Show HN: Daylight – track sunrise / sunset times in your terminal https://ift.tt/lsqA7cR

Show HN: Daylight – track sunrise / sunset times in your terminal https://ift.tt/HPzqlaA March 9, 2025 at 05:51PM

Show HN: AI-powered root cause analysis with the Five Whys method https://ift.tt/UOToqA2

Show HN: AI-powered root cause analysis with the Five Whys method https://ift.tt/6i75mYt March 12, 2025 at 07:16AM

Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls https://ift.tt/r35SWa6

Show HN: We built a Plug-in Home Battery for the 99.7% of us without Powerwalls Hi HN! I’m Cole Ashman, founder of Pila Energy. I’ve spent my career working on home energy systems—first as an engineer on Tesla’s Powerwall, where I focused on the Backup Gateway, Solar Inverter, and metering systems. More recently, I led Product at SPAN, where we built the Smart Electrical Panel and integrated with most major home solar, EV, and battery systems. Pila ( https://pila.energy/ ) is a home battery that plugs into a standard wall outlet, provides smart backup power, energy shifting, and grid services. It’s more than a power bank—it’s a distributed energy system that can scale across multiple rooms, entire buildings, and work together in real time as a coordinated system. We built Pila to be local first with an open API to allow developers to build use cases on top of our hardware (Home Assistant, etc). Big batteries like Tesla Powerwall and Enphase are great if you own a home and can afford a $10K+ electrical project, but they require permanent installation, electricians, and panel upgrades—which makes them inaccessible for renters, apartments, and cost-conscious homeowners. Over 50% of the cost of installing a Powerwall isn’t even the battery itself—it’s soft costs: labor, permitting, etc. We wanted to create an entry point for more people to access energy security at home. How does it work? Plug Pila into any 120V wall outlet, and power passes through to connected devices and appliances. The inverter, LFP battery, BMS, grid disconnection, controller, and wireless connectivity are all built in. (details at https://ift.tt/bNsv7PG ) When an outage happens, the onboard inverter detects the power loss within 20ms and automatically disconnects from the grid (islanding). Whether you’re home or away, backup kicks in instantly. A built-in cellular radio ensures you get a notification even if your home WiFi is out. Pila is 1.6kWh. That will backup a standard fridge for over a day. One key challenge we faced with a distributed architecture was coordination between batteries, for things like solar-following and managing real-time draw from your utility connection. Unlike large garage systems, where you can run a wired CAN bus, our batteries are spread across the home. We’re solving this with a sub-GHz wireless mesh network—self-healing, coordinator-less, and designed to make setup and expansion as simple as plugging in another unit. Long-term, we’d love to open up this protocol to provide a more reliable communication layer for energy products in noisy built environments—reducing reliance on consumer Wi-Fi. We want to deliver the value you’d expect from a whole-home battery like Powerwall, in a plug-in format. That means going beyond a basic lead acid UPS with real home energy management, useful insights about power use, power larger loads like sump pumps, and even deliver grid services. Most portable batteries are missing the functionality that makes a home battery useful: no bidirectional power, no integration with solar or smart home systems, and no ability to manage home energy dynamically. They tend to be boxy, ruggedized, meant to be moved around, not seamlessly integrated into your living space. On top of that, many use e-mobility battery chemistries, which are great for delivering high power on demand but wear out faster when cycled daily for home energy use. As a renter myself, I started Pila because these awesome energy products aren’t accessible enough. And frankly, generators are loud, expensive, and a pain to deal with. Even many Powerwall owners I’ve talked to say they really care about keeping the fridge, WiFi, and a sump pump running—so why does energy resilience have to be so complicated and expensive? As the grid struggles to keep up with demand, we believe modular, renter-friendly batteries can make home energy resilience more accessible. What's been your experience with home batteries? What recent power outages have you had, and how were you affected? https://pilaenergy.com March 11, 2025 at 09:18PM

Show HN: A Multiplayer Chatbot https://ift.tt/9bCwTRP

Show HN: A Multiplayer Chatbot Imagine if ChatGPT thought you should meet someone it recently spoke with. I built this simple demo that keeps messages from other users in context, so it can suggest connections and stuff. You can modify the system prompt to decide what the whole point of this is. I’m looking for ideas! https://ift.tt/BXSrEYh March 11, 2025 at 11:08PM

Show HN: Chrome Extension for ChatGPT to organize conversations into folders https://ift.tt/mbySFQp

Show HN: Chrome Extension for ChatGPT to organize conversations into folders Hi HN, I'm Alex, a full-stack developer from Toronto, Canada. I recently built a Chrome extension that organizes ChatGPT conversations into folders, allowing users to sort and save important information for easy reference. The idea for this extension came from a friend who highlighted the lack of good (and affordable) ChatGPT organizers. Many existing tools were either low-quality or overpriced, so I decided to create one that was both reliable and accessible. I built the extension using plain JavaScript and developed a backend with Express to handle Google authentication. For storage, I used MongoDB, enabling all users with an account to save their folder structures and conversation data. Initially, I planned to charge $5 per month to cover costs since originally this extension was intended as a portfolio project addressing a real-world problem. However, just as I finished the main functionality and was about to implement payments, ChatGPT announced an official feature similar to one my extension was providing. Rather than continue competing in a market with an "official" solution, I decided to stop development. But I didn't want my work to go to waste, so I chose to release it for free, motivated by a desire to share it with the community. I made some changes to eliminate the backend. Now the extension stores all folder structures and content locally in Chrome storage. Luckily, I had some old code to reuse for this. The extension is now live on the Chrome Web Store. This project introduced me to a lot of new challenges with technologies I hadn’t used before, but I’m grateful for the experience and the skills I gained along the way. I hope you find it useful! Links to the extension and its website: https://ift.tt/4nkDmLX... https://ift.tt/TxpQd7S If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out in the comments or via email at georgepozdman@gmail.com. https://ift.tt/TxpQd7S March 11, 2025 at 04:41AM

Riding the Rails: San Francisco Cable Car Stamps

Riding the Rails: San Francisco Cable Car Stamps
By Kelley Trahan

Evening shot of a cable car on Powell Street with passengers, February 29, 1968 San Francisco's iconic cable cars aren't just a beloved tourist attraction. They are a symbol of the city's unique history and ingenuity. And they’ve appeared on two United States postage stamps. Let's take a journey through the history of these tributes and see how they came to be. The first ride: the 1971 cable car stamp The first cable car stamp was released in 1971. It was an 8-cent historic preservation stamp honoring the San Francisco cable cars. It showed the cable car's charm and was a small tribute to the...

Published March 10, 2025 at 05:30AM
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Show HN: I built a Figma plugin for quick data calculations https://ift.tt/tWdDjkA

Show HN: I built a Figma plugin for quick data calculations I lead design on a B2B SaaS product. It's quite data-heavy in places. Using placeholder content in data tables, checkout summaries and dashboards is a big no-no for us. It might seem like using random numbers saves time at first, but sooner or later there's documentation to write and plenty of clarifications to be made. It throws off customers during interviews – "hey, that's not really my sales target!". It confuses stakeholders at review time– "what's this data point supposed to be?" I built a Figma calculator plugin for my team so that they spend less time doing mental maths. It calculates sums, differences averages and percentages, and makes it easy to use real-looking data in designs. https://ift.tt/H1mRWyv March 10, 2025 at 07:11PM