(Gouach co-founder here) This is nice, but when you have an e-bike with a malfunctioning battery that you use for work everyday, you don't want to have the 2/3 months it generally takes for exchange programs.
Plus, once you sent your battery, they either discard it which is not ideal for the environment, or try to remanufacture it, which is very dangerous when it's done on a battery which wasn't designed for it, like ours
(Gouach co-founder here) Exactly! The first kits are DIY for our early adopters, but we are working on an assembly pipeline in France, China and the US for our models in the coming months. Clients (B2C and B2B) will receive pre-assembled batteries
We are also looking for bike-shop owners who want to train on our batteries (it can be learned in one hour or so) to get a new revenue stream by offering to repair and assemble our batteries!
(Gouach co-founder here) Most of our users buy brand new cells, and we are working with partners who do have the equipment to retrieve second-life cells and match them in their factories, before selling them as "matched second-life cells packs" back to users for a huge discount :)
(Gouach co-founder here) Car-sized batteries last long because they have so much redundancy, that even when multiple cell fails, you barely notice it. It's very different in a smaller e-bike battery packing 40 or 80 cells.
Cells aside, cars have very good suspensions, and their batteries have been designed with very pricey component to eliminate shocks and vibrations.
On e-bikes, most batteries will have to sustain those, and we've seen a LOT of commercial batteries who were out of order for a simple $5 electronics component which was broken, and which couldn't be replaced because the battery was not made to be repaired (soldiering, glue, etc)
If I was an asshole designing such a protocol, I would design two or three protocols, specifically so I could disable one via an OTA when somebody reverse engineers it. My real batteries would note the authentication failure, and try protocol number two, their firmware aware of the design from the very start. The people who reverse engineered protocol number one would be hosed until they can reverse engineer the second one, because this would be the first time they even see the second protocol. Do this enough times, and the third parties doing reverse engineering run out of customers willing to wait for them to fix it every time. Hell, you can also just make the BMSs support OTAs. OTA a new firmware with new encryption, force REs to re-solve the problem, since of course the OTA for the stock BMS's stm32f104 will not apply to their board's CH23FVQTZM123123.
There are in fact, a few devices out there that did precisely this and successfully hosed reverse engineers (ask me how i know).
Don’t ever depend on reverse engineered protocols for anything you care about. This game of cat and mouse only has one end -- the manufacturer is at a significant advantage.
I tip my hat to this team for successfully reverse engineering, a encrypted protocol. But if they really think they can sell something based on that, I rescind that hat tip because that is fucking insane. There are just so many ways that the manufacturer could fuck with them. And the reverse logistics of shipping back a large battery for all those pissed-off customers who just want a refund are going to cost a lot of dollars.
I personally would not put a cent into this company unless they agreed to only ship products for devices that already support completely normal interoperability. This business of reverse engineering and attempting to sell based on that is going to be a money drain that kills them (thus ending all customer support). I am willing to bet that they have not even priced out ($$$) the cost of a return to them, nor estimated what percent of customers will need it when the encryption changes or something else doesn’t work.
And there'd still be all the already sold controllers, including brand new bikes at retailers. These things don't exactly have over-the-air updates, they are designed to just work forever with the firmware they ship with
> they are designed to just work forever with the firmware they ship with
Is that so? Every time I have brought my bike into a Bosch dealer, they ask if I want firmware updates. One of them was a significant change (changing the "sport" mode to a mix of "tour" and "turbo" depending on torque and speed).
For the Whispering dev: would it be possible to set "right shift" as a toggle? also do it like VoiceInk which is:
- either short right shift press -> then it starts, and short right shift press again to stop
- or "long right shift press" (eg when at pressed at least for 0.5s) -> then it starts and just waits for you to release right shift to stop
it's quite convenient
another really cool stuff would be to have the same "mini-recorder" which pops-up on screen like VoiceInk when you record, and once you're done it would display the current transcript, and any of your "transformation" actions, and let you choose which one (or multiple) you want to apply, each time pasting the result in the clipboard
Awesome, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention! Cool to see another open source project that has different implementations :) much to learn with their Parakeet implementation!
That's why now I've completely eliminated .env secrets from my codebase and I only use 1Password (with the cli) so it loads secrets dynamically as needed. So if I'm running some AI CLI on my codebase it won't try to leak some secrets
Great question, exactly CDC from Postgres to ClickHouse and adapting the application to start using ClickHouse for analytics. Through the PeerDB acquisition, ClickHouse now has native CDC capabilities that work at any scale (few 10s of GB to 10s of TB Postgres databases). You can use ClickPipes if you’re on ClickHouse Cloud, or PeerDB if you’re using ClickHouse OSS.
Plus, once you sent your battery, they either discard it which is not ideal for the environment, or try to remanufacture it, which is very dangerous when it's done on a battery which wasn't designed for it, like ours