prev and future @terraformindies - Where I work on us winning
Vancouver, British Columbia
Joined September 2019
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Another two weeks, and the next blog post is finally done:
How Starlink Will Conquer The Earth's Telecommunications Layer
The most important insight of this blog post is that Starlink V3 launched on Starship will reach a cost that is competitive enough for SpaceX to be price competitive with every ISP on Earth, irrespective of population density.
A Starlink V3 costs, SpaceX reaches $352/Gbps/year. This means that they can serve customers at broadband speeds (100 Mbps) for just $29/year, $2.4/month.
This is more than enough to cover the entire world in Starlink terminals and subscriptions cheap enough to compete with legacy telco's.
The limiting factor to Starlink's success is not economic, it's entirely achieving the required scale.
That's the headline of the analysis, aside from the conclusion there is tons of fun modelling that was required to come to such conclusions.
I started with the global distribution of population, overlaid the distribution of Starlink satellites onto it, and created a capacity allocation model that models the elasticity of connectivity in every country.
This elasticity-derived model allowed me to simulate SpaceX bringing online every unconnected person in every country on Earth with declining as the customer base increases.
Get all the info about the model and conclusions in the post:
ckalitin.github.io/posts/sta…
EVEN MORE PROGRESS!
Claude one-shotted building the schematic for the Tesla shunt resistor just from multimeter continuity and resistance probes and a picture of it.
Amazing work
Great Progress Tonight!
The unknown differential amplifier is a Texas Instruments LM2903! I misread "Q" as "G" and wasted at least half an hour, such is life.
I've got most of an annotated picture with net labels done.
Found the SPI lines, differential amplifier circuit, clock lines going from STM8 to the ADC IC, and lots more.
Interestingly, one of the shunt terminals seems to be tied to VSS - unfortunate, I wanted this not to require an isolated power supply.
I have not yet gone past where others have before me, but I'm well on my way. This will at the very least be the most well documented exploration of the 2012 Tesla Model S Shunt.
Interestingly, the 3-wire "SPI-like" communication protocol between the STM8 and the ADC uses the STM's TIM2 / ADC pin for data communication.
Could it be an ADC reading a digital bus? Or is this far too silly to even suggest? Maybe it's just used as a GPIO.
I unfortunately wasn't able to to figure out the connection between the op-amp and ADC, tomorrow I'll review diff amp circuit to get a better idea of what's going on.
Another amazing thing, I managed to scrape off the plastic coating on top of all the ICs and get very good looks at their markings! This is how I figured out the G vs Q issue.
Next time I find the connection between the op-amp and the ADC and finally start talking to it over SPI!
It'd also be interesting to probe UART to see if anything is going on. The RX pin doesn't have a test pad while TX does, so I'm guessing it's outputting something.
Terraform Industries just demonstrated solar installation for $0.016/kWh!
In the month before I started working for @TerraformIndies I wrote a series of blog posts on their process economics and came to the conclusion that with current solar costs we could already achieve 15.85 cents/kWh.
$0.1585 vs $0.16!
Such well calibrated prognostication! I’m taking a victory lap on this one, I predicted out solar costs down to a tenth of a cent per kWh.
Receipts:
ckalitin.github.io/posts/ter…
This also implies current H2 costs of ~$1.5 / kgH2. Well on pace to hit less than a dollar around the end of the decade.
I write about Terraform H2 electrolyzer costs here:
ckalitin.github.io/posts/ter…
@buildmattw good work, sir. As I picked up from you:
WE WILL WIN
At @TerraformIndies we're often asked how, as a tiny start up in California, did we manage to build the cheapest utility scale solar array in North America? I asked @buildmattw to write a post on how he did it.
terraformindustries.wordpres…
Related post:
teapaw.org/CKalitin/status/211707…
It’s under appreciated that solving solar array financing has more potential than making the solar arrays cheaper!
As this gentleman notes, Terraform's solar costs don’t add up taking financing into account.
This is the one of the most important insights behind Terraform: that it can be self-funded from a very early point, and before then some VC funding is required.
Notice in the chart below that financing costs are as significant to solar array operators as the cost of building the solar array itself! (Purple section vs blue section)
The cost of financing nearly equals the cost of constructing solar arrays!
If you can use internal capital, you delete that cost and end up nearly 2x cheaper than competitors. This is achievable with little improvement in the underlying technology!
Technology isn’t all that required to win. Reading the history of Carnegie, JP Morgan, the Merchant Bankers, John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil, etc. Makes it clear that extremely advantageous financing is a massive accelerating force and competitive advantage. (Listen to all the @HTTOTW and @FoundersPodcast podcasts!)
The way a technology conquers the world is through being on the right side of capitalism - making more value than you take. Once you have such a technology, proper financing in an extremely important key to scaling to conquering the world.
Again for posterity, related post:
teapaw.org/CKalitin/status/211703…
Terraform will be able to self-finance for a long time, after which they have to bring dollars forward 1-3 years - which is much cheaper than bringing dollars forward by 25 years!
I had Claude extract Casey’s revenue and margin roadmap values from this site:
roadmap.terraformindustries.…
Notice that gross profit outpaces solar array buildout cost (not taking Terraformer production into account yet, I’m a busy guy) until ~2033.
After that point, solar array buildout cost leads gross profit by 1-3 years.
The limit to self-funded growth is how much solar array buildout can be self funded through gross profit. So, a slight lower rate of expansion than Casey modelled would mean that Terraform never requires outside funding for expansion!
What a beautiful business.
It’s under appreciated that solving solar array financing has more potential than making the solar arrays cheaper!
As this gentleman notes, Terraform's solar costs don’t add up taking financing into account.
This is the one of the most important insights behind Terraform: that it can be self-funded from a very early point, and before then some VC funding is required.
Notice in the chart below that financing costs are as significant to solar array operators as the cost of building the solar array itself! (Purple section vs blue section)
The cost of financing nearly equals the cost of constructing solar arrays!
If you can use internal capital, you delete that cost and end up nearly 2x cheaper than competitors. This is achievable with little improvement in the underlying technology!
Technology isn’t all that required to win. Reading the history of Carnegie, JP Morgan, the Merchant Bankers, John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil, etc. Makes it clear that extremely advantageous financing is a massive accelerating force and competitive advantage. (Listen to all the @HTTOTW and @FoundersPodcast podcasts!)
The way a technology conquers the world is through being on the right side of capitalism - making more value than you take. Once you have such a technology, proper financing in an extremely important key to scaling to conquering the world.
Terraform will be able to self-finance for a long time, after which they have to bring dollars forward 1-3 years - which is much cheaper than bringing dollars forward by 25 years!
I had Claude extract Casey’s revenue and margin roadmap values from this site:
roadmap.terraformindustries.…
Notice that gross profit outpaces solar array buildout cost (not taking Terraformer production into account yet, I’m a busy guy) until ~2033.
After that point, solar array buildout cost leads gross profit by 1-3 years.
The limit to self-funded growth is how much solar array buildout can be self funded through gross profit. So, a slight lower rate of expansion than Casey modelled would mean that Terraform never requires outside funding for expansion!
What a beautiful business.
Financing cost not included given that all arrays will be first VC funded then self funded
You’re right that financing cost blows it out of the water - this is a problem that if solved yields far greater returns than decreasing the cost of solar arrays
As I write about here:
ckalitin.github.io/posts/ter…
Great Progress Tonight!
The unknown differential amplifier is a Texas Instruments LM2903! I misread "Q" as "G" and wasted at least half an hour, such is life.
I've got most of an annotated picture with net labels done.
Found the SPI lines, differential amplifier circuit, clock lines going from STM8 to the ADC IC, and lots more.
Interestingly, one of the shunt terminals seems to be tied to VSS - unfortunate, I wanted this not to require an isolated power supply.
I have not yet gone past where others have before me, but I'm well on my way. This will at the very least be the most well documented exploration of the 2012 Tesla Model S Shunt.
Interestingly, the 3-wire "SPI-like" communication protocol between the STM8 and the ADC uses the STM's TIM2 / ADC pin for data communication.
Could it be an ADC reading a digital bus? Or is this far too silly to even suggest? Maybe it's just used as a GPIO.
I unfortunately wasn't able to to figure out the connection between the op-amp and ADC, tomorrow I'll review diff amp circuit to get a better idea of what's going on.
Another amazing thing, I managed to scrape off the plastic coating on top of all the ICs and get very good looks at their markings! This is how I figured out the G vs Q issue.
Next time I find the connection between the op-amp and the ADC and finally start talking to it over SPI!
It'd also be interesting to probe UART to see if anything is going on. The RX pin doesn't have a test pad while TX does, so I'm guessing it's outputting something.
The 2012 Tesla Model S shunt resistor has 3 ICs on it:
A 2903AVG differential amplifier
An IHM-A-1500 (which has a datasheet available on the internet!!!) that is an ADC with some horrible proprietary 3-wire SPI-like communication protocol
And an STM8AF, presumably to translate that horrible proprietary 3-wire SPI into something more readable.
Strange design, certainly seems like something they changed at the first opportunity to delete the redundant STM8 IC.
It also has a fun molex minifit like connector that is keyed. Maybe idiot proof the design while having many of the same type of connector on one board.
My share of effort / thought (measured by Claude conversations obv) is almost 50/50 split school-projects.
This is midterms season too, anecdotally I feel 70-75% of my thoughts are projects, the minority is classes.
This is an underdamped system
(That is unfortunately cutoff at its apex, giving us no fun oscillations)
This is an underdamped system
(That is unfortunately cutoff at its apex, giving us no fun oscillations)
