I'm going to have a bit of a #tech#rant (less charitable people might say #whine) here. If you just want jokes and cute bunny pictures, feel free to skip this one.
Object of my #ire this week? #Furnaces. I'm not even going to rant about their main control boards; most of that's been said better than I could say it, by others with more knowledge than I.
So the electronic module bolted to the back of this 3-phase motor contains what's called a "Variable Frequency Drive", or #VFD. That is a complicated setup with a bunch of very high-powered #transistors to turn 1-phase power into 3-phases for controlling and running the motor, along with a #CPU/#MPU to manage it, send different #waveforms to each of the 3 motor terminals to control its #speed, etc.
It also has to "talk" to the furnace control board. And there's another #puzzle.
Veritasium's new video on the history of vacuum tubes is great, one of his best imo. https://youtu.be/FU_YFpfDqqA
That in turn brought me back to Posy's gorgeous video about VFDs (vacuum fluorescent display). It's amazing how many different ways vacuum tubes were used pre-silicon. https://youtu.be/PkPSDOjhxwM #vacuumtube#vfd#retrotech