Journal
Field notes from the line.
What the robots found, what broke, what we changed. Written by the people who were there.
Field notes
What a robot learned in its first winter on the line
Six months, 1,240 spans and one ice storm on the Tamarack 230 kV line in northern Alberta.
7 min read
Every story
Engineering
Why we fly thermal at night
Sunlight makes steel look hot. At night, the only heat left is heat the line is making.
Vegetation
Counting trees from the conductor
How LiDAR from the wire changed trim cycles on 800 km of corridor.
Field notes
The glass bell that gave itself away
A shattered insulator is silent to the eye and loud in ultraviolet.
Company
Stralen raises a Series A to put robots on 50,000 km of line
New funding to build 400 Herons a year and open a field base in Denver.
Design
Designing a robot a lineworker can hang in ten minutes
Every handle, latch and label on Heron was tested with gloves on, from a bucket, in the wind.
The Line Report
One email a month: what the fleet found, one engineering story, no marketing. 4,100 line engineers read it.