gap, but back at it

I ran into a wall a few months ago working on the inverter. My circuit to fire the IGBT's was just not working, and I couldn't figure out why. I've since tossed my own own design, got some commercial firing cards (Concept Scale Drivers) and designed some PCB's to interface the firing card to the sanguino.

I'll post some pics when I get the PCB's etched and built.

Quote I like from Tom Ligon from the talk Poywell forum

Regarding profit, here's the really neat thing. Yes, the reason power companies want to produce power is to sell it and make a profit. The bean-counters have job security, and the engineering economists can calculate the depreciation on capital investment and life cycle costs and all that, enabling the power companies to extract a viable margin.

But that's not the real profit, and we all know it, and it is why we're all concerned about energy. The profit is that the electricity made is worth far more than it sells for. If we cannot get it by other means, we'll spend the money on solar to get it because it will be worth it.

The profit is what you can do with energy, especially abundant energy with fewer negatives involved in getting it, and what the fruits of those expenditures are. Energy, with raw materials and human talent, are the basis for our economy, and so is priceless.

The economics will shake out the most economical way to produce the power we need, but they don't set the value of the power to civilization.