MTN Electronics: LEDs - Batteries - Lights - Chargers - Hosts - Drivers - Components - 1-Stop-US Source

I’ve written and published a few Alexa skills. Unfortunately, “Hey Richard” isn’t a wake-up option on Echo devices. But I could easily write one to respond to “Alexa, ask Richard…”

You mean this could be a reality? :open_mouth:

“I never knew I needed one, but now I gotta have one.” :person_facepalming:

You think thats bad,

I own a Ford F350 Platinum with MS Sync.
It updates at least once a week. On top of that, it goes into ‘scheduled maintenance’ maybe twice 2 times a week. When it is upgrading/maintaining/etc, the nav, camera, radio, heated/cooled seats, phone,bluetooth,etc, all are not accessible, screen is blank or has the blue ‘progress bar’ slowly progressing. Sometimes it takes 10 minutes for it to complete. The operator/owner has absolutely no control over when or if it updates or maintains.

And with all this upgrading/,maintaining you’d think it would work flawlessly, not even close. And the only thing I ever see changing or improving in the Microsoft sync system, is, nothing.

I’ve turned off every setting I could find to stop this, all to no avail. Even discontinued my truck phone service and its sirus/xm ms service. No change, still updating at least once a week. What a piece of crap this ms sync is…

So the cardboard cutout of Richard would work something like this?

Bobcustomer: “Hey Richardalexa, what is the status of my order?”

Richardalexa: “I will check on that for you now.”

Richardalexa then pages Richard: “Attention Richard, Bobcustomer needs an update on his order.”

Richard: “wuh… it’s 3:00 a.m. Lemme sleep.”

Richardalexa to Bobcustomer: “The status of your order is wuh, it’s 3:00 a.m. lemme sleep.”

Perfect! :partying_face: :+1:

I used to feel this way about Microsoft. Long story, but the short version is they were The Enemy, and I hated them so much I refused to even spell their name correctly. But over time I eventually figured out that they are not, in fact, Hitler. The people who work there are not stupid or evil. And the problems they worsened weren’t really proof of their evilness, but rather symptoms of a broken system in which we all operate. It was mostly just a bunch of people trying to do their best, guided in the wrong direction by messed-up incentives in their environment.

So… I got better. But at the time, I said some things which were, in retrospect, pretty embarrassing.

In any case, sometimes bouncing ideas off someone is a helpful part of a thinking process. That’s all the cardboard cutout thing was about.

Thats a very humane POV.

Having worked on a project there in the Longhorn era, I will say, I came into contact with a lot of people who thought the sun shined out their asses. They mistook being in the right place at the right time for an act of intrinsic virtue, of their superior choices. It ended up hurting the company, because it blinded them to the fact that perhaps the way they’d always done things wasn’t always the reason they’d succeeded, but rather, that they’d succeeded despite the way they were doing things. That’d be more satisfying if most of them had suffered serious material setbacks for their arrogance, but they’d already cashed out enough to be set for life on their big-ass boats, etc.

When I started on the project there was a Dianetics reading room a short distance from the edge of the MS campus. A little before I wrapped things up ~2.5y later, the scientologists had moved on to a new feeding ground. In their place there was a different breed of predator, a pawn shop.

I wasn’t too keen on MS or Intel’s duopoly back in the day, but I was also very conscious of the fact that they provided the economic engine that drove computing from niche to mass market. Without them, at that time and place, it’s a lot less likely that some teenager in Finland would have had a 32-bit computer with an MMU to write a *NIX kernel. Or, if he had, that contributing to the project would have found as many willing and skilled volunteers.

Sure, things would have continued moving forward, and that capability would have eventually become affordable, but it probably would have been somewhat later. A lot of history is like that. But enough about all that…

Hi Richard! Sent you a PM with a question about one of your drivers I am considering in purchasing. Thanks!

Richard,

I am in the process of ordering one of your CUXM/CUXP P60 drop ins. Would it be possible to have you upgrade the 219C to the 90+ CRI version? I have the older version with the 219B LED in one of my other lights and love it. It is the reason I now have to consider strongly whether or not to purchase any light/drop-in that is not high CRI. I would be willing to pay a few dollars extra for the privilege.

Thanks,
Tim

Richard has announced his new boost drivers on his website home page. Looking forward to trying one of these! My first project will be an xhp 70.2 in a short 18350 convoy s2+ host…

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Ooo, thats some awesome news. I am always in awe of what Richard creates.

+1 000 000

Now, where is my credit card…

That’s great news! But I’m just wondering why is it so difficult to make aftermarket boost drivers. Thrunite has single cell XHP70.2 and XHP35 drivers. Acebeam has single cell quad XHP35. Even Haikelite has a driver that can run XHP35 with single cell.

One of the issues is the components and pcb being able to handle the high current. You could have 15A to 20A running through the board. Components burn up, pcb traces get fried, etc… FET’s run their high current through the driver a different way which avoids these issues. You also then need to adapt a firmware to work with it. Sometimes you have to change the driver layout to adapt to the firmware.

I’ve also heard that Lexel got NarsilM working on his boost drivers.

The race is on!

I asked the same question here: LED drivers and Accessories you want, but don’t exist and got several detailed answers.

Oh, I just remembered the most important reason. Those companies have research departments. They can pay people a salary to sit there all day to design and test prototypes and have big budgets to buy all the parts and equipment needed.

The independent guys like Richard and Lexel are just working on these things in their spare time with zero pay while trying to operate a business. So it takes them much longer. They are getting there, though. :+1:

Do you have a link to this driver?

He says it will be released in August. For right now it’s just an announcement that he’s going to be selling them.

Here you go.

Will he take preorders?