Alien is the seed word – feed into Google Patents search. I am searching for alien patents filed between 1900 and 1910. I pick an image from the first patent found, when listing by date ascending. I multiply the image, invert it, color it, and place the series on my favorite black ground. I pick…
Tag: Engineering
The Origin of Darkness
Where does it come from? Why and when did my physics/math/engineering art decide to only dwell on black backgrounds? I am sure there are proper theories in the history of art. I can come up with some armchair psychologist’s explanations – blaming popular culture, clichés, a collage of archetypical memories. I am hacker. We hackers…
Plural Form
Take a figure of a historical patent, meticulously drawn before there was software. It’s a Plural Grating Spectrograph. Wonder about the appeal of antique technical drawings. So modest, so sublime. Copy it, multiply it. Slowly rotate the color wheel, until the purples meet the reds again. This is an impossible spectrum. There are no purples…
Tribute to a Pragmatic Swiss Solar Pioneer – Who Called to Action in 1989
He is called a pragmatic doer, knowing his physics and engineering, devoid of ideology. This is how Josef Jenni is introduced in the preface to his document called How can we achieve the energy transition (Wie erreichen wir die Energiewende). It’s a manifesto and a technical overview – by the pioneer whose company had built…
Innovation and Scarcity (and Panic)
I tried to avoid such words. They sounded like hollow buzzwords in times of abundance, used by advertizers playing on fears. But our complacent world is taught a lesson, right now, at furious speed. I am following news as everybody else, I am reading about gloomy forecasts. An Austria paper mill has announced today it…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.
Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
Enthalpy
When you move from fundamental principles (in physics) to calculating something ‘useful’ (in engineering), you seem to move from energy to enthalpy. Enthalpy is measured in Joule, as well as energy. It is assigned to a ‘system’, a part of the physical world separated from other parts by interfaces. The canonical example is a vessel…
The Solar Self-Building Movement
Every year the International Energy Agency publishes a detailed report on worldwide usage of solar thermal energy. The last one from 2019 is based on data from 2017. Countries are ranked by their installed capacity: Collectors’ thermal heating power under standard operating conditions is linked to their area: 0.7 kWth (kilo Watt thermal) per square…
Cloudy Troubleshooting (2)
Unrelated to part 1 – but the same genre. Actors this time: File Cloud: A cloud service for syncing and sharing files. We won’t drop a brand name, will we? Client: Another user of File Cloud. [Redacted]: Once known for reliability and as The Best Network. Dark Platform: Wannabe hackers’ playground. elkement: Somebody who sometimes just wants to be an…
Infinite Loop: Theory and Practice Revisited.
I’ve unlocked a new achievement as a blogger, or a new milestone as a life-form. As a dinosaur telling the same old stories over and over again. I started drafting a blog post, as I always do since a while: I do it in my mind only, twist and turn in for days or weeks…
Where Are the Files? [Winsol – UVR16x2]
Recently somebody has asked me where the log files are stored. This question is more interesting then it seems. We are using the freely programmable controller UVR16x2 (and its predecessor) UVR1611) … .. and their Control and Monitoring Interface – CMI: The CMI is a data logger and runs a web server. It logs data…
Cloudy Troubleshooting
Actors: Cloud: Service provider delivering an application over the internet. Client: Business using the Cloud Telco: Service provider operating part of the network infrastructure connecting them. elkement: Somebody who always ends up playing intermediary. ~ Client: Cloud logs us off ever so often! We can’t work like this! elkement: Cloud, what timeouts do you use?…
Logging Fun with UVR16x2: Photovoltaic Generator – Modbus – CAN Bus
The Data Kraken wants to grow new tentacles. I am playing with the CMI – Control and Monitoring Interface – the logger / ‘ethernet gateway’ connected to our control units (UVR1611, UVR16x2) via CAN bus. The CMI has become a little Data Kraken itself: Inputs and outputs can be created for CAN bus and Modbus,…
Things You Find in Your Hydraulic Schematic
Building an ice storage powered heat pump system is a DIY adventure – for a Leonardo da Vinci of plumbing, electrical engineering, carpentry, masonry, and computer technology. But that holistic approach is already demonstrated clearly in our hydraulic schematics. Actually, here it is even more daring and bold: There is Plutonium – Pu – everywhere…
Cooling Potential
I had an interesting discussion about the cooling potential of our heat pump system – in a climate warmer than ours. Recently I’ve shown data for the past heating season, including also passive cooling performance: After the heating season, tank temperature is limited to 10°C as long as possible – the collector is bypassed in…
Reverse Engineering Fun
Recently I read a lot about reverse engineering – in relation to malware research. I for one simply wanted to get ancient and hardly documented HVAC engineering software to work. The software in question should have shown a photo of the front panel of a device – knobs and displays – augmented with current system’s…
The Collector Size Paradox
Collector harvest does not change much if we only use half the collector. Perhaps counter-intuitive but explained by the characteristics of heat exchangers connected in series: Especially if one of the heat exchangers (in the tank or collector) is already much superior to the other one, it does not help to optimize the good one further.
Data for the Heat Pump System: Heating Season 2016-2017
I update the documentation of measurement data [PDF] about twice a year. This post is to provide a quick overview for the past season. The PDF also contains the technical configuration and sizing data. Based on typical questions from an ‘international audience’ I add a summary here plus some ‘cultural’ context: Building: The house is…
Computers, Science, and History Thereof
I am reading three online resources in parallel – on the history and the basics of computing, computer science, software engineering, and the related culture and ‘philosophy’. An accidental combination I find most enjoyable. Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky’s blog – a collection of classic essays. What every developer needs to know about Unicode. New terms…
Tinkering, Science, and (Not) Sharing It
I stumbled upon this research paper called PVC polyhedra: We describe how to construct a dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron out of pvc pipes using standard fittings. … In particular, if we take a connector that takes three pipes each at 120 degree angles from the others (this is called a “true wye”) and we…
Simulations: Levels of Consciousness
In a recent post I showed these results of simulations for our heat pump system: I focused on the technical details – this post will be more philosophical. What is a ‘simulation’ – opposed to simplified calculations of monthly or yearly average temperatures or energies? The latter are provided by tools used by governmental agencies…
Simulating Peak Ice
This year ice in the tank was finally melted between March 5 to March 10 – as ‘visual inspection’ showed. Level sensor Mr. Bubble was confused during the melting phase; thus it was an interesting exercise to compare simulations to measurements. Simulations use the measured ambient temperature and solar radiation as an input, data points…
Mr. Bubble Was Confused. A Cliffhanger.
This year we experienced a record-breaking January in Austria – the coldest since 30 years. Our heat pump system produced 14m3 of ice in the underground tank. The volume of ice is measured by Mr. Bubble, the winner of The Ultimate Level Sensor Casting Show run by the Chief Engineer last year: The classic, analog…
Where to Find What?
I have confessed on this blog that I have Mr. Monk DVDs for a reason. We like to categorize, tag, painstakingly re-organize, and re-use. This is reflected in our Innovations in Agriculture … … as well as in my periodical Raking The Virtual Zen Garden: Updating collections of web resources, especially those related to the…
Ice Storage Hierarchy of Needs
Data Kraken – the tentacled tangled pieces of software for data analysis – has a secret theoretical sibling, an older one: Before we built our heat source from a cellar, I developed numerical simulations of the future heat pump system. Today this simulation tool comprises e.g. a model of our control system, real-live weather data,…
Earth, Air, Water, and Ice.
In my attempts at Ice Storage Heat Source popularization I have been facing one big challenge: How can you – succinctly, using pictures – answer questions like: How much energy does the collector harvest? or What’s the contribution of ground? or Why do you need a collector if the monthly performance factor just drops a…
Give the ‘Thing’ a Subnet of Its Own!
To my surprise, the most clicked post ever on this blog is this: Network Sniffing for Everyone: Getting to Know Your Things (As in Internet of Things) … a step-by-step guide to sniff the network traffic of your ‘things’ contacting their mothership, plus a brief introduction to networking. I wanted to show how you can…
And Now for Something Completely Different: Rotation Heat Pump!
Heat pumps for space heating are all very similar: Refrigerant evaporates, pressure is increased by a scroll compressor, refrigerant condenses, pressure is reduced in an expansion value. *yawn* The question is: Can a compression heat pump be built in a completely different way? Austrian start-up ECOP did it: They invented the so-called Rotation Heat Pump….
Same Procedure as Every Autumn: New Data for the Heat Pump System
October – time for updating documentation of the heat pump system again! Consolidated data are available in this PDF document. In the last season there were no special experiments – like last year’s Ice Storage Challenge or using the wood stove. Winter was rather mild, so we needed only ~16.700kWh for space heating plus hot…
Re-Visiting Carnot’s Theorem
The proof by contradiction used in physics textbooks is one of those arguments that appear surprising, then self-evident, then deceptive in its simplicity. You – or maybe only: I – cannot resist turning it over and over in your head again, viewing it from different angles. tl;dr: I just wanted to introduce the time-honored tradition…
elkemental Force 