NC_2023_10_10
[0:00] Music.
[0:10] Tuesday, October 10th, 2023, and this is show number 962. I know, it's only been two days since the last show came out, but Steve and I are off, to Utah to see the annular eclipse, so we wanted to get this out to you before we left.
I want to thank Joe from the Northwoods, Michael Babcock, and Bodie Grimm for contributing 100% of the content for this week's show.
You all rock, and you've helped us maintain our more than 18 years straight without missing an episode!
Also, with the show coming out on a Tuesday, you know what that means.
There will be no live show this Sunday on the 15th.
We'll be back in the saddle for the show on the 22nd.
Is Fantastical Fantastic? — by Jill from the Northwoods
[0:48] Hi, this is Jill from the Northwoods. I got a new job, as I probably told you already.
[0:48] Music.
[1:00] And I realized that 15 years of my calendar schedule went into my work calendar that was now gone. I decided I wasn't going to do that anymore and that I needed a calendar of my very own. I tried tinkering around with Apple Calendar. It went all right. It was fine. It was nice enough.
It took all my appointments. But there were just some things I wanted to do it couldn't do. So I, started looking around to find a more full-featured calendar. Of course, Fantastical always comes up.
People love it. People glow about it. If you read about it, it's all they'll talk about.
So I decided to give it another shot. To be honest with you, I tried it time and time again.
This is probably the fifth time I've tried it and it was fine, but I didn't feel that it offered me anything that a normal calendar doesn't offer me. Well, here's the deep dark truth. I don't think I played around with it enough to give it a fair shake. And now we're going to talk about what it is I found once I did a deep dive into Fantastical. And you know what? Now that I have, I'm loving it too, just like everybody else. So yep, count me in as one of those people who loves Fantastical.
There were a few things I could think of off the top of my head.
First of all, I wanted many calendars, one for my podcast, one for my private life, and one for what people call time blocking.
[2:26] That is if you took your magic, perfect week and scheduled it out.
You'd wake up at this time, you would exercise at this other time, you would have free time right in here, and it's basically a realistic look at the perfect week for you.
That was great. I was really excited to do that extra calendar. But you also have to have many calendars in order to get that done. And those were the two main features when I was looking for a calendar. So initially what I did is I started building my time blocking calendar in Fantastical. And it was perfect. First of all, I can have as many calendars as I want. Secondly, I could color code things so that I could have my fun things in green, my working in brown. My standard tasks that I have to do in a day in yellow. It then gave me this overall view of sort of how fun a day was. Was the day going to be filled with obligations or was the day gonna be empty or filled with fun things? I could.
[3:27] Look at a glance just by the color and see. Right now that was enough for me to start enjoying Fantastical. It was important for me too just to keep regular appointments, doctor appointments, anything I have to do, obligations I have towards friends. That was important, part of it. And it did a great job with the standard functions of a calendar as well. Now, you might be saying to yourself, normal calendars can do all this.
Why do you have to get some sort of fancy fantastical in order to do those things?
[3:58] But it's those extra features that we're going to talk about. First of all, fantastical is available on Mac, iPhone, iPad, as well as having some watch integration.
I can see my calendar everywhere.
[4:11] Deep down, I'm secretly petrified of missing appointments. I also want to be able to see my calendar everywhere, whether I'm playing around on my iPad, I'm looking at my watch, I'm recording podcasts on my Mac to have all those appointments easily viewable everywhere. That was important.
Then came the next part. I just got a job with California.
So it'd be nice too if I could see times in both time zones.
Sometimes I struggle on math time trying to figure out, wait, if someone asked me to do something at this time, will I be able to get to that appointment I have later today?
With that dual time zone feature in the system, now I can easily see what time it is in both places.
With Fantastical, you can create and duplicate appointments.
That's pretty simple and easy to do.
I was able to create a calendar just for podcasts, and I can create recurring schedules so that I know.
Regular things that I do every week, particularly when it comes to the podcast.
But let's say that there are things that happen often, but not on a set schedule. Maybe like my friends and I are having a potluck dinner.
[5:18] There are templates that will give you a start on creating the same type of event over and over again. So if I have this potluck, I'm able to go ahead and put it into Fantastical, then I'm able to use the template, and then it's always saving those similar features between the events.
That way I don't have to schedule it when I don't know when it's going to happen.
But now I don't have to recreate the wheel. I know that we're gonna have to have certain things inside that appointment, like who's gonna bring the potato salad.
Now I have it all set up in those templates.
[5:51] It also has the ability to create appointments in natural language.
Now, I didn't think that that was too big of a deal because I'm a nerd and I love clicking buttons all day long, But it is actually really nice to be able to say, regular language and have it fill out all the fields.
So you could write something like, have lunch with Bob at 1 p.m. every two weeks at Pizza Hut on Main Street and remind me.
And it will create that event with reminders. And if it has confusion about which location you want to have the lunch at, it'll give you options so that you can pick it.
And suddenly it creates your appointment, has the map to this location and everything you need.
And now I won't miss any of my pizza dates with Bob.
The appointments themselves have a lot of settings so that you can indicate whether again, it's reoccurring, give them that color coding, say who the appointment is with.
[6:49] The thing that I really liked about this is it has travel time.
So for example, if it takes me 15 minutes to go to my trainer.
[6:57] Now, I can set it up so the appointment is at 9 o'clock, takes me 15 minutes to get there, and now I want a reminder to get ready for the gym class.
But now the reminder is 15 minutes before I have to leave, not 15 minutes before the appointment making me late.
[7:17] I had this funny, silly situation where I put in my calendar, haircut, 1 p.m.
I made it a long time ago. Was it really at 1 p.m. or did I say 1 p.m. because I needed to leave my house at 1 p.m.?
Somehow you think you're going to remember those things and then you don't.
With this, I can clearly indicate which parts of the appointment are the travel time and when the actual appointment starts.
That just takes a load off of my brain so I don't have to remember those unique situations.
[7:49] And also with each appointment you can add photos, comments, maps, and have multiple views and see details with it.
So everything you need to get to your appointment, to know what you're supposed to do, right there.
And now I'm using it to record all the things when it comes to the appointments.
I had a meeting with my retirement investor the other day and I could put my list of items I wanted to talk about inside the appointment.
So no more scrambling around trying to remember what it is we were even going to discuss.
I like seeing my week in different kinds of view. It has something called the day ticker, which just shows you what's next and what's next after that. Easy to see.
That's great for a phone or an iPad or my watch where I just want the guts of what my calendar looks like. I don't want the gaps or the grid or anything like that.
On bigger devices like my iPad Pro or my MacBook, I want to see the full thing. I want to see the grid of the week, the grid of the day, whatever it is, maybe even a monthly view. I can view it in any way I want to.
And along with that, you can create sets of calendars. And so again, I mentioned I want to have multiple calendars.
[9:04] Now I can put those sets and those views together. So I see everything exactly how I want to see them.
And at a flip of a drop down box, change between them. So my podcasts are all squished together.
And I can see when it is I'm supposed to record, publish, do certain tasks.
Then, when it comes to my regular calendar of dentists and other appointments, I can see it in that other grid along with my time blocking.
So then I get a chance to look together. Am I actually fulfilling what I wanted to do in a week?
Am I exercising when I hoped I would exercise?
Am I working when I hoped to work? Makes it really easy.
And there are focus modes when it comes to the calendars. So maybe you have your work calendar inside of Fantastico, but you don't want to see that during the evening.
You just want to see your personal podcast schedule so you know what it is you're going to record that day. Easy peasy.
Now at that focus mode, you can set it up so that you only see your fun calendar, your podcast calendar, your calendar of your sporting events, whatever you want to see.
Now you're not bothered with thinking about work all the time.
[10:19] There are ways, and I haven't tried this yet, where you can have people join appointments, invite people to appointments, or create appointments with you.
The feature is called Fantastical Openings, which will allow you to share times that you're available with other people, show them open spots that you have, give them details. And what the company does that makes us Flexibits, it doesn't send any activities like the people that you're with, the invite, the locations. It just shows the openings where you're open and there's a huge privacy policy behind this. This is great because half the time when you invite people to come to certain meetings or do certain things, it is stealing your data. So my friend invites me to a thing and suddenly I'm getting marketing emails from that company they invited me in. None of that happens inside a fantastical. So you can enable openings without feeling like your privacy or your friend's privacy are going to get made. And you can use a meeting template so that you can send this out. For instance, if my gym trainer wanted to send out appointments with me, it could show all the available time she has to work out with me or show a specific time that she plans on working out with me. And that's nice to know that.
[11:39] Not only are you able to create the meeting times, but you're able to do so securely. I know a lot of times when you're at work, you have the ability through Outlook or whatever your job is doing so that you can set up appointments with other people. But if you're a private contractor or you're just trying to get around with your friends, this is a lot easier to use and And it's also nice.
[12:04] That you don't have to sign up for these major services. And there's integrations with Zoom, Google Meetings, Teams, and WebEx.
So that information gets embedded directly into the appointment.
You're not digging around looking for that invitation to see if you can find it.
And of course, it can bring in weather, so that you can see what the weather looks like that day.
If I'm supposed to go to that potluck picnic with my friends, I can see if I'm supposed to bring a coat, a raincoat, or wear something cool because it's going to be really hot.
That's nice to see when you have a lot of events going on. It also comes with a task management system.
It's very easy, simple to use, and it's standard task management.
So you want to get a particular task done at a particular time.
It's featured enough and that's pretty good.
But if you're someone like me who uses Todoist, now Fantastical will allow you to integrate with Todoist, which will show your tasks on the calendar date.
You can check them off inside of Fantastical and it will check them off into Todoist and also create them there as well.
So now I have all my world in one place, whether I'm trying to pay my cable bill, whether I'm trying to go to the dentist or my appointments, or I'm taking out the trash on Sunday night, everything's in one spot.
And not only that, it works with those calendar sets. So now I can say I want to see my personal calendar. I.
[13:29] Want to see my time blocking calendar, but then it also brings in those tasks. So everything gets done and, Every appointment is made. So the next part comes in with premium, I know I'm sick of premium accounts too, but sometimes they're worth it and when it came to.
[13:49] Fantastical I think that's in the end why?
Why?
Previously, I didn't love Fantastical, and now I do. And unfortunately, that comes with a price tag.
You can do most of the main things, like creating tasks, appointments, looking at your calendar, with a free account. Everything is right there.
You can even bring in your iCloud reminders and those Todoist integrations, all free.
[14:15] For free, you also get three days worth of a forecast. But if you get the premium, it's 10 days.
Of course, you get better support.
If something goes wrong. So far, nothing's gone wrong for me.
But the big features that really won me over on the premium account were those calendar sets.
That was key for me because I want to be able to switch between work, fun, planning, podcasts.
I can see everything I want to see every time I want to see it along with the color coding.
And both those things are premium.
The travel time also also premium and that's the part I know where my haircut appointment is and how long it takes to get there and the reminder to go before that.
Support for the Apple Watch also premium and when it comes to those widgets that you can put on iOS, For your iPhone your iPad and now Mac OS with Sonoma you get one set of widgets.
[15:15] For free, but you get all the widgets when you have the premium account and boy do I love widgets Widgets are just my favorite is saying and now I have them sitting on top of my Mac a desktop, Now you might be saying, Jill, did you upgrade your Mac on a beta and this is your primary Mac that you record podcasts and do everything on? No. What, kind of ingrate would upgrade their main computer on a beta? Okay, I totally did.
And I love the widgets and the widgets from Fantastical, again, making me feel confident I know all my schedules in the right place. I love the widgets. Having time zones so I can tell the time at California and the time at my home. Now it's only two hours away but time math is awful so now I can see that at a glance. So I guess that's the point.
Fantastical is a great calendar, solid task, does everything even with the basic functionality.
But with the premium account you get so much more. And then I realized I wanted that premium account to bring my whole world together. To get premium, it's $57 a year. If you're looking for a monthly premium, that's $7 a month. And if you're looking for family, that's $10.49 a month.
[16:32] And if you want the premium family for a year, that's $90. And in my mind, the premium makes a world of difference. So I thought I would give it a year, see what I thought of it, decide, Am I going to make full use of it?
Is it something that I'm going to integrate in part of my life?
And is it going to make me more calm that I'm getting my tasks, my appointments all done?
And if it does, then I will continue it. And guess what? It does.
Spoiler alert. I'm going to renew on that premium account.
[17:01] But you'll have to decide for yourself what you really need.
Not everyone has the number of calendars I have and the desire to do all those other functions.
If you have a more simple schedule and if your life is just not that complicated, you don't have that many calendars, the free level is probably fine for you.
You'll have to decide what you like.
When it comes to security, it also does something very interesting.
And I wanted to mention, because I know a lot of us are very concerned about security issues, but it creates, with Apple, an app-specific password.
So that way you're sharing an integration with Todoist or Google Tasks or other things with a unique password that is only for that app.
That way if something goes wrong, gets compromised, you don't want Google knowing your stuff anymore, you can simply just disintegrate that integration account and not have to worry about how much data they have or giving them something they shouldn't have, like your password or other things.
So this feels very secure when creating those integrations.
[18:07] So I hope this helps in explaining why Fantastical is so fantastical.
For me, the premium made all the difference, but it's a solid app, even for free.
And if you have any questions, remember this is Jill from the Northwoods.
You can reach me on Alice's Slack channel or email me at jillatstartwithsmallsteps.com.
Thanks so much for that, Jill. That was, shall I say, fantastic.
No, but seriously, I have heard so many people rave about this application, and I've always wondered why they think it's so fantastic. And I think you finally answered those questions for me.
Adding Widgets to Your Desktop in Sonoma with VoiceOver
[18:42] Michael Babcock is the co-host of the awesome podcast Unmute Presents with Marty Sobo.
Now, you've heard from Marty before.
Many of us have bought the Wave XLR based on his recommendation.
Anyway, I think you've heard from Michael before as well. and this week he sent in an audio tip to teach us how to add widgets to your desktop in Sonoma using VoiceOver on the Mac.
If you're a VoiceOver user, I think you're going to find this very valuable.
If you do have the gift of sight, I think you'll find it really interesting to hear what Michael hears when he uses voiceover.
[19:16] So in today's audio I'm going to walk you through the process of adding widgets to your desktop in Sonoma. Now, why might you want to do this? Well, I have recently, as of, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, gotten into wanting to be able to meet my step goal. And my step goal is 4,000 steps. I really need to up that, but that's my goal right now. And I'd like to be able to find out what the status of that is when I'm sitting at my desktop.
So I'm gonna show you a couple of things today. Apparently some people didn't know one of these things.
So when I go through this process, I do encourage you to follow along if possible.
I have Finder open right now and I'm running iOS 17.01 on my iPhone and I'm running Sonoma 14.0 on my Mac.
In Finder, you can first get to the desktop by pressing Command Option W.
This closes all of your Finder windows and says something like.
[20:25] External SSD, actions available, external SSD.
Yours probably won't say external SSD, but that's what mine is, and now I'm on my desktop.
Now, firstly, we need to get the widget from my phone to the desktop.
And I wanna thank Michael Dois for helping me with figuring out how to actually get this to work with voiceover.
So I'm going to press V O O that's voiceover. Oh, notification center, notification center, window list.
And this puts me in my notification center. Now, if I press V O right arrow, what's new place, which is directly on the desktop and now your iPhone widgets and widgets, and I locate the edit widgets button, so I'm going to press V O space on this search widgets blank search text field, and this puts me in a search list where I can search for the widgets.
I want, I'm not going to actually do that. What I'm going to do is go through the list of widgets.
So you can kind of hear what's available.
I'm going to quickly go through them, but I'll show you how to get to your list of widgets, which yours will be different than mine.
If you press VO, right arrow once you'll get to an available widgets and it says, activate to clear selection.
I'm going to go and interact with this.
[21:34] And as you heard, there are 48 widgets. So the one I'm looking for is pedometer plus plus.
So I'm going to use my V-O right arrow key and skip over to that one.
Amazon Alexa, Audible, Batteries, Brave, Buffer, Calendar, Castro, Clock, Contacts, Dx, DxCom, Drafts, DuckDuckDuck, Fidelity, FindMy, HealthView, Home, JustPressRec, Layer, Mona, News, Notes, Overcast, Parcel, Pedometer.
And now I've found Pedometer, I'm gonna press V O Space on this.
[22:00] And what I need to do is stop interacting with this list. Out of available widgets.
And then press V O right arrow.
Previews. And there is what we're looking for is previews. We want to interact with previews.
In previews pedometer. And you'll hear it say pedometer.
Now I'm going to show you what you hear in this case and what you need to do.
Text, step count, small. There's the small step count. Text, text, step count, medium.
Actions, text, text, goal completion, small. Text, text, goal completion, medium.
Text, text, daily step graph, small.
Text, text, light, small, text, text, light, medium, text, text, dark, small, text, text, dark, medium, text, text, daily counts, small, text, text, daily counts, medium, text, text.
And for the purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to go back to pedometer, text, step, count, small, actions available.
And I want to step count small. Now you can do two things on this.
You can use your actions menu with VO command space, actions menu, two items, and press your down arrow, and that will drag it to the desktop.
Or if you escape out of here, a faster way is to just press VO space on the name of the widget.
You'll hear step count, step count, small, step count, small inserted.
[23:11] And now the step count small is inserted. We're going to add one other widget to this, and that is my waterminder widget.
So I'll stop interacting out of previews, and I'm going to go VO left arrow twice to the search search widgets, blank search text field.
And I'll show you how this works by pressing V O space and typing W A T E R and typing water and we'll press V O right arrow. And we'll interact with the available widgets.
And I have all widgets or there we go. So I'll press V o space to highlight that.
Stop interacting. Out of available widgets. Previews. Go over to the previews.
In previews water monitor. And I'm going to find the widget that I want.
Hydration status large. And for this case, I'm going to use the hydration status large.
And I'm going to press VO command space.
Actions menu, two items. And on this one, I'm going to choose.
Drag to desktop. And we'll press VO space.
Drag to desktop. Hydration status large. Hydration status large inserted.
Now, we have my widgets available on my desktop. So I'll tap escape to exit the notification center and now I'll press V o o to close the notification center, Finder desktop external ssd. Now. I'm going to open my applications.
[24:24] Applications window and that is what you might be in or you might be in your home directory, So if you're in your finder and you're not on your desktop We'll press command option w because you won't see these widgets unless you're on your desktop, And now I'm on external SSD. If I press VO home, you hear pedometer and I can press VO right arrow. And you hear waterminder. In order to interact with this data, we'll go back up to pedometer and we'll interact with the widget.
It says Walker and if I press VO right arrow. And then I can stop interacting with that widget and and press V-O right arrow.
Waterminder. To get to Waterminder, interact with it.
In Waterminder, 13 items today, 43.2 ounces. Oh, I need to drink some more water.
Your progress is 89% on September 24th, 2023. So if I stop interacting with Waterminder.
Out of Waterminder. That's how you can access your widgets. Now let me show you one more thing that I accidentally discovered. If you press V-O-U in Finder on your desktop.
Widgets menu.
That's a widgets menu. And you can press down arrow. Pedometer.
And let's say I want to go back over to pedometer. I'll press VO space, pedometer, and then press VO right arrow, water monitor.
[25:40] So if you just need a way to jump to a specific widget, you can use the widgets menu, just know that you have to interact with the widget itself.
Hopefully you found this to be a little bit useful. That's how you can use widgets on Sonoma with iOS 17.
Share it with a friend.
[25:58] Well, I hope I just did share it with lots of friends, Michael.
That was really cool.
I am still always shocked at how quickly you can hear and listen and integrate and understand what VoiceOver has said to you and apply it and understand how to navigate through it.
I tried to work along and play along with you and I was able to do a lot of it, but it's still pretty challenging for me.
And I really appreciate you educating us on this and helping those of us that are using VoiceOver on a regular basis, learn how to use widgets on our desktops with Sonoma.
Support the Show
[26:31] The next time you learn something or are entertained by an episode of the Nocillicast, Chitchat Across the Pond, or Programming by Stealth, I'd like you to consider toddling over to podfeet.com slash paypal and making a one-time donation, no matter how big or how small, into the Podfeet podcast coffers.
To those who have done this in the past, I thank you all from the top of my heart.
Bodie Grimm Interviews Arcady Sosinov CEO, FreeWire Technologies (no blog post)
[26:53] Next up, we have an interview that Bodhi Grim of the Kilowatt podcast donated to the show.
He talks to Arkady Sosinov, the CEO of a company called FreeWire Technologies.
The problem here is that electric vehicle charging is evolving very quickly, which means that charging stations that were installed maybe only a year or two ago now have legacy charging that's far too slow.
The goal of FreeWire Technologies is to provide seamless replacement of legacy slow and level 2 EV chargers with ultra-fast chargers. But the trick is they do this in a matter of hours.
While this is a very interesting interview, I highly encourage you to subscribe to the Kilowatt Podcast in your podcatcher of choice, because Bodhi, when he's not doing a serious interview, is absolutely hilarious while educating you about all things electric vehicles.
[27:42] Music.
[27:49] RKD, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Brody.
So you are the founder of free wire. That's right. That's right. I found a free wire in, 2014 so it's been about 10 years now and I started the company after noticing this surge of, Electrification and transportation. I saw the first few Nissan Leafs hit the road in the San Francisco Bay Area at that point. It was a very, It was a microcosm, it hadn't hit the streets of New York or London or Paris.
And Tesla had just launched the Roadster and then eventually the Model S. And I figured I wanted to solve the hardest possible problem within the industry.
And charging was clearly a difficult problem. So decided to address it.
[28:38] There had to have been a pretty significant hesitation going from a stable job to an industry that really wasn't even in its infancy.
It was pre-infant at this point with the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Roadster.
What was that feeling like for you? It was a lot of fear, honestly.
I'd always had this passion for automotive.
If you go back to my childhood and teenage years, I was a gearhead.
I actually, believe it or not, worked on cars every single weekend.
My father was a taxi driver. He drove a cab for 26 years.
Not owned a taxi company. I mean, he drove a cab for 26 years.
And every weekend, we were doing something. We were doing oil changes or I did a transmission swap in our garage.
I did an engine swap in our garage and my relationship with him was, I think, centered around cars, right?
We just worked on the car every single weekend.
[29:40] And and so I have always had a passion for our mode. I never kind of thought I would work in the legacy automotive industry.
The big three Detroit didn't. And I, but when I saw this, this kind of new industry forming, I said, wow, I can get it on the ground floor of something that's really exciting, something that a lot of people don't know about, something where I can learn a lot and, and sort of scratch the itch of working on automotive that I've always had.
And I know you, you probably feel that I see the hot wheels behind you kind of on your wall.
Uh, sounds like you're a little bit of an automotive enthusiast as well.
I'm more of a technology dork.
I don't even have the, I don't have the ability to work on a car aside from, you know, changing maybe a fuel filter or, uh, changing a battery out. Those are the, that's the most complicated I get.
Let's talk about the early days of FreeWire. What was it supposed to be?
What'd you, what'd you think it was going to be when you first started it and what did it end up as?
[30:41] This is the little secret behind the name. What I thought FreeWire was going to be is, um, ubiquitous wireless charging for electric vehicles. actually thought we would do is lay inductive charging pads in road, so on highways, on every lane of that highway, and you'd be able to drive your vehicle, your electric vehicle, and charge it as you're driving.
So you'd have these inductive pads that mate to the receiver on your vehicle, and you would never actually need to charge because you'd be charged up by the road while driving. And we went pretty deep into that idea I I remember within a few weeks of founding the company actually flew out to Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee where they had developed this this what they called dynamic wireless charging dynamic just means wireless charging while moving where they had developed dynamic wireless charging and they had demoed it on a golf cart there was a golf cart with a receiver there were inductive pads in the floor they would drive that golf cart over the floor and the golf cart would be charged its battery would be Charged as it was driving and I just thought this was the most amazing thing in the world I thought this is going to change is gonna revolutionize everything and and.
[31:56] It's going to you know, the electric vehicles are gonna take off because of this particular technology, So I called the company free wire. I started doing research. I filed some IP and patents around, wireless charging and then I got hit with a brick wall of of common sense you could call it, which is that it's very expensive to try to lay wireless charging pads in highway.
At that point, I figured the cost would be about $2,000,000 per mile of road per lane.
[32:31] And that's not including the utility infrastructure that would be necessary to support all of these different wireless charging pads. And I assumed you would need this heavy utility infrastructure per what's called two miles of road. So every two miles of road you need new utility infrastructure.
And so you start to look at the cost of all that and you realize, well, that's never going to happen. Not only are we not going to rebuild our roads, right? We don't have the wherewithal for for that in this country, but also your utility infrastructure is just not there to support that availability of power.
You don't have that much infrastructure and that much power and you cannot deploy to all these different locations.
[33:14] So quickly I recognized, well, actually there's a different problem that I've run into that I need to solve now.
And the problem is that of the availability of utility infrastructure.
If I can make utility infrastructure highly available, or if I can disaggregate utility infrastructure, from charging, I can make charging more available, more ubiquitous.
And so I started working through that idea, working through that problem, and eventually landed on batteries as a solution.
It may seem like common sense today, I mean, frankly, buddy, but back when you look at 2014, 10 years ago, that wasn't an obvious solution.
And going down the road of developing battery storage to enable kind of high power ultra fast charging seemed a little bit crazy. I was laughed at a lot of rooms.
[34:07] But I believed that there was no other way to do it because I had looked at every possibility at that point.
You talked a little bit about batteries. From what I understand, your chargers have a battery pack inside them, is that correct?
Yeah, they have a very large battery pack embedded right inside the charger.
It's almost, it's a structural part of the whole system. So it's not a battery that's designed to support a separate charger.
The battery, in essence, is the charger. And so you're doing direct DC to DC.
The battery is storing DC energy.
The vehicle wants DC energy.
And you're basically pumping out power as quickly as possible from your battery and filling up the battery of the vehicle.
And it's similar to, the principle is similar to the hot water tank in your house.
So you don't pull hot water from the utility, right? You pull cold water, and you have a tank inside your house that heats that up and stores it, and as long as you size the tank appropriately, you have enough hot water for your family to take showers throughout the whole day.
[35:19] Every once in a while, once a year, you may have your uncles and aunts and their kids come and visit and stay at your house and you may run out of hot water that one time, but that's generally, you know, outside the norm. That's two standard deviations out.
[35:33] You're the tank that you've kind of spec'd should be enough to give you enough hot water for the house. It's the same principle here. We're just replacing H2O with electrons, but in effect, it's a storage. It's a buffer system.
Do these batteries connect together if there's multiple chargers at one location?
Can, let's say one's a little bit low, can the other ones bolster that or does it have to start pulling from the grid at that time? It starts pulling from the grid. So today the batteries do not connect together to make one big battery. We do that via software where we aggregate the batteries and we can bid, their aggregate capacity into utility programs but they don't physically we connect today.
And the reason we decided not to do that initially was because there was added cost in running Conduit between each of the different systems. So you'd have to rip up more of the parking lot, in essence.
Now, our next generation product, the Boost Pro, that we're launching at the end of Q1 in 2024, that product will connect all of the battery packs on your site together.
And so if you have, let's say, six of our chargers, you have about a megawatt hour battery storage capacity on your site.
And, and that provides some, some pretty interesting values on the current ones. If somebody pulled up in their lucid air, right.
The lucid air can charge incredibly fast. Yeah.
[36:59] What kind of charge rate are they going to get? Yeah. So you would get up to 200 kilowatts.
That's the peak charging rate of the system.
I've actually seen it go a little bit higher than that because Chuck.
[37:10] The kilowatt number, it really depends on voltage and current.
So I've seen for example, we have a lot of customers with heavy-duty trucks electric trucks, And I've seen those go up to 206 207 kilowatts But right about that range and it'll hold that power level throughout, The entire charge session as long as the vehicle can accept it now.
[37:30] Would you have to remember about the vehicle itself is that it has a very high power?
Rating, but only for a short period of time. When you start fast charging a vehicle, the power will rapidly ramp up.
But it'll only stay there for usually a few to 15 minutes and then start ramping down.
And by the time you get to about 50, 60, 70 percent state of charge in the vehicle, you've really ramped down that power. And we take advantage of that, meaning that's the portion of the charging curve where we're actually able to replenish our battery pack and get it ready, for the next vehicle that shows up, if that makes sense.
That does make sense. Yeah, that that's that was actually going to be my next question is how like if there's people people waiting, how are we ensuring that there's enough, left in that battery for the next person that comes up? Now, is it 168 kilowatt hours? Is that what I saw on your website for 160 kilowatt hours? Yeah, 160. It's the question that everyone asks first. And it's the right question to ask. It's you're asking the question of, well, what if my Aunt and uncle and their kids come and visit every single weekend. I'm gonna run out of hot water.
[38:50] All the time so first I'll tell you I hope they don't come visit every single weekend and, Likewise in the world of charging. It's very rare that you have these large through this large throughput of traffic, Now the system is designed to do up to about 20 charging sessions comfortably, without running out of critical capacity.
I've seen it go higher. So I was actually just looking at data from one of my customers in Vancouver, and I saw that a number of their units did about 30 to 35 charging sessions yesterday, just in one day on 30 to 35 charging sessions.
[39:28] That's a heck of a lot of charging. You typically won't see that kind of utilization, but it's a function of Labor Day, travel, weekend, holiday, et cetera.
I'm.
But the point of the system is, it's going to have enough capacity for the vast majority of charging sessions, charging applications, days of the year.
If you are really reaching a point where your utilization is high enough that you're running out of battery constantly, then you're making so much money on that site, you need to install a second charger.
So the break-even is when you get to about Six to eight charging sessions a day if you're seeing six to eight charging sessions day on average, You're breaking even if you're seeing 10 to 15 charging sessions. You're seeing right around, 10 to 20 percent IRR on that project and.
[40:23] You're incentivized at that point to install a new one versus traditional charging That's non battery integrated. Think about what you have to do You have to first work with your utility and bring new service to the site, So you have to call in a my case in California PG&E. I know you're in you're in Arizona, right?
So you probably call, You know the public service.
[40:51] Yeah, and SRP would need to to deliver you a new medium voltage service to your commercial site.
That could take three to four years to get that service to your site.
That's how long these projects are taking.
And then once they deliver that new service to your site, you're gonna have to install a very large transformer, that's your cost, switch gear, that's your cost, a new panel and so forth.
And so you've spent all of this capex, you've spent all this time, and you're probably thinking to yourself, okay, well now I'm gonna install eight chargers or 10 chargers on that new transformer.
The fact of the matter is you're not going to see eight to 10 times the utilization just because you installed eight to 10 times the number of charging stations.
It'll take you probably at least six months, but more likely a year and a half, for utilization to ramp up.
To the size of your install. And that's a drag on your returns if you're a project developer.
And so you're better off sizing your installation to the utilization that's there today, install that charger, start making money.
And if utilization does creep up, and you risk running out of the battery, install a second one, and then a third one, and fourth one, and so forth.
And that's what we find our customers doing.
[42:11] Is there any advantage like in terms of the infrastructure that needs to be put in place to go with FreeWire, you know, compared to any of your competitors?
Yeah, we don't require utility upgrades on sites. So we're going to use whatever power you have available on your site.
You know, our typical customers are their gas stations, convenience stores, and these sites typically have a little bit of spare capacity, but not a lot.
And so their choices are, I either use that spare capacity to install one, two or three boost chargers, or I work with my local utility and bring in new power, which again is a two to three year project, and the costs are hundreds of thousands to single digit millions of dollars.
And they're more and more so choosing that I'm going to install a boost charger, I'm going to use my existing power, no upgrades required, I don't need the utility to intervene in my projects and, And I'm gonna get up and running and charging quickly. So the big difference the advantage is, I'm not requiring you to build out anything I'm not requiring a new transformer or new switchgear use what you have existing on your site and, and then leverage that battery as your buffer.
[43:27] And you said something earlier that I'd like to go back to. This would actually obviously be a little bit of a benefit to the grid overall because you're pulling mostly from the battery and then you're replenishing, I would assume, at a slower rate than what you would be pulling if you were charging a car. But did you mention that you can sell some of this back to the grid if, if like during times when charging is slow but the grid needs a little extra pep?
And we do, yeah, and so this is the brilliant part. In fact, I'll give you just an example.
I have a customer in Texas who at night they see negative pricing of electricity.
So at night, because Texas has a lot of wind.
[44:15] We turn on our battery pack, we consume as much energy overnight as possible, and our customer is actually getting paid to consume that.
They're getting paid to take those electrons, and then during the day, they sell those electrons to EV drivers.
I mean, that's an awesome business model. I would do that every single day.
But that's my end goal is, you know, my goal is not to have the largest charging network in the country.
That would be nice, but that's not ultimately what I'm looking for.
Ultimately, what we are doing is deploying energy storage behind the meter.
And this has been a holy grail, Bodhi, for a long time.
A lot of companies have gone out there and said, we should install battery packs everywhere.
Yes, in your home, and there are companies doing that. Tesla is selling you a battery pack that you can install in your garage.
But actually, battery packs in commercial settings are much more valuable than battery packs in your home.
And I know that's gonna sound hard to believe to some of your listeners, because obviously at home, backs up your house. But I can tell you that if you lose power at a gas station or a convenience store, that owner is going to lose about $70,000 a day in lost revenues and in loss of product.
[45:31] And on top of that, the grid system, our utility grid, at these commercial locations, that's where it's weakest.
It's not in these residential locations, it's in these commercial locations where you have high consumers of power.
And so having a battery at every commercial site is a holy grail.
But the fact is you can't just go in there and give the batteries away free, right?
You need to sell them and selling a battery is a very, very hard task.
You can imagine me walking into a retailer like a Chick-fil-A and trying to explain to them the value of a battery and its impact on your demand charges and its impact on your utility rate tariffs.
It's a it's a really tough conversation to have, frankly speaking.
Instead, we don't go in there and we don't sell batteries. We sell you a charger.
And a lot of times you're looking for chargers. You obviously see the incentives that are available for them.
Your competitors are installing charges. Your consumers are asking for charging infrastructure on your site.
And with us, you happen to get the battery for free. And then we unlock that battery after it's deployed, to to sell energy back to the grid, to provide demand charge management, to provide time of use arbitrage and a number of other very valuable.
[46:54] Kind of technologies and and interactions with the grid that actually helps strengthen the grid rather than hurt it.
And that's where i get really excited so is this all controlled like on an app for whoever the property owner is or whoever is managing that or is this something that they need to set up with free wire ahead of time how does that work.
I mean usually frankly speaking that the site host.
I got a facilities manager or an operator of a local convenience store or fast food restaurant they want nothing to do with this.
They don't want to go into an app to set their pricing policies, to set what time of day they can bid into utility programs and not.
They don't really, frankly, often understand the concept of a demand charge or of peak and off-peak rates.
And so they want to offload that complexity to us, and we do that.
We tell them, hey, we've done an assessment of your site, and we think that by bidding into these particular programs and pulling energy at these times of the day, we can save you $4,000 a month on your energy bill.
[48:04] And some of that includes a value to the utility that they're then paying you for.
And the retailer says, great, fantastic, turn it off.
And then we turn on that functionality and we manage it as time goes on.
So it's not anything the retailer has to look at or set or remember to adjust over time.
We sort of just do it for them because they ultimately have a business run.
They're out there selling you, you know, Red Bulls and coffees and car washes.
[48:34] I think about it for a gas station for you know for decades their largest cost driver was fuel.
I don't hydrocarbons and they became over these decades very sophisticated managing that you understood when to buy it how much to store in their underground tanks.
Versus how, you know, depending on spot pricing of electrons, they understand how to price it to the consumer.
Should I make it 1 cent more expensive or 1 cent cheaper than my competitor next door?
So they became very sophisticated around the supply chain and the value chain of hydrocarbons.
But now they have this entirely new supply chain of electrons.
And it's something they don't understand because the language and terminology and And the business model is totally different.
You're not just buying fuel, you're now having to decide, do I pull during the day or during the night?
Do I go under this medium general rate tariff or do I go under the time of use rate tariff?
What is sending energy back to the grid mean for me? Is it a NEM rate or not?
I mean, there's a lot of complexity built in here.
And we go in there and we basically say, say, we're going to do for you what you've in for electrons, what you've learned to do over hydrocarbons, and our battery inside the boost charger is like the storage tank you have for gasoline underneath your site. We're allowing you to hedge.
[50:03] Against these spot prices that move frankly, even faster in electricity than they do in in in fuels.
Do you want to talk a little bit about the next connector and what that means for the charging industry?
Yeah, I love to I mean as a consumer I've been driving electric vehicles now for over 10 years as a consumer It is a better connector. Let's just put it out there. It is smaller. It's lighter, It's it carries both AC and DC on the same pins for all of your technologists listeners It where is the CCS connector?
It carries AC and DC on different pins, which makes it larger which makes it heavier, which makes it more expensive to build, So, NACS is a better connector through and through.
[50:49] But, at the end of the day, it is just a different plug. In my mind, it's like the lightning cable versus USB-C.
Yeah, USB-C is better, but I also don't mind using the lightning cable.
I've gotten used to it.
So, the switch from CCS to NACS is not really one of a better cable for consumers.
That's not really what matters here. here. What really matters, it is the OEMs, the automotive OEMs.
Admitting that they made a mistake years ago, not building out a charging network.
Tesla did. Tesla did the hard thing, which was, we're going to need to build our own charging network because there is no reliable and ubiquitous charging across the country.
And the automotive OEMs outside of Tesla, the traditional ones, said, oh, we're going to let free market economics rule. If we get these vehicles on the road, they will come. And the And the they is charging networks that are reliable, ubiquitous, easy to use for consumers.
Well, guess what? That didn't happen.
[51:53] And them announcing that they're going to go to NAX is one, an admission of guilt, right?
It's saying we made a mistake in not rolling it out.
And two, it is giving Tesla something very powerful, which is now Tesla's going to be able to gather data from all of these vehicles.
And Tesla's going to have a touchpoint with the consumers every other day.
For an automotive OEM, like a Ford and a GM, they yearn for those consumer touchpoints, right?
[52:23] They want you to answer their email blasts. They want you to walk into the dealership and talk to your kind of representative.
They want you to access their clunky apps. Whereas Tesla's going, well, they're gonna need to charge every two days.
They're probably gonna use the Tesla app to do that. And I'm gonna be able to get the lion's share, of views from that consumer by getting them to access my charging network.
So this is a very big deal for the traditional OEMs.
And it very much weakens their position.
Because now Tesla's gonna be able to access their consumers almost every day.
And that's not a position they want to find themselves in.
[53:08] Yeah, I do. I do have like when Ford and GM announced that they were going to do that, I was like, well, that's going to be short-lived until something better comes along. I am a little more heartened that the Society of Automotive Engineers are going to turn it into an actual standard, which a lot of the spec is already done by Tesla. So it's not like they have to work that hard at it. But the overall thing that concerned me the most was all of this adoption was happening in June and July, and there was no standard. I don't want Tesla to control the standard. I want some third party independent group to control that standard. So I hear your point. I would say that standards are what got us CCS. That's true. So I also would like the standard a standard to be there in a governing body for it. But I know that when there are too many cooks in the kitchen you get J1772 glued on top of DC pins. No matter what we do I mean we're going to still have to have Chatomo connections, CCS2 connections for a very long time because it's not like people are going to throw their cars away. Which is ultimately, and unfortunately, it's an added cost and that cost is going to be borne by consumers. If I have to install more charging infrastructure to make space for a Chatomo cable and a NAX cable and a CCS cable and, And I won't get full utilization across all those cables.
[54:33] Remember, Chatomo, I have a number of units with both CCS on one handle and Chatomo on the other handle.
Chatomo gets very little utilization, nothing compared to CCS.
[54:45] But that's an added cost, that means my unit is less utilized than it otherwise would have been.
And ultimately that's gonna be passed down to consumers in the form of higher per kilowatt hour pricing.
So, you know, from on the one hand, okay, you have the optionality and the flexibility for consumers who have those existing vehicles. On the other hand, they're all going to be paying more.
For those who don't know, like Chateaumau connector here in the United States is basically a Mitsubishi hybrid and a Nissan Leaf.
And that those are the two cars that use it. There might be some outlier that I'm not aware of, but those are basically the only two vehicle models that use that plug.
Yeah, yeah, and I've I would just be very direct. I frankly recommend to all of my customers to not install chat mode today.
And I get a lot of flack for this on Twitter and social media.
But the fact of the matter is I, I'm very utilitarian.
I honestly believe you install chat on a site.
The ultimate costs to that site hosts are going to be higher and they're either going to not want to install another charger or they're going to pass on those higher costs to the consumer, both of which are.
[55:57] Bad scenarios well let's say let's say today i bought one of your chargers right and put it up, in front of my house i'm charging people i have a chattamo connector and then i was like oh that's a mistake uh can i can can i pay you to come back and swap that out with something different, you can but it is it's like open heart surgery it's pretty hard um you know people underestimate how difficult it really is but you need to change the charging controller the cable itself you need to change on the cabinet the actual place where the cable goes back into rest because now, it's a different cable, right? I need to change the software inside the system to recognize now that it's CCS instead of CHAdeMO. You know, I need to change all of our internal documentation to for my field service team to know that it's a CCS unit instead of CHAdeMO. There's a lot that that has to go into it, on top of the truck role, that ultimately has to happen.
So, I mean, it is not a cheap swap, and again, someone's gotta pay for that.
Sure, and then going forward, FreeWire has adopted NACS, is that correct?
Mm-hmm, we have working units in our lab here, and so we're gonna be launching it as a SKU, a skew, meaning that customers will be able to select CCS and NACS or NACS and NACS or.
[57:22] Dual CCS starting Q2 of next year.
Right on. And will that go on just the new Boost Plus chargers or will that be available on the current chargers?
The Boost Pro, yeah. Right now, we don't have any plans to put it on the current chargers.
[57:39] Well, Arkady, is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn't?
Is there anything that I just missed?
I think it's, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking of what this market and industry will look like eventually.
And I think there are two schools of thought.
And one is we're going to see these massive charging plazas.
In fact, an announcement just went out today or yesterday that Tesla has built a 98 unit supercharger plaza.
And you've seen a lot of your, your, your listeners have probably been to the Bakersfield location where you have just dozens and dozens of chargers.
And those are great, but those serve one specific use case, which is when you and I, you know, once or twice a year drive from San Francisco to LA or LA to Vegas or Phoenix to Vegas, right? Yes, you're going to need these large hubs in those, locations. But I think the bigger market opportunity are a few chargers in every commercial and retail location. It's where you and I go anyways. It's the Starbucks, it's Dunkin, it's Chipotle, it's the supermarket. I don't need 50 chargers at each of these sites. I need two, everywhere I go.
And that's, I think, what the future of charging will look like.
[58:58] You're not going to need to drive to a special location, you'll just be able to charge on your way and it's going to be available everywhere you go.
And that's what we're building for. If that is the future you believe in, then having a battery that's embedded within that charger makes a lot of sense.
So I think the industry needs to think about who the true owners of charging infrastructure are going to be.
I think ultimately the winners here are going to be the retailers.
[59:26] And because they've been doing this for 100 years, they've been able to sell you, gas at almost zero gross margin, as you know, people are usually surprised to hear this, but there's almost no gross margin on gas.
It's it they sell it at close to cost.
[59:42] But they can make up their money inside the store when you go in and you buy a big gulp and a beef jerky.
They're they're making a ton of money on that.
And I think the same thing will happen with charging.
For sure, for sure. Do you know, based on that strategy that you said, a few chargers everywhere you go, right?
Are Nevi funds, are they available for that kind of strategy?
Because I know they want them along major roadways and things like that, the chargers.
Is there anything that somebody was listening and they owned a business, is there anything they'd be able to take advantage of?
Yes, so once you have deployed charging every 50 miles per the NEVI standard across your major highways, any remaining dollars in the NEVI program can be used at any location throughout.
[1:00:32] The state.
And a lot of these states will have significant amounts of NEVI money remaining.
Now that's on the Nevi front, which is, remember, a competitive program.
But there is much more accessible, and in fact, in some cases, more lucrative programs outside of Nevi.
So we have what's called the EV charging and the energy storage tax credits underneath the IRA.
And those can cover 50 to 70% of the cost of the installation.
And they're not competitive. They're available to anyone.
Pay taxes, you can get these very lucrative tax credits.
And so a lot of our customers are using those instead of going after Nevi, which is burdensome, It takes a lot of paperwork and so on and so forth.
[1:01:21] That's cool. That's cool. Well our Katie. Thank you so much for coming on today and discussing this with us, Tell us where we can find you or find free wire. I, Mean our website freeware tech comm and honestly, you know, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn So if anybody wants to connect with me personally, you can find me my name is spelled a RC a dy, Just type our Katie free wire. You will easily find me as a unique name So, I appreciate it, Bodhi. I'm happy to be on and would love to come back anytime you choose to have me.
Thank you so much for that great interview, Bodhi. That was really interesting. It's crazy to think about all of the infrastructure that is going into creating something that's going to help us save the planet with all of these electric vehicles. So, I love the inventive people that you've been able to find on your podcast. And again, I highly encourage everybody go subscribe to Kilowatt Podcast because it's awesome and it's hilarious and Bodhi rocks.
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[1:03:11] Music.