Over a year ago I crossed paths with Rick Jones, who was the VP of Marketing at Balmar before it was sold to a holding company a few years back. After a few conversations we agreed to form a company Wakespeed Offshore with the VSR Alternator Regulator technology as the flagship offering in a portfolio of regulators.
It has kept me rather occupied this past year and here is an early photo of the results:
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| Engineering Prototype of WS500 Regulator |
It is a 4th generation VSR Regulator, featuring more robust electrical design and protections, enhanced communications and charge profile for better support of advanced battery chemistry (e.g. LiFeP04), as well as IP67 design points. And it is just one of a family of regulators we will be bringing to market soon.
And this brings me to the news: Unfortunately the VSR Alternator Project as documented in this blog will not be advanced beyond its current state. There are several reasons for this, including: Time/resource availability, the fact that the CPU used it at capacity, and perhaps more so – due to my picking up the rest of the portfolio I have been exposed to concepts which are not mine to bring into Open Source. So, it is with a bit of sad news that I must acknowledge that this phase of the VSR story is coming to a close.
This has been an interesting project over the years, and I am hoping with 2019 it will continue into the future providing a true state of the art alternator regulator. It has always been clear that this technology was significantly ahead of anything on the market, and now it seems we are getting proof of that.
