Month: July 2023

Hawk Incident

Steven Guccione

This morning I was drinking coffee and reading news and heard a loud noise. Couldn’t really identify it or where it came from. Sounded bad, especially on this quiet Sunday morning. I walked around and noticed a very large bird, a hawk, on the ground. He was moving but didn’t look well. We have had other smaller birds crash into our windows, mostly since we cleaned them a few months back, and all but one survived. I was optimistic for Mr Hawk, but alas, he didn’t make it. Sad way to start a Sunday.

Solar and Battery Project

Steven Guccione

I’ve been wanting to play around with some solar panels and batteries for a while. I want to go small but not too small. I would like something I could possibly use in a short power outage. Maybe a few hundred watt hours. I also wanted something I could interface a Raspberry Pi to (for instance) to collect data. Mostly I just want to get a feel for how all this works, with the intention of building a complete house-wide solar and battery system.

I have decided on a Vectron controller. This seems to be a high quality product and has extensive open source support. As far as a load, I will probably buy a small refrigerator. This is about 80W but will only run intermittently. I’ll have to do a bit more shopping to figure out the panel(s) and battery(s).

Tesla Model 3 Automated Braking System Disabled

Steven Guccione

I was approaching a stop light in our new (600 miles on the odometer) Tesla Model 3 when all sorts of alarms went off. Everything was disabled, including the regenerative braking. Lots of messages popped up on the screen and I had to hit the brake hard to stop. Messages popped up and the car beeped and I started to worry.

Got it home and found it was a relatively common problem. Except the solutions were all over the map. Some people said it went away on its own, others said a reboot or a camera recalibration. Some swore by a software update. One fellow claimed to smell smoke in this situation. One person reported a required MCU replacement. It has also been record hot here in Texas but the car is garage kept and I assume Teslas operate in even hotter places. But who knows?

Last week we had the windshield wipers coming on sporadically. Again lots of people with this problem, and lots of suggestions. One was that the front camera was dirty and sunlight hitting it at different angles made it think it was raining. I cleaned off a little spot when the front camera was (ok, the car does need a wash) and all was well.

What if all of these other problems were dirty camera lens issues too? All these functions are tied in to the cameras. So I went around with a napkin and cleaned the five other cameras. Seems like it fixed the issue. Not a very graceful failure, disabling everything for a dirty camera lens. I will also note Tesla has moved away from ultrasound (?) distance sensors to camera only. This vision approach does not seem as robust as the old sensors. Am I suppose to trust self driving mode when it can’t even accurately tell me how far the front of the car is from the curb when parking?

Grid Storage: Batteries Will Win

Steven Guccione

First time I have seen this said out loud. Storage replaces transmission lines. The post has good data but gets a bit technical. Add in that batteries arbitrage the current somewhat wild price fluctuations in energy costs (at least in Texas) and you have a wining formula. The post claims battery farms are profitable after the second year. Not bad. It needs to be pointed out that the lunch they are eating is mostly coming from gas peaker plants. From Casey Handmers Blog.

Grid Storage: Batteries Will Win