Comment on The 49 dollar, 500 WattHour eBike Battery video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FwA_s9Ovxc
You talk about motivations for watching and DIY at about minute 14.
The reason I am watching is I have a lifetime of learning how things work, what they can do, and how to put them into different combinations. Often the off-the-shelf parts don’t fit, or are overkill or too expensive. Mostly they just don’t fit. Now I can see the possibilities, and have good enough math and science and computing to solve and optimize the applications. But I am not good at, and have no patience for soldering, drilling, machining. welding, making parts. I did those sorts of things in my teens 20s to 50s, but not much any more. So it is not just DIY and not-DIY, the scale and number of parts also matters. You have practical approach to things. You carefully weigh risks and rewards. You are not afraid to modify things made for other purposes to make them more useful. That scene where you show some of the various places batteries of that capacity might be useful was interesting. I could only see the many people all trying to find solutions to putting energy into situations. You changed the connector. Why? Because the one that was there was not useful for the places you knew more people were working now. But can everyone do that – take off the end, identify the wires, drill the hole, insert the connector, solder, etc? No. (you forgot to seal the hole after saying the seal will be water proof, maybe I skipped that).
Thanks for your video. But thanks even more from having the courage to change things. If it doesn’t fit, change it to suit your purpose. Or to help someone else. If a lot of people are living on the moon or Mars or in space, they are NOT going to the store to buy yet another connector. They are going to have your kinds of skills – to get the job done. There are a lot of countries and cities and places on earth that need to know how to do things safely, not over-cautious, quickly but carefully and conscientiously.
I think we pay more for connectors and cases than the guts of these things. LOL!
The things that are possible are a million times what people are doing – mostly because we rely on off-the-shelf connectors and cases and configurations. There is no way to “3D print” these batteries, but a robot could do it. Or tens of millions of people in the world can learn the skills and have the basic tools. DIY is as much self-reliance, courage to change, and willingness to see new combinations and possibilities. Sorry to be so terse, it has been a 15 hour day so far, and I have another 6 hours to go.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
Take at look at this video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPu6lN9yJOY
And this one – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdro-6u2Zg
They are doing the same thing, but the parts (including mathematics and computing) have standard interfaces that don’t fit together. So these guys are changing the connectors and trying different combinations.
