John

Yes the DNA 200 is conformal coated. Since that video we have a faster selective coating machine. It is silicone coated and we shoot for a dry thickness of 2 mils.

It fits in the beta enclosure. That was the first battery we were using for our tests. It isn't a bad battery if you get a good one. But out of the first ten we ordered, one had a bad cell and two had a cell installed BACKWARDS. Yeah... Also with the lowest cost hobby kings packs, they seem to just take whatever cells they can get and make packs. There doesn't seem to be any effort to match cells for capacity, age, date code, etc. All these things matter to a manufacturer. To an individual modder, they are cheap enough if one out of two packs is okay you probably come out ahead.

If you have a good thermal connection to the three mount pads, that heat sinks it pretty effectively. Heat sinking to the inductors on the back can't hurt, of course. The real answer is graph the board temperature or display it in one of the data fields on the screen and see what you get. Or run the case analyzer, but that takes about six hours.

Yep, we confirmed this bug and fixed it last night. Look for an update today.

If it doesn't, let us know, as that would be a bug, but an easy one to clean up.

It works okay on the switching supplies that we've tested with... All the high precision stuff runs off of (one of three) well decoupled linear regulators from the 12v anyway, so anything interesting already has linear post-regulation. The 12v supply directly is just feeding the power stages, so that can be fairly dirty without causing any ill effects. If you're a research lab, might a linear supply be better? possibly. For any sort of end user I can't see it making a lick of difference.

Power supply mode should make the flashing stop. If not that is a bug we'll get cleaned up.

That is the expected behavior when you don't have the battery balancer connection connected.

Oh no, the thing will connect for Escribe purposes just powered from USB.

You can switch profiles via command line. Profiles are fairly new.

Well, yes and no. Anything you can do in device monitor is a wrapper for command line commands. So all operation of the device can be done via command line. You can make it fire, record, log, etc. Anything in device monitor is accessible that way. There's a serial terminal in Escribe. The commands are plain text and respond plain text. So that much is particularly easy. We built it that way especially for automation. In, say, a research setting you want your smoking machine to just run, rather than have to have a lab tech hit buttons. We have a list of commands for developers. It is not particularly up to date, and we're unlikely to update it until after the official launch (priorities) but we can send it to you. Loading firmware is encrypted, and the settings bake to a binary file for upload, so that side of it isn't readily accessible this way, but all operation and montitoring commands and queries you can get to. The serial driver is proprietary, but the default is serial tunneled over HID, and that is totally standard, so if you can handle that small extra level of abstraction, there's no reason it won't talk to linux without having to write a driver. Hope that helps.

No. The DNA 200 runs from three cells only. Those three cells can certainly be IMR cells if you like, but it must be three.

Well, with the 200 they can see exactly what it is doing, and if it is doing something they don't like they can change it. If it is doing something actually wrong, we can fix it. That's really the major difference with the 200 over the 40. And, of course, five times the power.

I have the first linked one for testing purposes. Works fine, impractically large. Realistically though, there aren't really any good small lifepo4 cells right now that I know of. That said, for a few thousand dollars in setup charges any manufacturer that already handles the chemistry will make you calls in any size and shape you like. So any medium size manufacturer could have one made.

Well, we feel like we didn't do as good as job with this sort of thing as we should have with the 40.

We're in Akron, OH.

It does, though at a cost of only about 80% capacity per charge. In a mobile application like this, I didn't think anyone really wanted to make that trade-off. But giving people the ability to make their own choices is really what the 200 is about, so why not.

It isn't in the software right now, but this isn't a bad idea. I'll see if we can put it on the to do list.

Yes, we are very much hoping that wire suppliers will publish compatible curves that match exactly the wire they are supplying. I know titanium wires are a major headache in this regard. As your wire is proprietary we should take this offline, but I don't see major trouble getting where you want to be with the DNA 200

What kind of wire do you have that exhibits that sort of positive to negative to positive temperature coefficient? To bring curves in, the .CSV is temperature, resistance, with resistance normalized to 70f. No programming required. The coil calculator on the steam engine site is formatted properly to bring them straight in. The problem with wires that don't have a strictly increasing slope is that the temperature would be ambiguous, a reaistance could map to as many as three different temperatures. But we can probably come up with something if we need to. What kind of wire is it? (Pm me if it is proprietary)

The fuse is directly inline with the battery, and is a tertiary protection as is. It should only come into play in the event of catastrophic board failure or unprotected reversed battery. That said, if you have space I will never argue against an extra fuse.

You can build custom curves. No programming is necessary, they go in as csv files.

The easiest way around that is set up a three resistor divider to generate "cell" voltages for the balancer to see. You can also disable battery monitoring entirely, which is for fixed installations only, but is useful if you're building the board into a research smoking machine, or something like that.

Absolute max is 16v.

Not in the near term. We have a number of beta testers using parallels, which works reasonably well. All our new products from here on out will have this sort of functionality, so maybe a native Mac version in q4 or 2016, but it isn't on our firm development schedule yet.