Comments for Steve Leibson

Comment on Charging the Chevy Volt by sleibson321

sleibson321 — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:25:49 +0000

Thanks for the detailed data, Patrick. I’ve got a wrap up of the Tesla story coming up next month with my friend’s charging experiences and costs.

–Steve

Comment on Charging the Chevy Volt by Patrick Groeneveld

Patrick Groeneveld — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 19:18:37 +0000

Hi Steve
Nice article! As Silicon Valley Volt owner I can second your experiences charing the car. I bought one after I saw the teardown at DAC. The technology of this extrended range EV is truly spectacular. My employer graciously provides free charging, which makes electric driving very attractive.

My Volt charges at about 4 miles per hour on 110V, or at 10 miles per hour on 220V (L2 at work or at home). For comparison, it takes 5 minuts to fill a tank of gas, which is an effective charge rate of 6 times the speed of sound. At such slow rates its not worth the trouble charging and EV at a mall while running errants. Only for longer charges it makes sense (at work or at home).

The Volt takes about 4.5 hours for a full charge (L2), which gets me about 38 miles and costs $2.50 in electricity from expensive PG&E (at 20c/kWh). If I would drive on gas (which the Volt can), the same 38 miles takes roughly 1 gallon ($4).

An interesting observation is that public charging stations are a poor value proposition. The stations you visited in San Jose cost $1/hour and some even more. So a full charge would cost well over $4, which makes driving electric more expensive as driving on gasoline. So at current gas prices, you are losing money by driving electric if you use public chargers.

So money saving is not the biggest incentive to drive electric. I did the math on the ‘green’ credential of the car. The environmental impact varies, but if you are a California PG&E customer, the CO2 emissions are about 4x less than driving a similar compact car over the same distance. That is significant.

Patrick Groeneveld
Saratoga, CA

Comment on Out, out damn halogen. My LED replacement story. by sleibson321

sleibson321 — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 04:10:06 +0000

You raise valid concerns, tmign. The LED pucks do run hot. However, I’ve seen no discoloration of the sanded acrylic disks. As for reduced life due to heat, it’s certainly a concern. These pucks are installed face down in restricted metal fixtures so any convection would take place up and through or around the puck. I’m unsure if the cooling’s been affected that much as a result.

–Steve

Comment on Out, out damn halogen. My LED replacement story. by tmign

tmign — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 02:43:29 +0000

I have some concerns about gluing to the pucks.

1. Excess heat due to lack of air/space/ventilation shortens life of LEDS
2. Exposure to the bright LEDS will darken the plastic cover and/or bonding glue and change the intensity and color temperature, as well as increase the temperature over time.

Let us know how your fix works out over time.

Comment on Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform – Part 1 by All Programmable Planet - Steve Leibson - Hello Planet

All Programmable Planet - Steve Leibson - Hello Planet — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:21:35 +0000

[...] Programmable Planet.) I first started to write about this development nearly three years ago (see Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform — P… and Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform [...]

Comment on Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform – Case Studies – Part 2 by All Programmable Planet - Steve Leibson - Hello Planet

All Programmable Planet - Steve Leibson - Hello Planet — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:39:03 +0000

[...] the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform — Part 1 and Xilinx redefines the high-end microcontroller with its ARM-based Extensible Processing Platform — C…). I intuitively knew then that the Xilinx Zynq platform was going to make big changes to the way we [...]

Comment on Boeing isn’t the only one with Li-ion battery problems. Me too, with my Panasonic shaver! by MeasurementBlues

MeasurementBlues — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:16:14 +0000

Steve, Great seeing you at DesignCon. Interesting story. We have a story about Li0Ion batteries that relates toe electric vehicles at The Connecting Edge. Guess which battery photo starts it off?

Comment on Generation-jumping 2.5D Xilinx Virtex-7 2000T FPGA delivers 1,954,560 logic cells, consumes only 20W by SRAM Economics & Design: the Good, the Bad, and the Cache « struct herrfluffy;

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:29:39 +0000

[...] about a few watts of power consumption – 40 watts max (I think) on the huge chips like the Virtex 7 2000T (and I mean HUGE – it broke transistor record counts at 6.8 billion). Take a look at what [...]

Comment on Hands On Review: Texas Instruments’ Stellaris ARM Cortex-M4F LaunchPad Eval Board—$4.99!!! (sort of) by Hands-on Review: $12.95 Freescale Freedom Platform for Freescale Kinetis L microcontroller based on ARM Cortex-M0+ processor | Steve Leibson

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:18:44 +0000

[...] board only a few days after writing up the Ti Stellaris LaunchPad Eval board last month. (See “Hands On Review: Texas Instruments’ Stellaris ARM Cortex-M4F LaunchPad Eval Board—$4.99!!! (sort…”) The new board, a Freescale Freedom Platform (FRDM-KL25Z) features a low-cost, low-power [...]

Comment on Will your low-power design run on batteries for 30 years? This design from 1981 did. by sleibson321

sleibson321 — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:37:36 +0000

Bill,

The HP35 is an early 1970s design with LED display and NiCd batteries that needed charging every day or so. I own one of those, purchased in 1973 or 1974 a year after its introduction. It was obsolete and not on sale new by 1987 so I’m guessing you did not buy that model new in 1987. Perhaps it was an HP-12C if it was for an MBA program?

–Steve