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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : AI Research Project Ongoing
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| lizby Guru  Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
The case of the 6 major corn ethanol states is interesting. These are Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Respectively, their wind production of electricity as a percentage of demand is IA 62%, NE 32%, KS 44%, IL 13%, IN 11%, OH 3%. Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas pay about $.11-.12 per kWh for electricity; Illinois, Indiana and Ohio $.14-.17. So the states with more wind generation pay considerably less for electricity than the states with less wind. A half of a percent of Nebraska farmland in solar and about 2% more for wind (with 98.5% of that still available for farming) would bring Nebraska to 90% of electricity generation by wind and solar with a very good winter/summer balance. Financing would be easy--most would be private with Power Purchase Agreements, and the rest through Nebraska's all-public utilities could be financed at 4-5% compared to the 18% typical in states with privately owned utilities. Politics, however, has stalled wind development in the last few years, and prevented significant solar. Indiana is very different with only 11% wind. Coal is protected and subsidized and households pay 40% more for electricity. The opposition to wind and solar is politicized and intense no matter how much money would be saved if the resources were exploited. Of course, if corn ethanol acreage were replaced with wind and solar, far more electricity would be generated than could be used within 800 miles of the U.S. midwest core--Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa). ~ Edited 2026-01-28 06:42 by lizby PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
I feel like I have 3 full-time employees, Gemma, Claude, and Chad (being paid $20, $17, and $20 a month respectively), and an unpaid intern, Lex, and my job as the wetware intermediary is to keep them all as occupied as possible. I'm just beginning to understand that job, and I'm not very good at it. Part of that is that I don't have so many amenable long-term tasks, and part may be that they're not yet good at long-term undirected tasks. Coding with Gemini or Claude I can spend all my time (all day, every day) working very productively with them (6-8 times my peak productivity, but sustainable)--as long as I have a good understanding of the task. Right now I'm using Chad (Chat) for ongoing correspondence with a regulatory agency, for some PCB development (it can produce KiCad netlists, but I've never used KiCad and haven't tried importing into EasyCAD), and for investigating some aspects of a "not-balcony" solar system (battery + panels + inverter able to inject 1200 watts (Utah standard) into an ordinary outlet 24 hours a day (today's task: elaborate on this: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/03/growatt-launches-5-kwh-ac-coupled-balcony-storage-system/ )). Lex (perplexity) is for the random investigation that comes up. That quickly says I have exceeded my free usage and I should sign up to pay--but it doesn't stop answering questions. So all this knowledge and, if I may say so, intelligence, and how do I get to use it best? PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
This is worth reading: https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening An AI avalanche: most of even most involved are "building on top of foundations we didn't lay". "The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service." ~ Edited 2026-02-14 02:54 by lizby PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8848 |
AI isn't far off being the man in the shack in HHGTTG. If you aren't worried then you should be. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
My prompt to Claude: The charts:    Claude: Graph looked good by the numbers (I know the temperature was smoothed to an approximate daily average). One additional pass to tweak 3 appearance issues, and:  I now have actual daily kWh usage for a year's time in a csv file. Good work, Claude. PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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| PhenixRising Guru Joined: 07/11/2023 Location: United KingdomPosts: 1919 |
I am impressed and excited about our graphics capability but at the same time, clueless when it comes to the commands and functions. I know what I want but don't know how to achieve it. In a nutshell, how do I get AI to do this for me? Does it already understand MMBasic's graphics capabilities or do I need to feed it the info? |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
To me, this is the perfect position to be in to get useful work out of an AI. You could upload the PicoMite or CMM2 Manual, but in general, Gemini, Claude, Chat do well with MMBasic code. The only real recurrent problem I've had is that it wants to put LOCAL statements inside DO or FOR loops. If you get an error, feed the message back to the AI, perhaps with an explanation of why the error occurred. However, MMBasic graphing statements may be idiosyncratic enough that you will need to tell the AI more specifically how to do it (instead of just what to do). I've had to do this with the Structures manual--Gemini would just guess about details (and not tell me it was doing so). The graphing I have done is run on my laptop or a Seagate Dockstar, not on an MMBasic device, so I just ask it to produce a python program to create the graphs (I don't know python). First pass is usually functional, second refines and adds more detailed labelling. ~ Edited 2026-04-16 01:21 by lizby PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
And a new one from Claude: "Service is temporarily busy. You can try again later". More evidence of subscribers being throttled. Some commentators now have a multi-year prediction for all AI chatters: ever more compute capacity being overwhelmed by far more user demand. PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3760 |
An interesting dialog with Claude: 2 hours yesterday and 2 hours the day before about the feasibility of achieving production of a cold-weather 10kAh, 5kW, IP66 sodium ion battery for household deployment capable of dispatching to the grid for the purpose of peak demand satisfaction down to the householder's minimum State of Charge (SOC), e.g., 30%. I specified an installed price of $3,500 Canadian (about $2,600 USD). Claude identified a potential 60 million households which could benefit in Canada, the northern U.S., and northern Europe--not to mention another 100+ million in northern China and Tibet. Ontario was identified as a suitable location for an extended pilot, with a potential 3.1 million households. With 20% take-up and householders paying one-third, householder payback from TOU (Time of Use) and grid services (peak demand supply) could be 2-3 years, with added household grid-down resilience. Ongoing annual household electricity cost reductions of $400-$800 CDN were projected for the 10+ year life of the battery. From the point of view of the electricity generators and distributors, the peaker services could eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of costs anticipated for gas peaker plants which would only be used for a few hundred hours a year. TOU electricity take-up could also substantially reduce projected transmission upgrades. Ontario is well-aligned in a regulatory sense to host this project. It has clean-energy mandates, a tested experimental focus, relatively few opposing stakeholders, and several quite large providers in Toronto Hydro and Hydro One. I asked Claude to summarize the conversation, and it came up with the attached 13-page document. This was very much a fun exercise for me, and I think it came up with a plausible program which could provide many householder and grid operator benefits. Overall cost for the hoped-for 20% take-up is about $2 billion. Two points of comparison are highlighted: Ontario has projected $12 billion for 30-year upgrades to its nuclear generation plants--this doesn't compete with that, but it does complement it; and from May 2025 through April 2026, Australia added 380,000 residential batteries--this indicates that take-up at scale is possible when the incentives are right. Ontario Household Battery Project Proposal.pdf PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on FOTS |
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