Woohoo, travel time! Today marks the first day in Dallas attending Texas Instruments’ Battery Management Systems deep-dive seminar. Okay, technically it doesn’t start until tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean today was any less exciting.

The flight from Calgary to Dallas wasn’t too eventful, besides a controller fault that required going back to the terminal to resolve, but trying to grab a SIM card to put in my phone was a whole other ordeal. Fry’s carries the card but doesn’t carry the refill PINs, and my Canadian credit card would not work both online and on the phone; it was only when I went to Best Buy to purchase a refill card with cash that I was finally able to get cellular phone and data access.

I was also given a tour of the main TI facility, and boy it is HUGE! As much as I would have loved to share images, I signed an agreement explicitly stating I cannot do so. However, I was able to see a bunch of the lab rooms, offices and demo stands showcasing various TI technologies at work, such as the ARM processors in the Nest thermostat, the DLP chips in pocket projectors, and so on. I even got to see many of the people in the TI Battery Management team in person, but because of the seminar running from Tuesday to Thursday, they were visibly too busy with work to have a chat.

Tomorrow marks the first instalment of the Battery Management Deep-Dive Training sessions. There is preliminary word that I may have an opportunity to speak in public for a couple minutes about the TI forums and why I’m here.