power play–two
Today the power went out in four buildings on campus. Not my building. And almost instantly, people were poking their heads out of their offices and cubicles gopher hole style all over my building. Why? Because we are so dependent on a completely centralized functioning grid. I can’t even look at financials on my computer unless I have a live, fast connection to the Internet, and am either on campus or VPN’ed in.
One thing I love about South Asia is the decentralization. People don’t count on anything working. Power grid especially. So it seems like almost every computer has a UPS, etc.
But I was thinking about UPS’es today. We had some servers go down, that wasn’t the biggest problem with the power outage. The biggest problem was dumb little hub and router boxes. The kind that keep the bits flowing. They are important. It’d be nice to have them on a UPS. Does that mean we spend hundreds of dollars apiece to provide AC power to a $25 device?
There was once a 15 year old kid named Ben Henry. He invented a very simple way to make a flashlight. One that was cheap and simple as all get out, and that nobody had bothered to think of. His family was supportive; they patented it, and now dude has a company that sells flashlights to the US military. The light? It’s basically a snap on plastic cover with battery terminals and an led that you attach to an ordinary 9 volt battery. The flashlight _is_ the battery. And you even get a free source of batteries in all the old not-strong-enough-anymore smoke detector batteries, which are plenty strong enough to illuminate a tiny LED.
So here’s an idea: design a _DC_ based UPS which comes *between* the wall-wart AC-to-DC converter brick and your little electric device. Instead of an expensive inverter and massive batteries, you just string in a little 9V (rechargable?) battery and some diodes. It should be _much_ cheaper, and probably much more efficient, to provide a little DC to these little devices than to try to simulate the grid the device was plugged into. And I know a bunch of people today who could have continued the bit bucket brigade if only a few hubs had been equipped with one of these.
The first prereq for that, one I’ve wanted for fricken ever, is a *standard* way to provide DC into a device. Standard plug tip, standard polarity, standard size, and preferably standard voltage, but at the bare minimum a way to know what voltage is in there. Lots of wall wart bricks won’t tell you what kind of power they deliver and the manufacturers give scary ‘don’t void your warranty!’ warnings about third party transformers. The closest thing we have now? USB.
[Side note on USB: Why doesn’t this solve the whole problem? I can’t charge my phone with cheap USB phone charger cables because my Mac, which correctly implements USB standards, won’t give the beast 500 milliamps of power unless it uses USB’s digital protocol to request said voltage, pretty please. USB was not designed as a device charging standard, it was designed for computer peripherals. We don’t need a protocol here, we just need a standard plug for power! Like 12V car lighter plugs, only the end that plugs into the device. You might even get some efficiencies if you allowed people to buy transformers designed to provide DC efficiently to several devices at once, rather than always using the portable transformer/power plug that came with the device. ]