S.NSA, April 2014 Statement

S.NSA has a total of 4`737`075 authorised shares outstanding. The total assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009980 BTC. The cash+tangible assets per share implied value is thus 0.00009811 BTC.

S.NSA realised no operating revenue this period. The P/E implied value per share is so far 0 BTC.

S.NSA has Special Stock Warrants outstanding issued as per the IPO agreement, as follows :

The board design, the electronics and everything else is - and has been - mature. The problem we've been battling with, for the past month, is power.

Power is a finnicky thing. The constraints are of two kinds, and they work like this : first and foremost, every moving current creates a field, and every changing field induces a current. This seems simple in theory but it rapidly becomes gnarly in practice. You can't, for instance, use line power, but have to rely on batteries for a lot of operations (all the red operations, in fact). You have to carefully avoid particular configurations that would otherwise work as antennae. And so on and so forth.

The second, and foremost, is power draw. You see, a battery is not like a bottle of water, wherein a certain quantity of water resides and whether you drink it with a straw or cut the thing in half, a liter or a gallon or however much comes out. A battery is more like a flaming skull sent from hell to torment engineers.

Our peak power draw is about 100 mA, which is mostly due to the workslate SD card. The micro can be clocked at whatever speed we wantⁱ, but the SD card does need to be written, and that does take power. We've also considered EEPROMs in various configurationsⁱⁱ. Originally we were hoping to feed the whole thing off a triple cr2450s arrangementⁱⁱⁱ, but the manufacturer warns that current draw significantly over rated values (5 mA) drasticaly reduces battery life. Our tests so far show hours of continuous 30 mA draw without ill effects, but it is not really feasible to test a large enough number of batteries from various suppliers etc.

The current design is based off two CR-V3s, tied in parallel. We intend to use a universal socket if possible, so that any AAA batteries can be substituted. The parallel arrangement adds redundancy, as the Cardano will be able to run off either one socket filled, or with both for even less power draw per battery.

Here's looking forward to the next month's report.

1. Which influences power draw, but not linearly. The cooler you run it (which is to say, the less power draw it has) the longer it has to run, which makes its total energy consumption per task increase. So we've done our math again and again and selected optimums and been shuffling them around and so on. [↩]
2. Which need much less power but which also store much less data. [↩]
3. Which, in aggregate, should have provided ~1800 mAh worth of energy, amply sufficient for many hours of continuous operation. [↩]