POWER with Seth Mansur and Peter O’Brien

Explicit content warning

05/25/22 • 26 min

Before we can live in a renewable future, we will have to build and test the technology that will get us there. We have developed quite impressive innovation where we can pull power quite literally out of thin air, but once we have all this energy from the wind and sun, where do we store it? To help us answer those questions, along with giving us a glimpse into the future about economically storing our power and using energy efficiently, we welcome Seth Mansur, Regional Sales Manager of Genie Solar Energy, and Peter O’Brien, the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at NH Research. Seth and Peter talk to host Derek Burrows about the future of electric cars replacing fossil fuel, vampire energy, and the rigorous test that goes into batteries and solar panels.

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Seth shares how his time in Iraq serving for the Marines sparked his interest in creating a sustainable way to use solar-powered energy.
The biggest challenge is finding a way to store our power economically. How does Seth see this adapting in the future?
What is Vampire Energy, and why is it important to pay attention to how much energy our equipment uses when it’s not on?
Having the data to know what’s going on in your facility and what’s causing a vampire energy load is the first step for people to really be able to take control and ownership of your energy.
Peter discusses how battery innovation and testing are improving, and that the future of electric vehicles may be here even sooner than we think.
Better batteries are going to require a lot of testing. How does the Evie battery emulate real-world conditions in its testing process?
What is abuse testing?
Flash Testing is one of the technologies used by solar panel manufacturers.

Resources Mentioned:

Learn More About:

Seth shares how his time in Iraq serving for the Marines sparked his interest in creating a sustainable way to use solar-powered energy.
The biggest challenge is finding a way to store our power economically. How does Seth see this adapting in the future?
What is Vampire Energy, and why is it important to pay attention to how much energy our equipment uses when it’s not on?
Having the data to know what’s going on in your facility and what’s causing a vampire energy load is the first step for people to really be able to take control and ownership of your energy.
Peter discusses how battery innovation and testing are improving, and that the future of electric vehicles may be here even sooner than we think.
Better batteries are going to require a lot of testing. How does the Evie battery emulate real-world conditions in its testing process?
What is abuse testing?
Flash Testing is one of the technologies used by solar panel manufacturers.

Resources Mentioned:

Previous Episode

SPACE with Astronaut Abby and Omar Mussa

Welcome to the second season of Testing 1-2-3 from NI, where we speak to engineers, experts, and those on the forefront of some of the world’s biggest inventions and possibilities to look at the world around us from the lens of testing. In this episode, we explore the meteoric rise in space travel and exploration, and what that means for testing and the future of sending humans to space. Host Derek Burrows talks with author and founder of The Mars Generation, Astronaut Abby, about the unique challenges that come with testing for space, and specifically Mars. The conversation then shifts to Omar Mussa from Virgin Orbit, who touches upon the ethics of testing in space, and the one area where big hairy failures happen most. It’s an out-of-this-world conversation this week, get ready for blast off!

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How space exploration is one of the most extreme environments that we can explore.
What are some of the rigorous physical testing requirements that go into astronaut selection?
Last year, there were 133 successful orbital launches around the world, beating a record for annual launches that dates back to the Space Race.
Is there even space for human beings in space?
With only 5% of space launches being crewed, how much can we really do without human presence?
We are now testing both for longer explorations in space, but also shorter missions with commercial tourism.
Omar talks about what it’s like building something that blasts off completely unsupervised.
What is vibration testing?
Why do we need people in space if it’s so hard, expensive, and dangerous?
What do Abby and Omar think the future of test will look like in space?

Resources Mentioned:

NI
Astronaut Abby
The Mars Generation
Omar Mussa
Virgin Orbit | Virgin Orbit YouTube | Above the Clouds | Blue Skies Went To Black
We’re hiring! If you’re interested in exploring a future career supporting a small sat launch, check out Virgin Orbit Careers.
A special thank you to one of Omar’s LabVIEW mentors, Fabiola de la Cueva, for building the “Our Giants are Female” movement within the LabView community of presenters.
GDevCon

Next Episode

LANGUAGE with Kimberly Bryant and Eli Kerry

The lightning-fast pace of innovation brought on by the rapid advances in our testing technology owes at least part of its success to building, writing, and deploying a coding language that allows humans to follow and track it in a way that resembles how we think. This week, we explore how software-defined test has helped us improve and optimize our test, the differences between spoken language and coding, and the opportunities that arise when you are armed with a new vocabulary. To explore how we can better speak the language of test, host Derek Burrows welcomes Kimberly Bryant, founder and CEO of Black Girls Code, and NI’s Eli Kerry.

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What is Kimberly’s perspective on the differences between spoken language and coding language? What are the similarities?
How has software-defined test helped us improve and organize in the automotive domain and beyond?
While spoken languages may help us navigate and define the world around us, coding languages help us build them.
Why was LabView created, and what does LabView code look like?
With novel technologies like AI, we are teaching the computer how to solve problems sequentially by following a set of algorithmic steps, much like the teacher teaches their student.
As our computers get smarter, will we see the line between our language and theirs start to blur?

Resources Mentioned: