I don't understand this article. If the GPS signals are jammed, what purpose does it serve to have an atomic clock on board your plane? You still need accurate signals with time data to measure against.
You can get a very accurate timestamp from GNSS. What lots of people do then is slave a PLL based on a local oscillator, to be able to get time between two GNSS captations. Or to be able to extrapolate when they have no GNSS signal.
Now suppose someone is spoofing your GNSS signals, it's pretty hard to replace a constellation with another one whilst maintaining time consistency for you. One way to detect spoofing is comparing what a local clock is saying to whatever the GNSS is giving. A local, unfudgeable, stable, accurate clock is a good reference for this.
The article is seriously confused.
What you are talking about is easy - chip scale atomic clocks are easy to get. I can have one shipped to me today.
Hell, i have one on a time card in my basement.
I was under the impression (and from experience too) that the very stable oscillators were finicky and sensitive to temperature swings and in general costly to use properly in "hard" environments.
I'm happy to learn this is not the case for every good oscillator. TIL.
As I read from book about gyroscopes, most sensitive achieve so fine accuracy, they detect daily Earth rotation and even yearly Earth rotation.
But when they speaking about near zero temperatures, looks like they talking about something like Rydberg atoms - extremely sensitive matter, which could be considered as nuclear scale gyroscopes, or quantum gyroscopes, or read more about quantum accelerometer.
And current inertial navigation could be used to calculate relative coordinates like automobile odometer, but from integrating accelerations. But classic accelerometer is just not fine enough, and at this place appear quantum accelerometer and quantum gyroscope.
And I agree, article is terrible. I don't know why they use so abstract language, when could just say, navy already tested quantum navigation.
To be more concrete, space rockets nearly all fly with inertial navigation, but they are extreme case, because most use only inertial navigation just few minutes (so all those classic gyros/accelerometers integrated errors are small enough to successful enter stable orbit, and then using some sort of radio or optical fine measurements and making corrections with fine engines).
Planes flights are much more lengthy than rockets - I think, typical ~40 minutes or more (most long I hear 20 hours), so INS could integrate huge mistake.
I believe submarines navigate long distances using INS. I don’t know how accurate it is, or how often they have to make corrections using other data. But ballistic missile submarines can’t really use active sonar or surface with any frequency, so I’m not sure what other method they’d use.
I talked with captain of submarine. He said, in real life navigation was not reliable, so they have to go to surface and make adjustments with some classic navigation - radio beacons and star navigation.
And civilian education now close to forgot star navigation, but navy still train people to navigate with stars and learn Morse code.
> ballistic missile submarines can’t really use active sonar or surface with any frequency
Detect semi-surfaced submarine at night is really hard, if don't have intelligence data that it will surface on some non-random position.
From experience of Ukrainian war, my country have success with eliminating surface military ships, because have constantly monitoring their moves with satellites, but I cannot remember any case when semi-surfaced submarine was hit.
Are they not easy to detect on radar? Even during WWII, radar got good enough to detect submarine periscopes. It's hard to imagine that a partially surfaced submarine wouldn't have a significant radar return. That doesn't mean that they're easy to detect at long ranges, but I would have thought that partially surfacing or raising a periscope would be a significant risk to a submarine if the enemy knew its rough location.
At a guess, Ukraine probably can't deploy naval assets with powerful radar close enough to where Russian subs are operating. But an adversary with a more powerful navy might be able to.
During WWII, submarines was just very special type of boat. You could check wikipedia about German u-boats - exist about TEN subtypes, from which only latest types have really significant underwater range, but all others was extremely limited in underwater activity.
But, surface ships of that time was even more limited, many could not achieve even half of surface speed of u-boat, so become easy prey.
But if you will try to find some artificial object on sea surface, that is really hard question. Just because sea is huge, so you need to check extremely large space in short time.
Radars are better to spot artificial object on sea surface than visual, just because radar easier to automate. But nothing more. Radar is also have problem of square distance, very similar to visual. So, as it is hard to spot partially surfaced submarine visually, it also hard to spot such sub with radar, because much less part will be on surface, so radar will have much less signal to detect.
Periscope size is nearly undetectable on surface, if it used carefully, just outside detection range of radar.
So, to conclude, Ukraine problem is, we cannot detect partially surfaced submarines on open sea, but they could fire missiles. Fortunately, Russians have very few submarines on Black sea, and after they was hit at harbors, their usage become very limited.
> But, surface ships of that time was even more limited, many could not achieve even half of surface speed of u-boat, so become easy prey.
Agree with most of what you said, but U-boats generally had top surface speeds under 20 knots and were thus slower on the surface than most naval vessels of the time. They could certainly move faster than most convoys, but they couldn’t outrun pursuing destroyers or corvettes.
> slower on the surface than most naval vessels of the time
That is point. I'm not agree about most, but will be agree if you say about many.
> they couldn’t outrun pursuing destroyers or corvettes
But problem was, navy have so huge deficit of ships, so some convoys was run without naval support.
Sure, if all convoys was supported with fastest ships with best commands, u-boats will be no problem anymore, and as I understand, once this was happen.
A big issue during WWII is that the submarines were trying to find and approach the ships in order to sink them - and the ships in turn were looking out for the submarines. The submarine is forced to be close to ships equipped with radar.
Ballistic missile submarines are a completely different story. They aren't chasing anyone. Their entire goal is to be unpredictable and stay hidden, so if there's anyone with a radar around they are just going to keep quiet and move somewhere else.
Finding a sub prowling a shipping route is quite doable. Finding a sub in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Not a chance.
I must admit, I agree with nearly all you said. Problem is that Ukraine was weak, and nearly without navy, and civilian ships was unable to resist to Russian navy. And Ukrainian export was blocked, as civilian ships fear to run within range of fire of Russian navy.
When Ukraine got enough weapons to force Russian ships to stay at distance, situation changed dramatically, so export was unblocked.
I think, very similar things happen during WWII.
This is not about only submarines, this is about superiority.
INS essentially was expensive and AFAIK once GPS became available started to drop off in use outside of military. And with GPS availability coinciding with switching to more modern integrated Flight Management System/Computer, a lot of planes simply don't have INS installed.
Your words are near to truth. Before GPS from nearly 1950s used LORAN navigation system, with similar to GPS principles, but used long waves and have relatively low precision - about kilometer at best.
Before LORAN, used radio beacon navigation and star navigation (from Newton time), and good human navigator could achieve about 50km precision.
You could easy see signs of star navigation on good preserved old planes - they all have some sort of fully glass dome, or blister, to provide good near semi-sphere view.
And sure, all those before-GPS era planes have separate navigator job position, sometimes shared with mechanic.
You could ask, how planes could fly with 50km precision? Answer is easy - at all plane routes built ground structures easy seen from air and last mile navigation become essentially visual flight, nothing more, nothing less.
On some places ground navigation structures preserved now, for examples:
LORAN was mostly long range over sea, on the ground we had NDB, DME, VOR, etc all ultimately linking into "airways" for higher altitude operations where earth might be not visible due to cloud cover for example
The INS unit is separate and often has its own set of gyros and has to be connected as separate input to FMS or other navigational computers, same as connecting GPSes or other radio nav components.
For example the current model of popular Universal Avionics UNS1 series of NCU (navigational computer part of FMS) come with built-in augmented GPS receiversz but do not mention INS functionality at all even in extended models. Don't have access to manuals at the moment, but I'd expect to see INS as optional to connect over one of the external connectors on the MCU, as it was on the older models without integrated GPS
I had assumed that the ADIRU’s inertial reference data from its gyroscopes and accelerometers would feed into the FMS to provide INS capabilities in case GNSS was unavailable.
ADIRU in its minimal common form (some vendors might make a beefier one, who knows) provides the equivalent of old pneumatic "air data central" + artificial horizon and turn indicator gyros.
GNSS becoming "reasonably easy" to add meant that there was way less push to integrate INS after early use in transoceanic flights
Many small planes don't have INS in typical meaning, but their pilot is INS computer, calculated approximate nav from air data (air speed + weather data + compass or radio compass).
Unfortunately, these numbers considered state of art for modern classic gyroscopes.
Better are quantum navigation systems, using quantum matter as sensor, but they was too bulky to be used on planes, only last years appear more compact systems, sized like common home fridge.
I didn't read the article, but: a GPS receiver must calculate/find both it's time and position to get a fix. So maybe by having the time already available really accurately it makes the job of finding position easier?
From my (very basic) understanding of GPS you need at minimum four satellites to calculate the time. If you had a local atomic clock in sync with the GPS satellites, you'd only need three satellites to get a position fix. It would (probably, maybe?) also speed up the time to first fix / time to a precise position fix.
This really sucks, that is rough. When you’re buying from a company like Atlassian you don’t expect this to happen really.
The writing has been on the wall for a while with Opsgenie though. I work at incident.io and loads of our customers have had deprecation/migration warnings for a year or so now, pushing them away from Opsgenie and into different Atlassian products (with no migration plan, sadly).
It’s been great for us as they tend to move to us (we have good migration support for Opsgenie) but confusing to watch from the outside as Atlassian never stopped selling the product even while actively shutting accounts down.
If anyone started using OpsGenie post acquisition they should have KNOWN atlassian would change something, assuming it would remain status quo would have been naive.
For us it was a seamless migration for us to Jira Service Management from OpsGenie. There were many emails, and many in app banner notifications for MONTHS. All our rules transferred over. I only had to setup our notification integrations so all links into email/slack goto Jira Service Mgmt instead of OpsGeneie. Our OpsGeneie instance is currently read only.
Except that nothing is going away. We did the same, migrate from PD to OpsGenie. As soon as they offered to use JSM instead, we tried it and it’s great. Only one mobile client for everything, all old OpsGenie integrations just keep running, you still have heartbeats. JSM is the same product, just integrated into Jira. If you have OpsGenie running, migrating to JSM is just the push of a button.
I'm not sure it is. It looks pretty reasonable. I'm not sure about what your whole outrage is. You are a paying customer, so they have to send you an email before they do the public announcement?
Almost? The proposed amendment that passed the House but failed in the Senate? If 3/4 of the states were going to pass an amendment then why wouldn't 2/3 call for a convention of the states?
True. And I believe every system will eventually be gamed to some amount. You do occasionally need change. But if you were to artificially enforce some "full rewrite" reform e.g. every n decades, that reform would just end up a tug of war between sides already deep into the existing gaming, trying to increase the effect of whatever tactic their side excels in.
One candidate for a possible workaround that I've occasionally been speculating about would be an organized process where n groups are tasked with doing n "rewrites" in parallel, and then a process that somehow mixes approval and random selection to pick one. The rationale would be the hope that the low chance of a particular rewrite actually making it would add some distance, would reduce the gaming-the-system incentives. Everybody has some amount of motivation to actually design a fair system, but that's competing with incentive to make it gameable by whatever side the co-author in question is on. But that fairness incentive would not really be diminished much by writing a what-if instead of a definitive future, whereas the incentive to deliberately flaw the would-be system to make it easier to game gets lower with a shrinking likelihood of the proposal actually getting implemented.
Was it failure to introduce ranked voting, or failure to introduce electoral reform?
There was multiple systems being suggested. NDP preferred MMP. Personally I wanted STV, but the Liberal party wanted alternate vote, the system that would benefit them the most.
Once they realized public and other party support was for systems other than Alternative Vote they backed out.
BC perplexingly chose otherwise. People always seem to hate this. Even here in California, we’re lucky to be able to rank everyone in SF but few other cities can. And every election, there’s a lot of “IRV is ruining this city” when candidates with fewer first choice votes win.
Alaska got Ranked Choice Voting and after every election cycle where a Democrat wins they're up in arms about how it's bad. This time the repeal effort got within a whisker of succeeding, while the Democrat (Mary Peltola) lost her congressional seat.
RCV encourages moderation, meaning candidates like Peltola and Senator Murkowski (R) win statewide office. This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views.
Ranked choice isn't the only alternative voting system that encourages moderation. Approval voting is vastly simpler to understand and implement and also accomplishes many of the same benefits.
Simplicity is an underrated value when it comes to elections. People are more likely to trust that which they can easily understand. And ranked choice, fairly or not tends to cause a lot of confusion.
Unfortunately, I rarely see people who hate IRV/RCV because they want it replaced with approval voting. Usually it's that their candidate/party of choice would fare worse under it.
But they know they live in a state where any presidential candidate with (R) next to their name can win by 10-20 points. So they wonder how such a state can elect a Democrat without something underhanded going on. A working theory is that the RCV system is "too confusing" for some folks and it leads to the D candidate winning an "undeserved" victory.
The Duchess of Alaska is a "moderate" only insofar as her first and overriding loyalty is to the what the permanent Federal Civil Service in DC wants. She'll agree with anyone of any ideological stripe so long as she knows the will of the bureaucracy is being carried out.
I hear you and this is such a lazy argument against IRV. Do they really lack the imagination to understand why this is a feature, not a bug in IRV?
IRV, though imperfect, is so clearly superior to one candidate voting if the goal is a responsive democracy. Unfortunately, there are many people who don't want that. IRV closes a loophole for extreme candidates (I have a strong suspicion that the 2016 djt campaign would have been thwarted by IRV had the gop primary used it). It also allows partially aligned challengers to pressure incumbents without dividing the electorate. This would likely be better for the challenger and the incumbent. Consider this past election where Jill Stein was demonized as a spoiler, which she potentially was, but would not have been in ranked choice. I bet there are a lot of voters who would have rather voted for Jill Stein but instead cast their vote for a candidate whom they thought could win (including candidates who received what should have been Jill Stein votes and thus lost important information about what matters to their voters). This is bad for everyone except those who don't believe in responsive democracy and largely rewards career politicians, political consultants and lobbyists.
No, it would be a landslide only in one sense, the first past the post sense. Not in any other sense. The majority of individuals would still not want the cons in power, but with FPTP the left vote gets split.
Would it be possible for it to not happen right away? They are in a minority government without a PM, I really wonder if there's a way the elections aren't triggered basically instantly.
With Trudeau leaving, I suspect that at least one of the other parties will give them enough time to elect a new leader before bringing down the government. The government may even last until the required election date of late October however, nothing of any importance will likely be passed in that time
Unfortunately, the liberal party rules say they require a minimum of four months to elect a new leader. They may be able to fast track it in three months, but it’s entirely up to the liberal party so I suspect Trudeau will still be leader when Parliament resumes.
As someone with no knowledge of the topic, why was electrical reform needed? Wouldn't one assume that either party motivated to do it while in power would be doing it with the goal of positively affecting the outcome for their party in the future? It would seem weird for a candidate to reform how voting works knowing it could negatively affect their side, right?
> Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium
To be fair, that two-party equilibrium is the thing that keeps every minor political crisis from causing no-confidence votes and failed governments because all of the special interests involved break the coalition.
Other Parliamentary governments that don't have this kind of equilibrium end up with minor political parties holding massively outsized influence and concessions just to keep them in the coalition. See Denmark (this is pretty much the subject of every season of Borgen).
The only time a Finnish government coalition has failed due to a loss of confidence was in the early 80s. Prime ministers occasionally change mid-term and minor parties sometimes leave the coalition, but the coalition always continues until the next regular elections.
And the reason for this stability is trivial. If a party leaves a coalition and the coalition loses parliamentary majority, that party is effectively a major party. Potential prime ministers are rarely stupid enough or desperate enough to give small parties that kind of power. Instead, they prefer making the coalition a bit wider by adding another small party or two.
We also have the Swedish People's Party, which specializes as a reliable coalition partner. They are willing to collaborate with pretty much anyone. As long the coalition agrees to uphold the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority, they will give it another 4-5% support without too much drama.
Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
That affords you the social cohesion to avoid these things. Much moreso than Denmark and orders of magntitude moreso than Canada.
You just generally agree with each other more, in your own socially-distant, Finnish way. Kippis!
Also the comments about the Swedish-speaking minority interest are a bit weird in historical context -- Swedish used to be the dominant language in Finland until the Swedish-speaking nobility decided to promote the Finnish language and identity. It isn't exactly weird that their remnants today would be able to promote their own interests...
Your perception of Finland is stuck in the 20th century. Today's Finland is roughly 10% immigrants. If the current trend continues, the fraction should increase to ~15% by 2030. That would be comparable to the US.
As for the Swedish-speaking minority, it's mostly a result of colonization in the middle ages. Swedish became the dominant language in some coastal areas, while the rest of present-day Finland spoke a variety of Finnic languages. During both Swedish and Russian rule, Swedish was used as the administrative language, and the elites used it among themselves. But even among the elites, Swedish was often not their native language.
> Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..
We use preferential voting and haven't had a minority government, that is a government formed by coalition as the result of an election since 2010. We still typically have 2 major parties and 3-4 minor parties that can (but by no means always) hold the balance of power, particularly in the senate. It means that the govt has to compromise more often to get bills passed, but the minority parties rarely hold legislation hostage (barring things like the Housing Future Fund, which was a dog's breakfast).
We have two left parties that votes are split across, and a single right party.
This means the conservative party often ends up getting more power since they're "first past the post" even though the majority of the population may not agree with them.
So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
If the situation is as you describe, what really needs to change is that the two left parties need to merge, or one of them needs to become such a marginal player that it doesn't matter. If the leaders of those parties can't or won't do that, well, then you get the situation that you have.
Some believe that it’s better if representative democracies represent their constituents. Newer voting technology that permits a greater alignment of representative distribution with voter distribution is preferable to those people.
Personally, I find it galling that the massive Californian population of Republicans and Texan population of Democrats frequently go unrepresented.
You seem to believe in the primacy of FPTP voting in itself. That’s the difference.
That seems a misunderstanding of their argument. I suggest using an LLM, quoting the comment, and discussing with it till your comprehension matches that of the machine. They’re usually pretty good at it, and it appears better than you in this instance.
> So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
That's not what they're saying. In Canada, we can easily end up with parliamentary majorities for parties that have less than 50% of the popular vote. Sometimes substantially less.
No, I got that part. That's true in any first-past-the-post system, and especially true in ones with more than two major parties. (The solution to that would be proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post.)
But the complaint seemed to be, not that it kept happening, but that it kept favoring the Conservatives. So, on the one hand, the fact that it keeps favoring one party is an issue. On the other hand, the way the complaint was made makes it sound like it's not coming from a position of objectivity.
I beg to differ, the polls say otherwise regarding who the population wants and more importantly, the unhealthy coalition of NDP / Liberals have been preventing the parliament from functioning, we would have had an election by now had NDP stopped propping the Liberal party by preventing the non confidence vote.
Canada has a FPTP system but multiple parties. This means that it becomes possible to form a distorted, outsized government (even a majority government!) with a remarkably little amount of the popular vote. In 2019 the Liberals won the election and took 46% of the seats with a mere 33% of the vote. That is a remarkable distortion.
The argument as to why electoral reform is needed is because of this distortion and the view that the FPTP system itself is resulting in peculiar outcomes that do not reflect the actual wishes of the voting public.
I wonder if he could still do it last minute. Like could we switch to proportional representation in the last months? It’d be a better system and may even (cynically) help his own party in the next election so there’d be some incentive.
They don't want proportional representation. If they did, they would have had it. Trudeau killed the electoral reform committee precisely because the NDP and Bloc insisted the would only accept PR and not Ranked Ballots (Trudeau's preference) and the Conservatives would prefer no change at all.
PR would force the Liberals to co-govern in coalition with the NDP basically forever. They don't want it. Their enthusiasm for Ranked Ballots is for the opposite reason: they realize they are the 2nd choice of "most" Canadians (or were until the last few months...). Given that, and the near-extinction event they suffered pre-2015 and the rise of Trudeau II, you can understand why they'd prefer that...
People are failing to read between the lines here.
Trudeau wanted electoral reform. But only one kind of electoral reform. A ranked ballot system.
When he couldn't get that, because the NDP and Bloc said "No F'ing Way" (for reasons I'll get into below), he sabotaged the whole committee and forced it shut.
After that he only had minority governments. So there was no way he was going to re-open the issue because he still wouldn't get the result he wanted.
Why ranked ballots, and why are the NDP opposed to them?
Because in a ranked ballot system the Liberals would be the 2nd choice of the majority of Canadians. It would effectively end the NDP as a viable electoral party. At least that's now the NDP saw it. I think a look at other ranked ballot system countries would definitely provide evidence that it tends to produce two-party system outcomes (see Australia, effectively a two party system)
The NDP's preference is for a Mixed Member Proportional system like in Germany. As a partner in a coalition minority gov't with Trudeau there is no way they would have accepted anything else. And key people in the Liberal party will never ever accept such a system, since it would mean governing forever along with the NDP, their ideological opponent (no matter what other people might tell you.)
So, yeah, screw Trudeau, and thank god he's gone (he should have resigned after he failed a majority last time around), but I think people need to dig more on this issue and why he might be saying this:
He wants "electoral reform" and regrets not getting it, because if they had accomplished what they wanted (ranked ballots), they would probably have a good chance at another election win. Yikes.
> instead you've just handed us to the conservatives
I agree that the conservatives are not a good choice, but apparently for the opposite reason as you - the conservatives are unlikely to be able to fix much of the damage Trudeau has inflicted on the country, especially w.r.t. unfettered immigration.
The PPC is the only one with any sensible policies IMO, but unfortunately they won't be competitive in the upcoming national election.
> Trudeau has faced mounting pressure to resign amid polling that showed his ruling Liberal Party was likely to be swept out of power in the next election by the opposition Conservative Party. The prime minister has also become deeply unpopular over a range of issues, including the soaring cost of living and immigration. His leadership as further thrown into question when his finance minister abruptly quit in December.
My ex business partner did the hardware design for our prototype and scored a super helpful brilliant guy out of Nigeria on Fiverr that walked him through everything he needed. So I can honestly recommend this route.
The use case we had was actually pretty similar to OP, we had some basic design in EasyEDA and were looking to bring it to the next level for proper prototyping.
The business failed for several other reasons, but lack of solid hardware design (admittedly, ours was a pretty simple design) was not one of them.
Fiverr honestly goes pretty hard if you are running lean. I saved about an order of magnitude on trademark fees by having someone on Fiverr who had done them many times before walk me through the process instead of paying a lawyer to do it. I’ve also used it in the past to get acceptable (not great, but good enough to put on contractual letterhead) logo designs for extremely reasonable pricing
The 100w and heat resistant storage caps are nice, but that battery pack pricing and the lack of on-device controls makes this not an option for me.
$110 cad for the soldering iron is semi-reasonable, if a bit high compared to their competitors. $342 for the iron + battery means that's a $230 battery pack, which is absolutely insane.
Requiring the battery pack to be able to easily change controls means anyone doing more than super basic work, needs the $342 combo.
For tools that you use regularly, it is sometimes worth it to take a step back, put the cost into an absolute perspective and then just get the thing if you know that it's well-made and you use it regularly, instead of getting a cheapish, price-optimized knockoff instead (my experience).
I spent over 200$ on a glorified PCB holder and some probes (PCBite), which is in hindsight one of the most useful tools I own and still makes me happy every time I use it (even that alone is kinda worth it over time!).
I don't know your financial situation, but just consider: How much do you spend each month on meals/entertainment? Is $300 actually an inappropriate cost for a quality thing that you often need?
Note: Iron + station shows up as $250 to me, $350 is the set with some additional bits and bobs.
While I agree with all of your points on determining value, it's never that simple, and is often determined, in someone's mind, by the comparison made.
The comparison here is a Pinecil. I've been using a Pinecil for a couple of years now, I power it from a USB-PD power bank that's already in my backpack, and charges everything else I carry, and has more capacity and a lower price than this one, and the Pinecil without the power bank is much cheaper and more functional with its buttons and display than this iron alone; I don't need a PC (and I don't use Chrome anyway, though I do really like the WebSerial configuration).
I already own a Hakko soldering station, but I find I reach for the Pinecil 99% of the time due to convenience; only when I know I'll be doing a _lot_ of soldering in one go, and I'm going to do it at my desk, do I get the Hakko out.
This looks like a nice iron, and I'm all for supporting repairability (and iFixit in general), if someone will use it as their main station, and assuming this can perform, it seems like an excellent option.
For everyone else, a Pinecil and that powerbank you already have is an excellent option at a trivially low price.
But it's just a soldering iron and a weird usb c power bank. Of course one can spend 300$ on it and justify it, but is this actually better than the alternatives?
The ts100 and variants of it have been around for a long time, can be adjusted on device and powered by regular usb pd power banks.
Why buy this for $250 when you get the same thing from a pinecil v2 and use it with any 20v 100w PD USB-c power pack? I'm not seeing any differentiating features.
I can see why somebody might think that of general pine64 offerings, but the Pinecil is anything but that. It's a significant improvement over my bucket of old soldering irons I inherited and purchased over the years. Unless you are doing some serious heavy duty work, I'm hard pressed to think of a better alternative.
For me it's hard to reconcile what is a good initiative to ostensibly reduce waste, with the reality of ordering at least one of their products. For example I couldn't get a screen replacement at one point unless I ordered a kit, but I needed 2 screens, so I ordered 2 kits and now have redundant, specific, toxic, tools, only some of which actually helped perform the repair.
I'm thinking of the heating liquid pad, which gave me a bit of a laugh and didn't work, the plastic spudgers that were too soft to be durable, the precut adhesive strips that almost seemed insultingly ineffective. The actual handles and screwdriver bits were great though, so mixed feelings, I just hate waste.
It's hard to place exactly at its price point. At the full kit price it's approaching the cost of a mid-range Hakko soldering station which you can use all day every day.
I see this is a potential "better quality" portable option for a professional (than something like a Pinecil and a TS100), that might want to carry it around or use it when not at a desk, but the quality and performance remains to be seen (though I do trust iFixit).
At £240 in the UK, it's about 2.5x the cost of the Pinecil + Powerbank (which I already had). If I didn't have a Hakko soldering station and wanted something portable but capable to use fairly regularly, this seems like a good option.
For everyone else, if you already own a PD powerbank, the ~£25-30 (~£50 with a bunch of tips) for a Pinecil is _much_ more palatable.
I think you could justify the soldering iron itself then for like 80€, maybe not the basestation/powerbank.
IMO 340€ for the whole set with the wirecutters and tweezers and such is still an ok deal, even though it is slightly expensive, because the accessories are probably good quality also, and there are few things as frustrating as bad wirecutters ;).
I agree, in general, and also agree with iFixit charging whatever they can for it, but $350 is pretty much what I spend on core food for the month, or 3 pairs of shoes, or 2 pairs of climbing shoes, or a plane ticket to visit my hometown periodically. It is to your point also less than the tax on a new computer, and less than each ram upgrade on a MacBook Pro, or a week-long road trip, or a mountain lift ticket. There are different ways to convince yourself it's worth it, and it may be, but it's kind of a huge jump up if you're not already soldering nearly every day. Like $350 on meals and entertainment or $350 on a soldering iron is quite clear, I need to not buy the iron and reduce my spending a bit.
The TS80P is very nicely made and can be obtained for around $70. It's only 30W, but this newer generation of irons has a much more efficient tip design, so it works much better than the wattage would suggest (if you're comparing to a Hakko or something).
The iron persists settings when you unplug it. You can change the sleep timer and timeout, set target temperatures, calibrate the accelerometer, and more.
The Power Station is nice to have, but you don't lose any functionality without it.
I was a kickstarter backer of the pokit who thought "oh that's cool", and it just sits in my drawer because I don't want to have to use an app to use basic functionality on my tools. I learned my lesson on that one and I know if I bought this soldering iron I would have the same issue. I'd rather use other soldering irons because I don't have to plug them into my computer to change the temperature between tasks.
FWIW this is just my $0.02. I'm sure you'll still sell lots, but if that had an onboard display + buttons then I'd have ordered one right away for the other nice tweaks you've done.
I feel the same way, but did just realize that because they used web serial, you could use the iron to make yourself a little 3D interface, could be a fun project.
Yep, i'm much of the same opinion. It's a much sillier product, but I had a annova sous vide forever ago that died.
Looked around, heard Joule was the "go to" these days, got one. Gave it the fuck away eventually after the 15th time the app lagged or wouldn't work or whatever.
I'm sick and tired of my tools (yes it's a cooking tool) having the audacity to require an app. I get there's a lot of possible functionality that an app provides, but the annova I replaced it with still has a functional interface so I don't have to fuck with it for the basics.
I don't even see what the workflow would be to use their web interface on this iron?
I'm running a TS80 with IronOS as my daily driver for device/cable connection on the field (relatively thin cables) and some misc PCB repairs. And I set the temperature (and other settings, like sleep) once and that's it. I know I'm probably a niche user, but I see this working very nicely (it looks better quality, I like the connector design they used more, ect) for me, if/when the TS80 kicks the dust.
YMMV, but I think you can get a lot of mileage with a setup like that. Thinking about it, even my 'stationary' old Weller is used as an ON/OFF affair 98% of the time.
So how are you supposed to actually use that? I don't think there are any computers out there which can provide 100W out of their USB ports.
Am I supposed to unplug the iron from its power supply, plug it into a computer, change the temperature, unplug it, plug the power supply back in, wait for it to heat up, and finally continue soldering? That's awkward enough that even a crappy proprietary smartphone app would've been better!
Make sure it can support 100W (that one only goes to 85W).
Plug one end into your PC, one into a wall charger, and one into your soldering iron.
If you want to solder such a thing yourself, there's USB-C PD data/power splitters sold in various places (it needs to be smarter than just connecting pins, since it needs to intercept the power negotiation), but I haven't yet found a part that is advertised to handle 100W.
The hub has a bunch of female ports, and one male USB C port.
The male USB port is the only one that provides USB PD charging output, and it is also the only port that can be used with a USB host machine.
This means that it cannot be used to change settings on the iFixit iron with a computer and give give the iron enough power to heat up. It's not an improvement at all over a regular computer that also cannot do both of these things concurrently.
It looks like a lovely hub to keep on a desk for plugging in a laptop, but it is broadly limited to doing exactly that.
Could you make a cheaper Power Station with an AC/DC converter and no battery? I will forget what temperature I set this at if I don't have visual feedback.
Mozilla didn’t make them implement a browser feature that is not widely available. Believe it or not there are plenty of better soldering irons that don’t require a web browser to configure.
You don't have to have Chrome to configure it (the story talks about this). It's configured over a serial interface and among browsers only Chrome on desktop implements WebSerial (and probably other browsers based on Chrome). That said, they did go out of their way and make the Chrome experience nice.
What feature is Firefox lacking? It would be nice if the error message was more specific, rather than referring you straight to Google or Microsoft for their latest spyware.
WebSerial in this instance, and it's also not on Safari on Mac.
It's a convenience but I'm happy using CoolTerm on my Mac or launching Chrome if I need some WebSerial feature like in-browser flashing of my Meshtastic nodes.
Just 2 paragraphs down, it's very clearly explained:
> giving batteries this first charge at unusually high currents increased their average lifespan by 50% while decreasing the initial charging time from 10 hours to just 20 minutes.
And it's possible the benefit isn't nearly as big if you don't normally take 10 hours to fully charge a battery. It was just previously assumed that slower was always better.
The amount of time it takes to charge a battery is inversely proportional to the current - there is nothing surprising about the fact that using more current charges a battery in less time.
What is surprising about this research is that one small process change (doing that initial charge with a high current instead of a low one) resulted in a 50% increase in the total lifetime of the battery. That's the part that feels like "free money" in that, if accurate, this means battery producers could produce batteries with much longer lifespans without any fundamental change to their battery architecture or chemistry.
IT is free money in another way for manufactures as well: since they battery doesn't have to sit in their factory/fixtures for as long getting that initial charge there is a lot less in process batteries in their factory, less charging fixtures and jigs to buy... This process savings is often invisible until an accountant looks close and then they discover it is massive.
If you've got your widget rolling off the production line once every 90 seconds, you only need 14 chargers to have the charging done just in time on the line itself, eliminating the "storage for distribution" step entirely.
That sounds like a minor details, but accountants keep poking at that and discovering that extra steps like that are cost a lot of money. I'm guess tens of millions more $$$ which either goes to more profit or lowering prices - either is good (profit because I may be an investor, lower prices for customers)
https://www.insauga.com/canadian-tim-hortons-locations-are-h...