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Thoughts on an interoperable EV charging network

A gas station stall is held for few minutes. A fast charger, on the other hand, is held for twenty to fifty minutes, and it is hard to know when the charging will finish. Duration depends on battery chemistry, connector type, starting and target state of charge, whether the pack was pre-warmed, whether the site has hit its sanctioned peak demand, and whether a demand response event is running. A good deal of what makes EV charging awkward seems to follow from this one asymmetry. Long dwell times mean queues form, and high variance means those queues are hard to quote reliably. Taken together, the two mechanisms a petrol station leans on — physical first-come-first-served, and the assumption that everyone clears quickly — no longer work. Ensuring a good customer experience, despite these issues requires a tight coordination between forecasting, queue management, navigation, which is harder to achieve in an interoperable network, where charge point, charging app and vehicle OEM could be ...
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Goodness in Tesla

It has been more than 4 months that I turned in my badge at Tesla. By now, I have mostly gotten over the constant tick to check ercot.com for the latest market price spikes, upcoming scarcity days and check internal dashboards to track how VPP dispatched. Elasticity of brain to adapt to new work rhythms is amazing.. and so is its capacity to forget. So before I forget the lessons I learnt and cultural patterns that made Tesla hum, thought of writing those down, in order to preserve and grow them. I sincerely believe some aspects of Tesla's culture are worth emulating. This is an effort to list them without disclosing any non-public information, and capture the emotions and quiet integrity of engineers that used to run the small sliver of Tesla I had the honor to work within. I tried to organize the post below around cultural building blocks to make it easy to read. Joining Tesla I have been following Tesla since 2009, including listening in on most investor calls. The grit and sac...
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A beautiful bifurcation

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 The world of work is often viewed as a sterile pursuit of checklists, project plans, meetings, coding.. the whole grind, without many emotions or drama. Those last things belong in a movie or TV soaps that we watch after returning home from work . But work does have its moments, of inspiration, serendipity and clarity.. all dramatic enough to be put in a movie, which are the breadcrumbs that show us the way to our life's calling. One such moment happened to me in Bangalore early in my career, and made me decide to pursue control design as a career path. I wanted to pen this down for a long time.. but was not sure if I could share this publicly, despite it being of no commercial value. Since it has been almost 20 years since that incident, writing it down to share an oddly satisfying science discovery and its personal impact on me, without disclosing the business context around it. Hoping it spurs others to remember what drew them to their life's work, and for others who might ...
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Amtrak is a box of chocolates..

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  and you never know what you're going to get (or meet)!  A new job in bay area, required me to commute and take Amtrak both ways. After two years of pandemic, that was a rare chance to see and meet diverse people from all walks of life. One such interaction stayed in my mind . Here is what happened.. I was trying to get work done on laptop at a lower level in the train, when in rolled a burly man, in his seventies, with a mask on, on a wheelchair. His cap said he was a vietnam war veteran. He parked the wheelchair next to a wide table and started talking on phone. From the sound of it, it was clear that he really enjoyed talking. It exuded eloquence, warmth, good humor and positive vibes in general. After the call, he looked at us fellow passengers and from the corner of my eyes, it was clear he was looking for some kind of connection as a pretext to talk. After some time, he broke the ice and started talking with me and another fellow passenger. It was mostly one-way as he c...
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Watching wind industry grow, memories from last 20 years

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I work in renewable wind energy industry, and saying this fills me with pride and many many memories... Memories of a roller coaster ride over last 20 years, with ups and many downs.. Wanted to write these down for a long time.. because writing can help make sense of things, discover patterns in random draws of life and separate signal from the noise. So here it goes... In 2002, fresh out of college, I joined the world of serious work at GE research center in Bangalore. It was amazing.. The whole place was buzzing with passionate people from each walk of engineering, at desks and in labs, wanting to make their mark with their hardwork, ideas, working with each others and colleagues all over the world and creating a good reputation for Indian engineers.  In the same year, as Enron scandal unfolded all over the news, GE acquired the wind turbine business from Enron at a fire sale, and lot of work came to us to learn and contribute to the new business. A German engineer came to Banga...
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Zen and the art of (Simulink) software maintenance.

call for help.. (and a long post) As Rob Pirsig had said, the mind is a bundle of ghosts, ideas that exist on their own accord, evolve over time and help or hurt us. Newton's laws, common sense, and the golden rule are some of the best. They are reinforced by the affirmation from repeated experiments or experiences and by the social rewards, cooperation they enable. But there are others.. the wretched ones.. which cause the mind to go out of balance and lose its connection with reality, to lose its calm and dive into spirals of anger, hatred, doubt, cynicism, conspiracy theory, prejudices, inferiority or supremacy complexes.. the list goes on. In some sense.. the mind can become infinitely more complex than the reality it deals with.. and therein lies the rub. To be effective, the mind needs a system to reign in or weed out undue complexity and biases and have a clear north star, or values in Pirsig's words that guides its quest to make sense and forge meaning ...
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Half baked ideas

Just read about apple's research on autostereoscopic displays , which lets us see a 3D image, without needing to squint :) I have been thinking about a pet idea for a long time, which is half baked, and will probably remain so.. Hence I though it might be good idea to spell it out here, so that interested people can work on it/ evaluate it. (and if blog post has any legal validity as a prior art, at least people can't patent it :) I have heard enough brickbats about it from friends, but still it charms me to envision its implementation. Here it goes :( 1. Head tracking pointing : Human computer interface has been trying to replace mouse with gaze for a long time. Usual problems associated with such are distraction and confusion, as cursor follows gaze, and gaze follows moving cursor, which follows gaze and so on. Even gaze tracking is not that accurate yet/ cheap enough to be practical. My solution is head tracking. Head is easier to track approximately, as features/ silhouttes...
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