scott_h

Each of these pretty established suppliers offer this service:

- Sunstone

- Advanced Assembly

- Sierra Circuits

- Osh Park

They all have ~7 day lead time or shorter. It all comes down to choosing simple processes with generic parts.

Do you have your own machines or just outsource these orders and ensure the supply chain stuff moves along quickly?

I like the idea, more heads in the game makes it cheaper for everyone, but this seems like another hat in the ring.

Interesting stuff, I work with RF and I was curious how a passive component can have such a high gain (given that gain is usually measured as an increase in energy of a signal).

Turns out the way that the gain of a passive reflector seems to be measured is: "the ratio of the power density at a distant point due to the passive repeater to the power density which would exist at the same point" if the repeater were replaced by a matched antenna (or basically nothing at all).

So basically it's a measure of how much better the signal is when you add the reflector, and that's why it can achieve such high gains: because the signals traveling so far are already being atmospherically attenuated by hundreds of dB. Maybe that's not new information to others.

Anyways, cool stuff. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

http://www.gbppr.net/splat/Passive-Repeater-Engineering.pdf#...

> So you didn't read the article?

Part of my critique is that the numbers cited in the article don't relate to their meaning. Measuring catalyst by kg instead of kWh is stupid, so $20/kg means jack when you look at what that actually means for a battery. Sounds hard to believe that there is an inexpensive anything made of only things like nickel-molybdenum-cobalt.

> That's all very nice, but that number is from a paper from 2018.

Hey I agree with you, but that's what the article cited. Maybe they shouldn't be citing a 2018 article. And I bet that $83/kWh was absolutely a best case estimate without manufacturing costs, nor accounting for scaling costs. Thats why I added the link for context.

TLDR: Taking something from flight hardware doesn't make it great for ground use.

As much as I (and this article it seems) would like this to be a silver bullet in the climate crisis and battery market worldwide, I don't think the breakthrough-esc headline is warranted.

My thoughts (if you care):

1. Despite claiming that their batteries are affordable (and not rare) because they "only" use Nickel, the battery catalyst is a Nickel-Molybdenum-Cobalt alloy, which seems like a pretty rare, expensive component. Their published research cites a $~83/kWh cost for just the materials (that's not very cheap). For reference LiIon is $~75/kWh, LiFePO is <$50/kWh.

2. Their cell cycle life's are a little confusing. They say "tens of thousands of cycles", but in their paper I see only the number 1,500 cycles being referenced. Is there some other research or specs that I'm missing (if so they should be referenced)

3. Later in the article they claim that because their cells don't require heating or cooling (among some other features), but these requirements aren't always needed with ground based grid storage solutions, due to the abundance of space and lack of weight or space saving optimizations (such as with EVs). That's not really anything special, and you can really only stack those against LiIon chemistries (which do require safety and cooling).

If you are interested in what's going on, don't read EnerVenue's regurgitated marketing; read the actual science and decide for yourself: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1809344115

Read this for background: https://www.storage-lab.com/

Stop posting your own tweets.

Guess what component a simulator named diode doesn't have...

Guess what component a simulator named diode that doesn't have...

Amazingly written!