40v Tax: Fill & Download for Free

Because it’s cool and fun and lets you make your computer do awesome stuff. Lots of people look down on any form of Basic. But I’m here to tell you;I programmed computers to talk over a GPIB bus and test weapons systems with it (Rocky Mountain BASIC on HP computers - to this day I have a deep love of old HP computers and have an HP85 - fully functional - in my lab. I don’t know why).I worked on a complete trucking load control and dispatch system, which interfaced with a Qualcomm satellite communication system and external mileage and routing software which did payroll, road use taxes, inter-province taxes, in Basic. It talked to a dBase DBMS. Hey, I didn’t start it. I just had to maintain it. Our clients were little known companies - Ford, BMW, Yellow Freight, American Standard (Yes, they make toilets AND run a fleet!)I used VB to write a test system for electrochemical testing of our electrode materials and the final test of out 80farad, 40V ultracapacitors. As a sidenote - those damn things were scary. Ever SEE a capacitor “breathe?” They all do. These did so visibly.So go ahead. VB rocks.

As Paul answers, and I’ll repeat, most small format gardening equipment is already electric if you want it to be. This has been true for about 5 or even 20 years, depending on which bit of equipment you are after. I had one of the first cordless battery drills way, way back, running off 12V NiCd. I now have two 36/40V lithium chainsaws: a first gen one that isn’t great, but does the job, if a little slowly, and also a second gen one that is basically equivalent to a good small 2 stroke chainsaw. Yes, the chain speed is still lower, but it will do everything the larger petrol ones will do, and by the time you’ve adjusted the choke on the 2 stroke unit and pulled the starter, I’ll have finished a typical small cut through a 2″ branch. You don’t need ear defenders, either!Larger stuff? Well, that’s a bit more taxing. We have Telsa cars, so it is possible to build an all-electric full sized tracked vehicle, but I don’t know of anyone who has done it yet. As of two years ago, JCB launched an all-electric mini digger. Which looks like fun. It claims a full day of work on a single charge, but, on remote sites, you are still going to be stuck running a generator to charge it anyway. And, I think, that’s the core issue. You still need the power from somewhere, and a jerry can of diesel is far easier than a “pocket full of electricity” if you don’t have that supply chain/really long extension lead.For work around a home that’s already built though? An electric vehicle would be ideal. It won’t wake the neighbours until it is actually doing things, so dropping it off at the very start of the day wouldn’t be an issue any more. Less smoke and pollution is always good, and you aren’t going to have carbon monoxide poisoning if you use it indoors either, as you would with a petrol driven unit.For smaller jobs it would be ideal, and for part or single day rental.They could also be made far harder to steal, with battery powered trackers built in, and electronic locks, rather than easily bypassed ignition switches on a single key across the range!The only big downside, and it is a big downside, is that construction equipment tends to get left for a long time between jobs sometimes. As in, years. We have a dump truck that gets used maybe annually, and a mini digger that gets used on around the same time frame. It often takes half a day to get both working fully (or as fully as a 40 year old truck ever will), but once it is working, you are good. The fuel still works, as diesel is pretty good over long terms, the oil is still there, and the rust breaks away. You add a new car battery, and take it away at the end. With a battery unit, especially lithium, you simply can’t do that. Every few months you would need to move the entire machine to the charging point and top it up, much like the way your phone goes dead dead, and if you don’t bother to charge it, it loses voltage. Once lithium is below about 2.7V per cell, you have an issue, and it takes care and skill to save them, and often they need individual cells desoldered and swapped out. That’s not too bad on a 40V unit with 10 cells in it, but the many hundred kilogram units used in big stuff? No thanks. And certainly not at a possible 400 volts with 200 cells! (On a fully charged bank with one defective cell, it could be 416V and 0V across a single dead cell - there’s real danger there from both shock and that dead cell exploding into flame, with currently used battery technology)So perhaps you need to consider the use cases before you buy. Oh, and the new electric diggers are far more expensive. A bit like an electric car, much of the price is in the battery, offset against cheaper “fuel” - so if it isn’t getting used often, the old tech is still going to be cheaper than a tank of diesel every so often.