How to multiply amount of EV charging points

Here is business idea on how to multiply amount of EV chargers

Many homeowners are in position to provide EV charging points (power connection, parking places), even if they are not interested in EV vehicle at the moment. Some of them are willing to monetize the possibility, but don't want to deal with clearinghouse headaches and the necessary initial investment in expensive charger. Lack of the solution prevents many to share their existing EV charging point even with their next door neighbors.

So we need to invent:

1. infrastructure that would incentivize (reimburse) home owners to expose their power to any EV consumer.
2. Adapter device that is as cheap as possible, for every EV owner to buy.

How?

1. Create portable adapter that transforms home 3 phase power to NACS or CCS. Car driver will purchase and register the adapter with clearinghouse (see below) and carry it in the car.

 

 

2. Create DIY kit for homeowner to wire a standard 3 phase power socket (IEC 60309) in a rain-proof way on their parking place (or accessible from street) and stick "provider" RFID tag (received from clearinghouse). Should be doable by any certified electrician.

3. Create software infrastructure to charge consumers and reimburse homeowners, with secure producer-consumer authentication. The adapter will have a chip that reads RFID tag embedded into the power socket and calculate reimbursement amounts.

General notes:

• It would be nice if the adapter  cooperates with the car's computer/SIM to communicate with the clearinghouse using cellular network
• Homeowners should be able to set rates, down to zero to certain adapters (EV car owners), see who is connected at any given time and contact details of EV drivers.
• Some amount expected to be taken by clearinghouse for infrastructure support
• The adapter variations could be with embedded 3G SIM, charge indicator, anti theft device

Daeb - Carpooling-first robotaxi driven highly efficient transportation solution

 ====== Daeb ======

Daeb - pronounced "deb" - nothing special, I just like the short name, similarly to "cab" :)

Motto: Carpooling-first robotaxi driven highly efficient transportation solution.

===== intro =====

Bus, metro and cars transport are obsolete. People want to have the best features of the three, like comfort and speed of car, lack of parking headache and cost of bus or metro,

Robotaxi might sound as the solution, yet it has its own issues. It is very complex system that tries to solve all problems for every possible road and weather conditions. No wonder we are in wait for over a hundred years and counting..

Another issue is carpooling, or rather, lack of it. The robotaxi car is by design point-to-point solution that does not bode well with picking up and dropping off passengers en-route, like bus or metro. As consequence, its efficiency goes down with rising traffic loads.

We need something simple, like elevator or escalator, that is "carpooling" passengers by design and works reliably in closed, predictable space. A network of strategically put travelator-inspired transportation would enable passengers to reach remote places easily.

===== Daeb =====

Daeb is a system of autonomous cars that are purpose built for quick pickup and dropoff and whose purpose is to transport passengers along predefined short route, like a street or around a block. The limited environment would simplify requirements from autonomous car. Neighborhoods might choose to use different transportation means, depending on environment, like self driving scooters or callboats.

It would stop at any place by pressing a button (to exit) or waiving a hand (to pickup). Phone app might "order" empty Daeb car to await passenger outside, just like taxi. It might circulate this way between center and remote parts of the neighborhood, passing predefined doPon places, like a bus route.

The Daeb car might have option to become car for rent on the go. Say someone needs to carry heavy load or citizen with disability to remote place. In this case he might "take over" the Daeb car control, sit at the driver place and drive the car to destination.

Similarly, there will be separate set of likely bigger Daebs traveling between suburbs or to downtown, with even bigger Daeb system participating vehicles (like trains) moving between cities.

The multilevel Daeb architecture enforces resources efficient carpooling. The separate Daeb loops enable to differentiate carriages and frequency, depending on demand.

doPon codes

doPon is short from "Drop Off People and ONboard"

symbol “↙️P↗️”

DoPon is system to enumerate places where people drop off and onboard, near socially popular places, such as wedding halls, malls, stadiums, cemeteries, etc.

It is designed to be used in robotaxi, carpooling or taxi settings, when user is on the go and needs to enter pickup or drop off location.

Scheme

doPon system is global, thus it has both full, short and tiny schemes. Same doPon place might have several doPon code (see shorting below).

Tiny - used in city: @Cid (e.g. @33231) - first digit is always control digit of all digits in doPon code. Second digit specifies amount of digits that follow it (it also serves code shortening - see below). Digits from second and until first non-digit char is the doPon code of comprise number of the place in the city.

Certain prefixes might be reserved for already existing system. For example all public bus stations in Israel have unique 5 digits station code. These might be mapped to doPon at, say, “prefix” 5. Thus, a bus station 12345 in Israel will have doPon code @X512345 (where X is control digit)

Short - used in region: @Cid-CityRegionCode - where CityRegionCode might be mapped after phone code of the City or Region

Full - international: @Cid-CityRegionCode-CountryCode - where CountryCode is phone code of the country

Slots A popular doPon place (like in airport or mall) might have several “slots”, where passengers might await for drivers to pick them up. The slots are dynamically directed to, based on demand and availability. To specify slot, one should add + sign after the short doPon code part. For example, full doPon code for slot 12 of doPon place 831 (BenGurion airport) might be @X3831+12-3-972 (where X is control digit). For consistency, slot number is not used in control digit calculation.

Codes shorting

It is expected that popular places will have shorter codes. These are easier on people to remember and type. Codes with “eternal” prefix (such as 1 to 3) could be printed on billboards and memorized by people easily.

In practice it is hard to estimate place popularity, thus a graduation approach should be used. Initially, any place submitted into the system is assigned longest code possible (say 7 digits). If the system sees many lookups for the code, it will get graduated to shorter code. After that, use of old code will cause warning about the code graduation.

doPon place

A physical doPon place should have several features:

• It is well suited for a car (especially autonomous cars) to stop safely and allow passengers pickup and drop off
• It has easy way for driver to turn around
• It is wheel-chair or scooter friendly, passengers have easy way to reach socially popular places nearby
• A popular doPon place might have several clearly marked “slots”, probably spread at different entrances. Slots on both sides of a road might be arranged in street-like buildings order for more human-friendly navigation.

F1x - wiki for devops

By definition devops role requires 24/7 on-demand attention. With separate NOC team to execute SOPs and track incidents. Single devops is nonsense. A company that has single devops is a recipe for disaster as there is no redundancy for that fragile and pesky human resource.

With more than one devops, knowledge sharing becomes the issue. And without further ado, let me introduce F1x - how we handle it in our company:

F1x

Have you ever wondered about possibility to press F1 and have a way to scribble notes about the very thing you are working on? And make these notes available to other members of your team? Popping up into their face when they happen to start working onto the same thing? And they can edit them too!

Introducing F1x - "F1+eXtra help button everywhere":

F1x is "F1 help button everywhere" system that recognizes user activity (context) and maps contexts and corresponding wiki pages.

At this stage it is able to track contexts of users doing ssh to servers and changing current path into a directory. But it already gives powerful notes-leaving mechanism:

Imagine you are trying to understand some weird functionality and ssh into the server. A popup shows up with a note that there is F1x note. You press F1 and browser is opened to the F1x wiki page, that is exactly about the server you are working on. Even more, when you chdir into some directory, and there is a note about it, you will get popup as well.

Here is short video demo of the F1x in action:

More info and code is on the gitlab project over here:
https://gitlab.com/skliarie/f1x

O GTalk team, where were thou? (part IV: The END)

It is finally happened:

Google Talk is surprisingly still operational, but that ends on Thursday

Took 12 years to die:

O GTalk team, where were thou? (part III) (AKA: The other shoe dropped). (2017)

O GTalk team, where were thou? (part II) (2014)

O GTalk team, where were thou? (2010)

MYSQL/BTRFS/NVME failure

It is a very bad idea to run database (especially production one with lots of I/O) on BTRFS because the filesystem at any random time might become readonly:

Oct 24 12:30:22 db02 kernel: BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1) in btrfs_run_delayed_refs:2936: errno=-28 No space left
Oct 24 12:30:22 db02 kernel: BTRFS info (device nvme0n1): forced readonly

And then you find that you need to do rebalance. You try and find out that rebalance can not be done because - you guessed it - there is no space left. They suggest to delete couple of snapshots though. You delete them, start rebalance and now the whole filesystem is stuck completely.

If you need HA mysql db with snapshots, then you should go with mysq/LVM/DRBD path, see this link for insight: https://rarforge.com/w/index.php/2_Node_Cluster:_Dual_Primary_DRBD_%2B_CLVM_%2B_KVM_%2B_Live_Migrations

O GTalk team, where were thou? (part III) (AKA: The other shoe dropped).

Today it happened for the first time. GTalk team, silently, without telling anyone, stopped messages sent using XMPP to be delivered to Android Hangouts clients. This caused me to miss important alert message from my monitoring system.

Good bye GTalk/Hangouts, it was nice to know you.

Hello telegram, the only popular and opensource API system out there!
See you on tg://resolve?domain=skliarie