Chris M.

Top side of a BeagleBone Black I've been working a bit with the BeagleBone Black (BBB) , a $45USD single board computer, for the last couple of months. It's capabilities, relative to its cost, are impressive. Several sites have compared the specs of the BBB and the popular  Raspberry Pi (RPi) , another powerful and low cost single board computer. You can check out some analysis of the two  here . One important difference between the BBB and the RPi is that the BBB lacks a video processing unit (VPU) to accelerate video playback . A video processing unit helps improve video decoding and/or encoding rates by performing some or all of the specialized operations involved in video processing. Without a VPU or other specialized hardware, a system would have to perform the video processing using the system's core processor , likely a general purpose processor, and at a far slower rate.  This RPi and BBB comparison  picks up on the video decoding capab...

Earlier this year I purchased a Toyota Plug-in-Prius . The car comes with a slow charger module that is powered through a standard 120v 15amp outlet. This kind of outlet can deliver something around 1kw of energy. For the 4.4kw battery pack in the PiP , it takes about 3 hours to charge the pack from its empty state. Empty for the PiP isn't actually a zero charge level, the battery is kept within a 15% to 85% State-of-charge(SOC) to prolong its life. Frequently I was finding that I didn't have enough time to charge the pack before leaving on another trip. One option was the $1500 or so to purchase a 240v charger and have someone install it. A quick search on the web turned up the OpenEVSE project , a project to build a evse charger. I started to read about the evse project and got interested in building one. I did want to have some kind of network support so I could control and monitor charging, schedule it better than the car could and otherwise expand upon what the proj...