throwing into question the fate of dozens of similar restrictions on gas in cities across the country.
Berkeley’s gas ban, which was the first of its kind when it passed in 2019, had been challenged in court by the California Restaurant Association and was struck down last year by a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The city settled the lawsuit last week by agreeing to immediately halt enforcement of the rule and eventually repeal it altogether.
NYT: Storing Renewable Energy, One Balloon at a Time
Energy Dome uses carbon dioxide held in a huge balloon, the “dome” in the company’s name, as a kind of battery. During the day, electricity from the local grid, some produced by nearby fields of solar cells, is used to compress the carbon dioxide into liquid. At night, the liquid carbon dioxide is expanded back into gas, which drives a turbine and produces electricity that is sent back to the grid.
In Sardinia.
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But these [other] storage methods have limitations. Pumped hydroelectric requires — and alters — hilly landscapes, and the facilities cost a lot to build. Lithium is a limited resource that is often dirty to mine, and it becomes excessively expensive when designed to store energy for much more than four hours, which may be an important capability if intermittent sources provide the majority of a grid’s power.
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In September, Westinghouse announced that it would build a 100-megawatt storage facility in Alaska, enough to supply about 80,000 average American homes with electricity for up to 12 hours. He added that the facility would cost about half that of one using lithium-ion batteries: “We feel very, very good about the economics.”
A good survey article that covers a number of long-term energy storage technologies for both electricity and heat.
Six Colors: Apple’s immersive MLS highlight reel debuts later today
Apple announced today that the first Apple Immersive Video documentary for Vision Pro, featuring highlights from last year’s MLS playoffs, will debut tonight (March 28) at 6 p.m. Pacific.
The video format has previously only been seen in a handful shorts in the TV app on the Vision Pro. This new film will be similarly short, running about five minutes long, and will be free to all Vision Pro users.
I’m excited to see the finished product—all of Apple’s immersive videos have been pretty amazing—but I have to point out that this five-minute highlight packages is being released 110 days after last year’s MLS Cup Final. That’s not great turnaround time. If immersive video for sports is going to be a thing, turnaround is going to need to be a lot faster.
As pointed out in Daring Fireball, this is the only release from Apple since the Vision Pro product announcement.
DailyHive: Canadians can get free A&W every time the Blue Jays win
Starting March 28, every person who has an account on the A&W app will receive a one-day exclusive offer for a free menu item. These potential offers can be anything on the menu, from a Teen Burger, to Onion Rings, and even root beer.
Coupons will be distributed the day after the Blue Jays win to everyone with an account on the A&W app and a minimum purchase is required to use each offer. You can find these coupons under “Offers” in the app.
Last Updated: 28.Mar.2024 19:54 EDT