The last time we had a power failure was about four years ago, and this one lasted about 15-minutes. That gives us a reliability of about 99.99998%. Pretty good, as far as systems go, but not what Americans expect. They think of electricity like gravity; always there 100% of the time.

In reality, this level of reliability is amazing when you consider the fact that your house sits at the end of a long chain electrical components, some of them redundant (like the power plants at Hetch Hetchy and Diablo Canyon) some of them not (like the transformer on the pole outside your house) which stretches over thousands of miles. Although power outages in this part of the world are infrequent, they are a regular fact of life on many parts of the planet. And they are about to get more frequent here as well.

As we switch over to smart grid technologies in the attempt to improve grid efficiency and integrate green technologies like solar, wind, wave and small cogeneration facilities, we are going to have a lot more of these little inconveniences and perhaps a disaster or two.

Smart technologies, while more efficient than traditional approaches, are also less robust. They lead to the kinds of problems we are now seeing on the Toyota Prius, where in the quest for the power efficiencies of regenerative braking, some owners are experiencing brake failures. These systems fail suddenly and in unusual ways, like digital television which gives you a perfect picture until it suddenly goes away completely rather than degrading slowly into a snowstorm of static. (By the way, the current generation of kids, raised exclusively on digital media, doesn’t even know what static is.)

As we move into this brave new green world, consumers are going to have to take more responsibility for their infrastructure if they don’t want to be inconvenienced. We are ever more reliant on electricity and communications to make our day-to-day lives possible, which means that in addition to stockpiling supplies of water and food, you are going to need to start thinking about emergency supplies of electricity.

Fortunately, the same technologies that threaten our piece of mind are there to save it. New innovations like home hydrogen fuel cells, whole-house battery backup systems (developed for solar applications) and even small but mighty traditional generators with automatic transfer panels can, for the first time in history, put the reliability of your electric systems in your own hands and can actually make you look forward to the next power outage.

Links:

ClearEdge Power

Related posts:

1. Using Power to Brag about Saving Power
2. The Hydrogen Economy

How the Clock Works — from the Outside.

Our clock has only three interface elements; a big blue display (the time), a smaller yellow display (the alarm time) and a knob. Pressing the knob turns the alarm (and the yellow display) on and off. No yellow numbers, no alarm. Yellow numbers? That’s what time the alarm will go off. It’s that simple.

You change the alarm time by turning the knob. It moves in 15-minute increments, so in a couple of spins (forwards or backwards) you can move through a whole day. I’ve always thought that the little AM/PM light was hard to notice, so we’ve done away with it here. You set the alarm in 24-hour time. which makes it really hard to get it wrong; 7:00 AM reads as “7:00″ while 7:00 PM reads as “19:00.”

That just leaves the noisemaker. Rather than leave it up to the a radio station, which has too many parameters to set (volume and tuning) or may have unreliable programming, I decided to include my own noisemaker. Sure, we could have interfaced to an iPod, but adding another device undermines our assurance that the alarm will go off as planned. Instead, I’ve chosen to play sound files off a micro-SD card. This gives us lots of other capabilities as well, like making the clock chime on the hour, speak the time, or play different alarm tones at different times. Since the reader accommodates a 2Gb card, you can design your own audio “skin” if you like.

Last, but not least, we solved the power problem. With the old mechanical clocks, you lost exactly as much time as the power was out. With digital clocks, even a brief power interruption restarts the clock at 12:00.  Some clocks have a back-up battery in case the power fails, but most do not. The ones that do, require you to replace the battery periodically (which no one ever seems to do).

This clock keeps the correct time even when you pull the plug. For how long? At least a few days and maybe a couple of weeks (there are a lot of factors involved). The displays turn off and the alarm can’t sound when the power is off, but when power is restored, the time is still accurate.

How the Clock Works — from the Inside.

The guts of this machine contains a hard-working and very inexpensive 8-bit PIC microcontroller. (It’s the long rectangular black thing in the picture.) There is also some audio circuitry to play sound files off a micro-SD, an amplifier to drive a speaker, some LED displays, and a power supply to make it all work.

The Logic Board

The PIC microcontroller does all of the heavy lifting, keeping track of the time, managing the two displays, controlling the audio chip, and handling user interaction.

One more component worth mentioning is the carbon aerogel supercapacitor. (It’s the big round thing on the logic board.) This little guy stores up electricity when we’re plugged in. When we’re not, the microcontroller senses the power failure, shuts down everything non-essential and hunkers down for a long winter. It draws just enough power from the ultracapacitor to stay alive and keep track of the time. Supercapacitors are cool because, unlike batteries, they don’t get tired of charging/discharging so they don’t need to be replaced periodically.

Mechanically

I decided to build this clock into a CD storage container. It was about the right size, inexpensive, and I liked the color. In order to give myself a little more flexibility, I put all of the electronics on two boards instead of just one. There is a display board, which holds the digital displays and the knob, and a logic board which holds the microcontroller, audio electronics, and power supply. A 16-pin connector mates the two boards together.

The Display Board

The size of the display board, which is the larger of the two, is primarily determined by the size and placement of the LED displays. By putting the rest of the electronics on another board that mates behind it, I gave myself the option of fitting the whole thing into a smaller box than I could have if it were all on one board (in case I change my mind later).

In our next installment, we’ll talk more about the details of the design and how engineers design something like this.

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock in (1200 Easy Steps)

You would think that a device so critical to modern life would be designed better, but in spite of the fact that there are thousands of models to choose from, they pretty much all suck. How often have you gone to bed the night before a critical meeting and been unable to fall asleep because you had no confidence that the alarm was set correctly? My own alarm clock requires at least a dozen cognitive steps to set the alarm with any confidence.

How it should work

You should be able to set your alarm clock in a few seconds. You should be able to tell from across the room if the alarm is set, and for what time. You should be able to set it in the dark, without your glasses. You should never be lying in bed wondering if you accidentally forgot to push some button or bumped the volume control and are going to get up late and look stupid.

So, forty years after the digital watch was rolled out at CES, I decided to design and built the perfect digital alarm clock. Even with all of the advances we’ve made since the 1960s, this has turned out to be a really interesting challenge. It involves assembly language programming, custom fabrication, parts suppliers from all across Asia, and an enterprising low-volume circuit board manufacturer based in Bulgaria. Why all the complexity? Because of the simplicity.

Simple = Complex

Let’s assume you want to fly to Los Angeles. (Don’t take it personally, it’s just an example.) Think about the steps you have to go through to make that happen.

• Determine when you want to go and when you want to return
• Go on various websites to find the right combination of itinerary, cost and airline
• Identify and use the correct payment method
• Manage your seat assignments
• Create appropriate reminders to ensure you arrive at the correct airport at the correct time
• Arrange for transportation to and from the airport

And this doesn’t even include packing luggage and all the personal aspects. This is just getting there and back. Now imagine you wanted to make this completely simple for yourself. What would you do? You’d hire an assistant and say “Steve, book me a flight to Los Angeles.” Very simple for you, but it requires that you interface with a highly complex and sophisticated machine — Steve.

The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designer. This is something I’d always more or less understood, but this project made that completely clear.

In the next posting, I’ll describe the clock itself: how the user experiences it, and the insane complexity behind that apparent simplicity.

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock (Part 2)

This week, Sprint is hosting its ninth annual developer conference in Santa Clara, CA and the theme is definitely smartphones. Android, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile are all featured heavily as Sprint attempts to catch up to T-Mobile and ATT in the smartphone market.

I really only care about the Android. I was anxious to see Sprint’s version of Android and try it out on their network. Would they muck up the interface with a lot of Sprint-only apps designed to make money for them and stand in the way of my using the features in my phone? Charging me to change ring tones, share pictures, and use the navigation software is simply not going to fly anymore.

Sprint was giving out a new HTC Hero plus a month of service to the first 400 developers who proved they could build a “Hello World” application before 6:30 PM. I got a late start at 3:00 PM (this isn’t my real job, you know) and barely made it, delivering my app at 6:10 PM. Most of that time I was waiting for 750 MB of developer tools to download over the crowded WiFi and EVDO infrastructure. The actual app writing took only 20 minutes. But, all’s well that ends well; after too many lattes I got my phone (and a bad case of the jitters).

The Hero is a really nice phone; lightweight, attractive, with a stunning OLED screen that automatically adjusts to room brightness. Its performance is very snappy, especially in the browser. The software is pretty standard Android stuff, with a few little twists. For example, your contacts are now integrated with their Facebook profiles (more useful and less annoying than I thought it would be), there is an included PDF reader, and Microsoft Outlook and Exchange is supported via HTC’s Sync application.

I was glad to see that Sprint had largely left the Android operating system intact. A layer of big phone carrier goo would have been a deal killer for me.

Unfortunately, the phones are running Android version 1.5 while the rest of the world is on 1.6. This means that a lot of newer applications (including the new version of the Android Market) won’t run. With everyone else talking about releasing 2.0 next month, Sprint is saying “2010″ for version 1.6. That’s bad.

Worse is the fact that Sprint’s network doesn’t support OTA (over the air) upgrades for the Android. This means that, while other carrier’s customers get their phones upgraded automatically, Sprint users will have to visit the Sprint store or go through some complicated software installation procedure using their PC and a USB cable, a gymnastics exercise which is beyond most users.

So, bottom line, is it time to move back to Sprint? They have snappy data speeds and really broad coverage in most of the country, plus a lot fewer dropped calls than T-Mobile, and I’ve been really happy with their customer support. A lot of people should be really happy with Sprint’s new Android offerings.

But I can’t do business with them if they don’t have the products I want, and what I want is the current version of the Android operating system and all the latest software. After all, what would my friends say?

Related posts:

1. I Fell in Love with an Android
2. Portable Speakerphone for Your Car
3. Attack of the Mobile Barcode

I’ll just come right out and admit it: This gadget seduced me. You could set the retail package on a pedestal in the MoMA and it would blend right in. It is a work of art.

I opened up it up, stuck it in my ear and it just started working. It talked me through the process of pairing with my phone (a process which is ALWAYS a pain in the butt), and that was that; we were instant friends.

The Q1 is completely voice operated, even to turn it off. You can say stuff like “Redial”, “Call back”, “Answer call” or “Ignore call,” even “Check battery.” And, you can pair it with up to 8 devices just by saying “Pair me.” It can even monitor two phones at once and answer which ever one is ringing.

Nice, but how does it perform?

The Q1 actually has 2 microphones, one to monitor the environment and one to listen to you. The signal from the environment is fed into a DSP chip where the noise is digitally subtracted from your speech, giving whoever you are talking to a crisp clear signal devoid of road and wind noise.

One of my most demanding specifications is battery time. In spite of its light weight and small size, the Q1 has a talk time of 4 hours and a standby time of 100 hours. It charges through a standard micro USB connector. When it is time to charge it, you can use the tiny foldaway AC adapter or the USB cable to charge it off your laptop (both are included).

The USB cable has one other function. The Q1 is designed to allow the firmware to be upgraded to accommodate new phones, add features or (heaven forbid) fix bugs.

Sadly, the Q1 makes my Jawbone headset, which I was SO excited about just a couple of months ago, seem obsolete and hard to use. (Ouch!)

I’m giving the Q1 five stars.

Related posts:

1. Portable Speakerphone for Your Car

QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

Related posts:

1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference

"Greetings!"

I bought an Android phone just to check it out (’cause that’s what I’m supposed to do; my friends count on me for that.) I bought it in spite of that fact that I hate T-Mobile, in spite of the fact that the Android didn’t support Microsoft Exchange or view PDFs or let me view and edit Microsoft Office documents, and in spite of the fact that T-Mobile wanted to assign me a “ghetto” 510 area code number. None of that mattered. I just wanted to see it. I had 30 days to return it and that’s what I’d do.

Goodbye, Sprint!
What a surprise! After spending 100 hours playing with the phone (downloading software, configuring things, hooking up external devices, even making some phone calls), I had to admit I was in love. Goodbye, Sprint! Nothing else matters.

Why? It’s all about the software. In their attempt to lock you into their platform, brand themselves, and encourage you to buy silly things from them (like ring tones), the carriers all cement a layer of useless bloatware over the phone’s native programming. This junk is always thrown together haphazardly, poorly integrated, and badly designed. Basically, Microsoft and Palm and Sprint each have their own agenda and they are slugging it out in the arena of your phone. (Even now, Sprint is delaying the launch of it’s own Android phone so that Samsung can add a bunch of Sprint crap to the user interface.)

In contrast, the Android is designed to be open. There are hundreds of programs available for it, most of which are free, and they all play well together by design. You can add and remove them at the touch of a button without ever having to deal with your carrier.

Zillions of Programs

Zillions of Programs
“Who needs zillions of programs on their phone?”, you ask. Well, there’s one that can use the camera to take a picture of a book or a CD and find the lowest prices for that item in nearby stores and on the Internet. Take that, William Shatner!

There’s an augmented reality program that uses the camera to display whatever you are looking at on the screen, drawing labels over the picture in real time to identify what you are seeing. It will point out Angel Island, the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, San Quentin, and so forth. A similar program identifies the stars and constellations as you point it around the night sky.

Around the house, you can snap pictures of barcodes as you run out of things and it will put them on your shopping list. There’s a compass and a runner’s log and even an audio editing tool to make your own ring tones. It’s a camera and a GPS and a voice recorder, plus email and a web browser. It has visual voicemail, newsreaders and music and podcast players, Skype and Twitter clients. Oh yeah, and it’s a phone!

Plus, if you ever lose it, you can send it a text and it will tell you where it is. There’s also a bunch of games for it, but I’ve been having too much serious fun to play with them.

Why Android and Why Now?
There’s no end to the creativity people are demonstrating with the Android, but why this platform and why now? Because Google and the Open Handset Alliance found a secret formula for harnessing the creativity of developers.

First of all, they built a device that has all the hardware you need to do interesting things. It has a GPS, a 3-axis accelerometer and a magnetic compass, WiFi, 3G networking, and bluetooth, a touch screen and a keyboard, speaker and a processor with video and music capability. If you can’t have fun with all that, then you shouldn’t be programming. It even has a multi-color LED.

Secondly, they created an operating system that works like a Lego set, making it easy to build programs out of pieces of stuff that you and your friends have done before. Need a map of your current location? Just call one up. Need to play an alarm tone at a certain time? There’s a system service for that.

And last, but not least, they made it easy to get your new software creation into the handsets of thousands of grateful users through the Android marketplace. Even if your first creation is free, you can make a ton of money selling the advanced version for $0.99. And the cost to be a developer is just $25.00 (a paltry sum when compared to other developer programs.)

AND it's a Phone

The Future
The Android platform is still in its infancy, but it’s remarkable how quickly the market is maturing. It seems clear that Android’s operating system is going to break out of the phone and spawn a whole new generation of portable computers that will replace the laptops of today. In short, netbooks are going to fall in love with Android, too. Chip manufacturers are already tooling up and companies like HP are making early announcements.

I think Android as a new computing platform makes perfect sense. After living on the Android for a week, my big, fast Windows machine feels clunky and out of date. If the Android had a little bit bigger keyboard and screen, I’d use it for everything, relegating my Windows machine to really big jobs like video editing, 3D modeling, and first-person shooters.

And what about the iPhone? A beautiful product for sure, and a terrific success story for the company, but once again Apple is headed in the wrong direction by vertically integrating. Silly boys, the future is open!  But that’s a story for another time.

Links:

Silicon Alley Insider, “HP Considering Android for New Netbooks”
Engaget, “Save us from Apple’s groundbreaking, developer-shackling App Store”
New York Times, “T-Mobile to Use Google Software in Devices for Home”

Related posts:

1. Sprint Rolls out Flawed Android Strategy at Developer Conference
2. Attack of the Mobile Barcode
3. Portable Speakerphone for Your Car

"Same S*** Different Fuel"

Ahhh…the hydrogen economy. What a wonderful idea! Hydrogen can be made from electricity and water. Then you can put the hydrogen into your car where it is turned directly into electricity in a fuel cell, and the only waste product is water. It’s a completely closed system; water to hydrogen to water to hydrogen to water. There’s really only one problem with it:  it doesn’t work.

A little basic science: Hydrogen, in its cleanest form, is made from water by putting in electricity (one electron for every hydrogen atom.) But the process is highly inefficient. The very best that you could even theoretically hope to achieve would be breaking even (although we realistically have no hope of ever coming close to that). Which means, you have to think of hydrogen as a battery (although not a very efficient one). It stores energy from electricity (that you have already made elsewhere), gives some of it back, and wastes the rest.

The simple truth is, there is no free lunch. There are no hydrogen mines and hydrogen can never be used to make the electricity to make itself because it is a net consumer of electricity. So why are we even talking about it?

Oil companies are promoting H2 (that’s science geek speak for “hydrogen”) for a couple of reasons. First of all, you will still have to go to the pump to fill up on hydrogen. This means they don’t have to release their stranglehold on you and your gas tank. The very thought of a world where people have clean energy delivered directly to their homes WITHOUT making a trip to the 167,000 gas stations in America is terrifying.

Secondly, you have to ask “Where are they planning to get all this hydrogen?” Simple, the same place they get everything else; oil!  That’s right, just because you can make H2 from water doesn’t mean you have to. Remember, splitting the hydrogen out of water requires putting energy into the process; more energy than you get out by using the hydrogen. Even if they wanted to make hydrogen the clean way, where would they get all that energy?

Nope, better to just make hydrogen from oil. After all, half of the energy in simple hydrocarbons (natural gas and such) comes from hydrogen. The problem is, the other half comes from carbon (read “greenhouse gas”). That means that oil companies can just retool their big refineries into making hydrogen instead of gasoline. Problem is, splitting the hydrogen out leaves a big pile of carbon (probably as carbon dioxide). That leaves us back where we started which, frankly, is just what they had in mind.

The oil companies are hoping that you were asleep during high school chemistry and that, with a little sleight of hand, they can make the carbon “disappear” and get you off their backs. But the truth is that we have built these massive global enterprises with the sole purpose of digging up carbon and distributing it to everyone inexpensively so they can burn it. Until we stop doing that, we’re going to be in trouble. As the old saying goes, “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Car companies are promoting hydrogen, too. What’s their angle? They know that economical availability of  hydrogen is years away. By coming out in favor of hydrogen, they can appear to be promoting a green technology which, unfortunately, just isn’t there yet. Net result, again, business as usual. No need to retool the factories and no need to sell electric cars until the hydrogen fuel cell is available.

But why resist? Wouldn’t they make just as much money selling electric cars and regular cars? Yes, and therein lies the problem. Car manufacturers and their dealer channels don’t make any money selling cars. They make their money servicing cars; performing oil changes every 6,000 miles and servicing the the thousands of parts in an internal combustion engine that are damaged by the high temperatures and RPMs or simply wear out. Electric cars, on the other hand require almost no service. Electric cars would put the traditional dealer channel out of business.

Electricity is the answer. For now. Converting oil into hydrogen and carbon dioxide doesn’t fix the problem. Converting electricity into hydrogen and back into energy doesn’t make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is putting electricity directly into your car and using it as electricity.

Where will we get all this electricity? There isn’t an easy answer to this question for now. We have hydroelectric today, and solar and wind are coming online fast, with geothermal and tidal and a host of other technologies in the wings. And for the time being, a bunch of it will have to be generated by burning carbon and using (God help us) nuclear reactors.

But we don’t have any electricty to waste, and hydrogen is a wasteful technology. Its only advantage is that it props-up oil company and auto company profits.

So, tell the car companies that you know they are stalling. Tell the oil companies that you know they are hiding all that carbon somewhere. And let’s quit pretending that there ever could be such a thing as a “hydrogen economy.”

Related posts:

1. Using Power to Brag about Saving Power
2. I Survived a 15-minute Power Failure