• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I agree that Tesla did a TON to popularize electric vehicles when the closest thing from a major American auto manufacturer at the time was probably the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt. That spark, largely ignited by Tesla, is likely a huge reason we have many of the options we do today.

    It’s a shame major manufacturers like Toyota and Honda still won’t get onboard (yes, Toyota technically has a single EV offering as of this year, but good luck finding it and most reviews seem to find it underwhelming at best), but I think that fact further bolsters your point. If those two major players still can’t be bothered to get involved, I think it does indicate that what Tesla did during the last decade or so helped inspire others to get into the market that may not have otherwise.

    That said, do we have any evidence that Tesla’s announcement of a plan to release their patents in 2014 really made any real difference? I am unaware of any of those patents being used by competitors anywhere, though it is entirely possible I am uninformed and I’d appreciate any sources you have.

    I think one of the most glaring examples that the patent release may have had little to no impact is that the now-presumptuously-renamed “NACS” connector still isn’t used by anyone other than Tesla almost a decade on. In fact, SAE only announced that they would standardize the thing at the end of June this year.

    Again, I freely admit that I agree Tesla deserves credit for finally creating a real, mainstream electric vehicle market. However, I am personally unaware of any benefits their 2014 “announcement of a plan to release their parents” has actually directly benefited the industry.




  • Yeah, let’s absolutely get more renewables out there, but I don’t see how we can accommodate base grid loads without something like nuclear (especially when grid storage of renewable energy that isn’t consumed at the time of generation seems like a problem that will take a long time to solve).

    The anti-nuclear stuff drives me nuts, and as we’ve seen with Europe and their general move away from nuclear (France being a notable exception) is that you can spin up all the nuclear you want but you’ll need more fossil fuel plants to handle base load regardless.





  • Thanks, that all makes a lot of sense.

    It looks like pad 5/VCC is on the middle-left, pad 2/GND is on the middle-right, and pad 6/data is on the upper-left of the footprint when I open the hillside46.kicad_pcb file in the KiCad PCB Editor, click on ‘View’, and check “Flip Board View”.

    As a sanity check, given the info above: it looks like I could rotate that ESD chip 180 degrees (so that the ESD chip’s pin 1 is on the lower-right pad of the footprint) and have everything work, correct?