The Update: Power, Piano, and Proof of Legwork

Keeping an active internal discussion about the things that interest us at Geocene builds trust and makes it easier to have conversations about harder topics. I summarize our most interesting internal discussions for this newsletter, so you can be a part of our community too. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

• We designed and prototyped the next generation of PowerWatch: a power outage and power quality sensor created by nLine. Electric grids in Sub-Saharan Africa are largely lacking the traditional and expensive monitoring equipment needed to detect when and where power outages are happening. The much lower-cost PowerWatch device is plugged into outlets in homes, health care facilities, and cold storage warehouses. PowerWatch then detects power outages and power quality issues and sends this data back to the cloud, filling a critical data gap for utilities, energy system designers, and grid investors. Providing reliable electricity for all is cool stuff, and we’re grateful to be a part of it!

Left: A previous version of the nLine PowerWatch ready for deployment. Right: The new lower-cost, easier to manufacture, and more advanced PCB from the next generation sensor.

• Speaking of _n_Line, their CEO Noah made a robot puppet with his friend Ben and wife Lane that drives around playing piano and singing Vanessa Carlton. This video of them driving it around San Francisco went viral!

• Skot felt that his morning ride wasn’t rewarding enough, so he hooked a Bitcoin miner up to his Peloton. It’s nice proof of work, but once we got into a discussion of bike powered electric tools, we ended up debating how much power is used by all the toasters in the US (5x the power consumption of Gibraltar), and how 1949’s smart toasters are better than 2023’s smart toasters.
   
• The promise of a ubiquitous low-power IoT network has been simmering for a while, but nothing has hit full boil. But some positive news arrived from Amazon Sidewalk (the sneaky little public IoT network that is broadcast by customer-owned Amazon products like Echo smart speakers and Ring doorbells). Amazon just opened Sidewalk to 3rd party developers and released a developer kit to play with the network and see if you have service near you. In related news, Nordic recently announced their SDK works with Sidewalk out of the box.