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BobMann Senior Member Joined: 30/06/2011 Location: United StatesPosts: 134
Posted: 03:16pm 28 Aug 2012
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When a wind deal goes bad. You need to be an inventor and a Lawyer too
I posted here because I wish to clear the air on my deal with Steve at vawats.net when I post there it just gets removed.
I have build a lot of Vawts and sold them mostly based on the F&P motor. Made the Mann Smart Drive and a company Tree Top Wind Mills. Found Steve online and asked him to build a Smart Controller for my turbines. He said he had thought of building a controller but never started. So I send him some funds to start had a power supply he needed shipped and whatever he needed. I even sent one of my Vawts and Mann Smart Drive to use in real world testing. I was always under the upstanding of a one year exclusive sale agreement on the controller, first in first out to market. I did put up the fund and equipment needed and all my time too.
Our only business deal was to build a controller for Tree Top Wind Mill to work with my Smart Drives so I could sell them as a kit. I was hoping to build something special for the small wind turbine owners.
I worked over 2 years on my end of building and testing Vawts and PMAs and gave all the good the bad and ugly data to Steve to be used in the development of the controller.
On my end did trade shows, meet with investors spent ten times the funds sent to Steve.
We even had calls with my Lawyer, Steve and me trying to build a LLC that was on my dime.
Than I was told we had no real deal I may get one or two controllers for testing a month over a year.
And they would be sent out to others too.
I have one bad controller and the only working one was sent to his old partner and Windgen.org is talking about selling the controller on their site.
I pulled the plug at this point I asked for everything back. Then he uses my UPS account without asking.
The sad part is he did build a Smart Controller as I had dreamed of. At no point did I ask for 100% of the controller or 50 %. I would of liked 10 % but knew I would never see it.
The point is always use a Lawyer on any dealing yes I know better, but in my heart I believe in a hand shake to be as good as my word. So I am walking away from the wind mills and will not look back.
Bob Mann
Edited by BobMann 2012-08-30
sjh7132 Newbie Joined: 27/12/2011 Location: United StatesPosts: 13
Posted: 06:18pm 30 Sep 2012
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I didn't realize Bob was smearing me on multiple boards and multiple countries. The real (or at least my side) goes like this:
I've been working on this idea and board for 4 years. If you look at my YouTube channel you can see I posted proofs of concept long before Bob even had a Smart Drive or contacted me.
I had the design pretty much complete and was about to start making prototypes when Bob contacted me. He asked if there was anything he could do to help make this board happen more quickly. He sent me money without me asking, and loaned me a alt, and later a turbine to test with. (And bought a 400v power supply ($200) for me to test with.) The reason I asked for the loan of these components is his alt produces an unusually high voltage, and I needed this equipment to guarantee that my board would be compatible with his alt and turbine. If I could make my board compatible with a guaranteed customer, it seemed like it would help both of us.
It should be noted that while Bob claims he funded all equipment necessary for this project, I already had an electronics lab in my home with probably $50K in equipment, including scopes, logic analyziers, signal generators, amps, programmers, power supplies, computers, etc. I even invested my own money to enhance my Surface mount capabilities for this board.
Bob was very cool at first. He'd occasionally call me up ask how things were going, etc. He's even suggest that I use some of his money to take my wife out to dinner, donated to a charity run my kids were doing, etc. But at some point he started promising controllers to customers. I didn't tell him to do this. This is an R&D project and you never know how they are going to go. He would ask when we would have product to sell, and all I could tell him is when the next prototype will be ready for testing. As luck would have it, the high voltage coming from the alt did make things challenging and it took several revisions of the board to get it right. It was also a challenge to get the firmware right to be able to react to the wind turbine quickly enough.
Bob's videos show a Version 1 board that had many bugs. He installed one in one of his customer's homes. I'm not really happy about that because I think it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Plus it doesn't really work, other than being able to do the hand crank demo. Bob preselling boards that weren't ready, became a problem because he had to start buying turbines back. I'm sorry, but that wasn't my doing.
Bob and his lawyer did contact me asking if I wanted to form an LLC with him. I listened to the proposal but didn't agree. Honestly Bob has a garage shop operation that sells maybe a turbine a month. My board could potentially be used on just about any home sized turbine. Why would I want to be locked into one turbine producer and a small one at that? So nothing ever happened with the LLC. I didn't suggest that we form an LLC. It was Bob's idea, that's why it was on his dime. In hind sight I wonder if that was just an attempt to get control of my design?
I came out very a version 2 board. It was much improved, but had some ugly cuts and jumpers in the middle of the power circuit due to routing errors. (But the design was pretty sound.) I posted these youtube videos showing it working.
Right after I posted these videos Bob started to say things like "I should be the only one who can sell these boards because of all the help I gave you." Yes, he loaned me a turbine and power supply. I loaned him prototype boards for testing and trade shows. But I've put 4 years (on and off) in on this project, 3 generations of final boards and lots of test circuits before that. He was asking for sole rights to the board FOREVER. I had always understood the agreement to be that Bob would be selling my boards, but exclusivity was never mentioned. I declined to give him control forever. I offered exclusive distribution rights for a year with limited quantities in the first few months to flush out the remaining bugs. And he begrudgingly agreed.
The board was about 95% working and I understood what needed to be fixed for V3. I had V3 in my computer. Strangely at this time, Bob decides to sell the turbine I'm using for testing on EBay, and stopped my progress. I had to take the turbine down, package it up and ship it. Stopping my progress seemed like a very strange move for someone who kept bugging me to get the board done because he had angry customers. I think this was some sort of power play, but I'm not sure. I was very confused and angry at the time, given the hours I was putting in to accelerate the schedule for Bob's needs.
I had the working V2 board, but still wanted more test data, and I didn't have a turbine anymore, so I sent it to my Friend Marcus, who has a working lift type turbine to try. I got lots of useful information from Marcus, including how my software was not intuitive for the average person. Is is true I could have sent that board to Bob. But I was afraid he would have given it to another customer, and it was full of cuts and jumpers and I needed test data, not for it to just disappear like the other prototype did. Plus data from a lift type turbine would be very useful.
I've since come out with the V3 board, and have been testing it here with a Boreas alt and Solar panels. I don't have anything to push the high voltage range so I can't say for sure it works up to 200v. I've changed the standard configuration to be 100v input because that's easier to test.
Before I ordered parts for these final boards, I asked Bob if he was still interested. He said 'yes', so I ordered parts for 10 boards.
So at this point, for just loaning me some stuff. Bob gets one year of exclusive sales of my board, a board tailored to work with his turbine. After the year he still has rights to sell the board, just not exclusively. All the money Bob had sent would be applied to the purchase of boards. (i.e he didn't pay for any of the failed prototypes or any of my cost.) That doesn't sound like a bad deal to me, in fact it's way too good for what he invested.
Then Bob completely changes his mind on all agreements. He just seemed to lose it! I think he saw that Marcus was testing the V2 board (crappy jumpers remember), and I was talking with Windgen about future sales. (Future as in after Bob's exclusive year.) His imagination must have run wild. I tried to calm him down with no luck. He posted that I was screwing him. I can't be trusted (like his post here), etc.
I'm not sure what happened. I'm half thinking that Bob thought I was a poor college student and by setting me up to buy an expensive inventory of components and then not taking the boards, he thought could maybe put me in financial trouble and strong-arm me into giving up my design. Just a theory, I'm not sure. Fortunately I have resources to stand being screwed by Bob. Bob could have been selling boards right now (exclusively), but he called everything off and really burnt bridges doing it!
I was straight with Bob from the start. If anyone cares, I can share copies of emails that document the agreement and show where Bob agrees, then does a 180 at the end.
Bob still has one of my prototype boards. I've returned everything of his, alt, turbine, power supply and his money. Yet he still has my prototype. On vawts.net he threatened to send it to China to be copied. That would be low, but maybe not below Bob. I'm still hoping to get that board back, but he and his lawyer are ignoring my emails now, so I don't have much hope. I'm seeking legal counsel to see what my options are.
Just in case Bob does come out with a copy. Is should be noted that the board he copied has many bugs and terrible firmware. It really didn't work for turbines at all. We kludged something together to do the hand crank test. A firmware bug also often made it self-destruct by turning the wrong two transistors on at the same time. It's not pretty when that happens! And this is / was in someone's house!
The V3 board and firmware is much better. Besides being a mppt controller, it's a useful scientific instrument for testing turbines. The host software can do plots, log data, etc. The board itself can run in MPPT mode for turbine is steady air and solar panels, or V-I curve following mode for faster response to gusts. It has other test modes, like constant voltage, constant current, constant duty cycle, etc. You might check out this thread on vawts.net.
We completely characterized a turbine, including doing a table of power vs wind vs voltage. I have never seen anyone else produce that type of data.
In the end, Bob has everything of his back. I spent lots of money and time making my board compatible with the high voltage from his alt, all for nothing. But I do have an awesome board. (Okay maybe I'm biased)
I'm currently making V3 boards and offering them at a low price to a few people on Vawts.net to be testers. It's too bad because these would have been perfect board for Bob to test and sell.
Eventually, after some test period, Windgen will be the first to sell them. (And he doesn't have an exclusive agreement either.) The only thing he's asking is that I don't make an exclusive agreement with anyone else, which seems very reasonable if he's going to invest in infrastructure to assemble and sell them.
Anyway, that's the story. I'm sorry it had to be aired on this forum. On vawts.net we deleted the whole thread (both sides!) because it didn't seem appropriate for public consumption. I don't care either way. It might be good for people to know how this went down so that they can be careful when dealing with Bob (or possibly me).
If anyone really doubts my story or wants to know more details, feel free to contact me at my us-vawt.com email address.
Steve Hansel
www.us-vawt.com
Edited by sjh7132 2012-10-02Steve
Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me.
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