[davepl]

Can someone explain cap-start? Does it store a bunch of surge energy in a cap for the initial inductive "kick" when the motor starts?

I decided not to monkey with my big compressor. I have a small desktop compressor I used for tires and air brushing that I will play with instead!

I built a switched outlet box with a 30A Craydon SSR in it to play with, we shall see. I searched and paid extra for a non-zero-cross relay. Normally they don't switch until the next time the AC crosses zero, which is OK as a switch but wouldn't work for AC slicing.

I've also been tinkering with a bunch of old retro displays and trying to interface them to modern electronics. Here are some of my results!

Little saga on the VFD display: it's a Japanese unit from Noritake and uses hand-coded timing loops to drive it that I could only get to work on the CPU they designed it for (which I'm not using because it's ancient). So for the $1.75 they cost, I dedicated an Atmel 328P (which it works with) just to controlling the VFD. It then exposes the standard LCD interface across the i2c bus so that the ESP32 can call it as if it were a local display. Works great, but was a bit of an investment.

I'm a software guy, so every one of these little wires is a victory ;-)