Power Management, Chapter 8: Power Management ICs | 25 Amp Circuit Breaker

When potential EV adopters ask me how long it takes to charge my i3 I don’t have to say “ugh… like 22 hours for a full charge…” Instead I get a much different reaction by saying: “after a normal day of use I plug in my cell phone and my car at the same time and usually the car gets to 100% first… but DC fast charging stations can go substantially faster”

Driving the Niro PHEV is a better experience than the standard Niro — when I drove that hybrid, there were a few stumbles with the dual-clutch transmission when cold. It seems the larger, more powerful battery and motor combo smooth out the rough edges of this transmission. The greater electric torque makes getting off the line brisk, almost fun.

> and some apartments are fed with 208V 3-phase, which provide three phases of 120V to neutral, or 208V phase-to-phase.

Adjusting settings via the Fn menu is generally a good experience. A very nice touch is that you can use the up/down/left/right directions of the 4-way controller to move the cursor between Fn menu items, and then use the front control dial to adjust the settings. This is nice because it lets you quickly make a number of Fn settings changes in succession, without having to drop down a menu level for each, or being forced out of the Fn menu between choices. The few exceptions to this are those items with a second level of control, such as multi-shot ISO or the tweak adjustments for white balance settings. In those cases, you need to explicitly select the menu item via the OK button, and then use the left/right keys to make the needed adjustment. The only exit at that point is to hit the OK button again, which unfortunately drops you out of the Fn menu entirely.

The outlet on your wall is likely on a 15 amp circuit, so in many cases, the Smart Plug can handle as much power as the breaker or fuse can. To see what the power requirements of many electrical devices are and what type of load they create, you should visit Electrical Safety First. It’s a site based out of the UK, but the power ratings for products are the same no matter which country you use them in and the charts here are an invaluable tool.

I had a chance to spend a few days with a late prototype of the Sony A55 (equipped with production firmware version 1.0) prior to its release. (Note that the Sony A33 is so similar to the A55, that we’ve only made a few edits to this Field Test to make it work for the A33 review.) After running a couple thousand shots through it (it does have a very fast continuous mode) I found it to be a pretty compelling camera, combining remarkable shooting speed with a host of other capabilities that really set it apart from most of the market. It’s by no means perfect, but unquestionably expands the range of shooting capabilities open to consumers with average pocketbooks. Looking at just how much I found to comment on below underscores for me just how much Sony has done in the last few months. Read on for some of my thoughts on this new class of consumer SLR:

In my college days, designing stage lighting systems for customers, I had a test rig that I used during a sales presentation. The reason I built this is that a customer had his electrician contracted to do the install work (we didn’t do the electrical install, just specification). When I specified 20 Amp breakers and told the customer that they’d be limited unless they upgraded their service, they told me that their guy had taken care of it.

The third incident was also while I was working for the welding repair company. I had a previously perfectly working high-pot tester and needed to test the insulation on a transformer. The tester itself failed and shorted to the case – and I took 11kv AC to the fingers just by turning the power on. That stung a bit, but I got a new high-pot out of the deal, so a net positive.

I can’t speak for the ‘3’, but you can – since you can at least compare your cost of charging with the 240 – 250 volt cost in the Tesla Calculator.

There’s one more multi-shot feature on the Sony A33 that’s worth mentioning; namely Auto HDR (High Dynamic Range). HDR photography increases the range of brightness values represented in a scene by combining two or more shots taken at different exposures, combining highlight detail from some and shadow detail from others. In the past, this has involved locking the camera down on a tripod, shooting several images at different exposures, and then working on a computer to combine them. Lately, though, the capability to do this directly in-camera has been appearing from a number of manufacturers, with varying levels of success. The auto HDR feature on the Sony A33 works pretty well, since the camera does the same micro-alignment trick it uses for its other multi-shot features. Options for HDR include an Auto setting, where the camera determines how much of the effect to apply, and manual settings ranging from 1 to 6(!) EV of exposure range.

It’s a little unusual to see an effective pixel resolution for an electronic viewfinder, but we believe the reason effective resolution is some 20% lower than the EVF’s actual pixel count is that Sony has selected an LCD with approximately a 4:3 aspect ratio, but are only using the central 16:9 aspect ratio swathe of the display. This is likely done both to match the rear-panel LCD display aspect, and also because even with this crop, the EVF already has a generous 1.1x magnification — much higher than that of most APS-C DSLRs — and a somewhat tight eyepoint of 19mm from the viewfinder eyepiece (18mm from the eyepiece frame). Were the whole display used, the eyepoint would fall uncomfortably low — it’s already just a little tight for eyeglass wearers. Thankfully, it includes an unusually wide -4 to +4 diopter adjustment range, better mitigating the tight eyepoint for those with eyeglass prescriptions inside this range. It also has a 100% field of view, and three step automatic / manual brightness control.

Anyone know a good source of information for dummies on electromagnet math? I’d love to build one of those electro magnetic pan brakes, but blindly connecting 240VAC to a coil scares me.