if all that energy is used to boil water and we’re cutting that energy use by 3/4 then it’s saving 70Wh (not kWh) per litre, or 70kWh per cubic meter. that’s not much

probably can be done, but ultrasound irradiation itself will warm up coffee a little. if all of it goes to heat, then it’s extra 20C or so so you’ll have to cool it down afterwards anyway

while ultrasound can do some weird things, article says

Their research, published in the Journal of Food Engineering, included blind taste-testing experiments which showed that their ultrasonic room-temperature version of espresso was undistinguishable from coffee shots brewed in the traditional way.

or maybe it’s not as good as expected or maybe it falls apart for some obscure reason. remember: 90% of clinical trials fail

maybe simply this didn’t work well enough for it to be worth the effort. there were already surrenders to drones (rare) there’s no reason why automated drone couldn’t do it as well

not what i have expected tbh

converted into lasertag arenas

just yesterday i’ve fixed a blown smd fuse, these are also a thing (fortunately easy to diagnose)

some components fail more often than others, like caps or batteries, or are designed to, like fuses. sometimes it’s obvious after looking even without measuring

it’s kinda dogshit but for this application it (cmos version) would be good enough. or better than that, there are dedicated pwm signal generators. i meant this thing in terms of complexity needed

i think you can get away with resistors when you can work with 5V, up to 1.5A. lithium batteries need current limiter in series with voltage limiter, and this alone can be made in a very simple way, unless you want to know when battery is charged, or if you want extra efficiency that smps gives you, but this only makes sense for larger batteries (phone-sized and up) or when you want to handle everything to charger and connect battery to charger directly. then i think you need controller

my guess would be it’s a parts commonality thing, it’s not hard to make it the old way, there are datasheets for it too. sure you could probably make tiny and cheaper (30x10mm? maybe smaller) analog board with two chips and mosfet working as pwm controller and current limiter, but it’ll have different passives for different battery sizes and heater powers. or you could make one design with optional usb port that you might just not solder on, and depending on model you just put different firmware inside

then you have to interface with charger anyway so ig this makes some more sophisticated chip make sense

yeah it’s more efficient this way but all you need is ne555 + mosfet tho? still no need for it to be turing complete

all of these, and gas turbines too, are synchronous. some wind turbines are almost-synchronous and some use giant inverters which is probably one of bigger mass uses of power electronics today

it’s not all steam

ok fine i’d put there a current limiter which you can make with 2 transistors and a diode. no need for an entire microcontroller. it’s often included with batteries these days anyway

why does a glorified heater connected to a battery need any silicon attached to it?

just don’t reinvent the wheel

Or you could make mbin client with mastodon-like or piefed-like UI. Maybe even it’s already done