> The contracts we sign with all dealers clearly stipulate that products that are not UL certified and listed by local power grid companies may not be sold or used in the United States, because the products do not meet US UL standards. If used in violation of this policy, the devices may pose significant-safety risks. To address this, Deye has built a verification mechanism into the devices. The pop-up alert is automatically triggered by the device’s authorization verification mechanism, rather than by any human intervention.
Yeah, which is garbage. UL is a certification body, not a legal requirement. Your insurance might want it, your utility might want it.
But there's plenty of ways to use solar inverters where neither of those factors applies.
And furthermore, you can buy tons of non-UL-certified junk at Harbor Freight and plug it in yourself. It's not like there's a magic forcefield at the border that these Deye units somehow slipped through. Using that as an explanation for disabling their hardware is so insubstantial as to be just this side of an outright lie.
And I'm astonished that the linked article isn't calling them out on it.
When the local building code requires that grid-connected devices are UL listed, then it becomes a legal requirement. I suspect this is probably the case in most jurisdictions across the US.
edit: NEC section 110.2 indicates all equipment must be "approved" and delegates this to the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) locally; and the majority of them are going to defer to a "NRTL" (Nominally Recognized Testing Laboratory, such as UL, CSA, ETL, etc) instead of doing all the expensive and tedious testing themselves. So when it comes to grid connections, some sort of approval is nearly always a de facto legal requirement.
Mobile installations (RV’s, construction trailers, etc.) and off grid are two very common types of installations for solar inverters. And do not have to meet those requirements.
There are _many_ ways that all of this doesn't apply. Nevermind the fact that people that but things have the expectation of using the device with out interference.
Let's assume there are some people using these devices in a way that is not compliant with the local codes, because they haven't met the testing/certification requirements.
Genuine question. Which of these options do we prefer? (Choose any number)
1. Deye proactively bricks all the devices
2. US governments compel Deye to brick the devices
3. Local authorities penalize people using the devices illegally
If something actually burns down, authorities will circulate a bulletin and move to #3.
Anyone using the hardware in an off-grid, mobile, or other situation where the cited regulations don't apply, should sue the crap out of #1 and I will contribute to a gofundme for their legal battering ram.
As someone with some EtherCat and CNC experience, what’s your interface from gcode to your CNC? Have you written custom software or is there a EtherCat compatible gcode sender I’m unaware of?
There are actually many - almost every serious (IE 100k+) wood router is ethercat.
Centroid (known for the Acorn board) released Hickory, which does ethercat servo drives but not full ethercat support. It runs the same CNC software as Acorn/et al.
Vital Systems makes an ethercat motion controller that interfaces with Mach4.
They let you use any ethercat device you have an ESI file for, and map the inputs/encoders/output types to Mach4 data of various sorts (digital inputs, analog inputs, encoders, etc).
MachMotion also has an interface to Mach4, theirs is a soft realtime motion controller based on RSI's (very well known/used for robotics) motion planning.
Those are the more standard ones.
Twincat also has an NC interface that supports gcode but you'd have to make your own UI.
LinuxCNC can do ethercat, but i've never considered it :)
There are also more standard hardware solutions. Syntec's hardware controller can do ethercat, etc.
I’ve been very happy with my Siglent 4 channel/100 MHz scope (with logic analyzer but I don’t have the $200 pod so I don’t use that). The scope was about $400 and I find it worth the investment. It’s on the same level as the popular Rigol lines but I don’t like their UIs very much (too chinesium for me?).
From my research into microscopes for fine electronics work, the keyword you are looking for is “trinocular”. They have standard camera mounts built in and you can attach almost any camera via an adapter.
Did anyone else play Mavis Beacon growing up? I recently got a mechanical keyboard and there’s an online version of Mavis Beacon that held up surprisingly well, and got me used to typing on the new layout.
My favourite thing about that were the little games like the driving one, the racing one and the supermarket checkout (numeric keypad). However at the time I suspect I didn't pay proper attention to finger placement.
The only roadblock I’ve found has been the webserial API, which enables users to flash ESP32/8266 or other devices from webpages. It’s super handy for flashing WLED or ESPHome to devices because you don’t have to install any extra software. As far as I know, it has been marked as a “wontfix” in the Firefox bugtracker as they consider it a harmful feature [0]
I mean, I understand the attractiveness, but it's a super-niche feature that wouldn't really move the needle.
The real problem, imho, is the constant glitching on Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Even if they were really "accidental" (big if), they impact massive amounts of users in their everyday lives, and it takes very little to lose a user forever.
Maybe FF should launch a GMail competitor, and/or promote alternatives to any Google property.
Honestly, I don’t consider this mindless piracy. It’s ridiculous how many links on HN are behind a paywall. I understand the press needs to be funded, but I do not regularly read NYTimes or the many other news sources locked behind a paywall. I click on interesting articles on HN typically. It would be burdensome to subscribe to each and every news site posted here.
Tkinter is fairly basic but feels very native on every platform I’ve tried, and it’s easy to use. There are lots of extensions available too. I just wrote a comment about it:
If you’re interested in Python desktop apps, check out TKinter. I have a piece of boilerplate code I typically start with [0], and within an hour I can have a finished piece of software that runs in the native windows manager on any OS with no libraries or frameworks to manage. It’s not the prettiest code but it’s very easy to write and I love how native it is.
> The contracts we sign with all dealers clearly stipulate that products that are not UL certified and listed by local power grid companies may not be sold or used in the United States, because the products do not meet US UL standards. If used in violation of this policy, the devices may pose significant-safety risks. To address this, Deye has built a verification mechanism into the devices. The pop-up alert is automatically triggered by the device’s authorization verification mechanism, rather than by any human intervention.