Davide Andrea

In '56 Davide's mother was a college student from Colorado, USA who was traveling by bicycle through Europe; she met Davide's Italian father who was studying to become a protestant minister at a Christian center in Piedmont, Italy. Davide was born in nearby Torino, Italy, in '57.

As Davide's father was assigned to various churches, the family lived in various parts of Italy, from Trieste in the North-East, to Palermo Sicily in the South. At 13, Davide fell in love with electronics after reading an article in the local paper on how to build a light sensitive burglar alarm, which he successfully completed. By the age of 16, Davide was designing actual products: a wand to detect breaks in the heating element in electric blankets; a tone decoder to page particular truck drivers through their CB radios; a spy product to tap a phone line and display a phone number dialed on a rotary phone; a full featured burglar alarm.

In 1976, at the age of 19, Davide moved to Colorado, where his mother's parents offered a place where to stay and college tuition (on the condition that he would cut his hair short and stop looking like such a damn Hippie). The next year, Davide began studying Electrical Engineering at the University of Colorado. There, Davide worked in the electronic shop at JILA, with Nobel Prize laureate Jan Hall as a mentor. Soon, his wages were enough to pay the tuition, so Davide no longer needed his Grampa's money, allowing him to grow his hair long again.

Davide graduated in '82, and began a career as an engineering consultant. For a few years he also worked at Colorado Electro-Optics, where he developed the first commercial grade, passive infrared actuated, light fixture.

As a consultant, Davide developed consumer products, mostly for health club exercise machines, automatic door openers, and accessories for cellular phones.

During those years, Davide gathered a certain local notoriety as an outrageous prankster (e.g.: http://keepboulderweird.org/ "Baby on car") and as a Free Form radio DJ on KGNU, the local community station.

In '99, Davide bough a Corbin Sparrow electric vehicle, which was his first direct connection to the EV world. In '04, for the purpose of converting the Sparrow from Lead Acid to Li-Ion, Davide developed his distributed Li-Ion BMS topology, which today is still the core of the Elithion product line.

In '06, Davide co-founded Hybrids Plus, to convert Prius HEVs to PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles), using his BMS technology. There, he also developed the Inverger, a bidirectional Inverter / Charger for V2G (Vehicle To Grid) applications. While the company had the potential of being a major player in the nascent PHEV industry, it was marred by disagreement among the company founders on the most effective strategies for moving the company forward. Enormously frustrated, Davide left Hybrids Plus in Aug '08. Within 2 weeks, Davide had formed Elithion ("Electronics for Lithium Ion") to offer his BMS technology to the industry. With Ann Colcord (Davide's partner on and off the job) running operations, and Davide doing engineering, today the tiny Elithion is a significant player among the handful of companies worldwide offering off-the-shelf, professional, Li-Ion BMSs.

In '09, Artech House approached Davide to suggest he write a book on his Li-Ion BMS expertise. The result is the "Battery Management Systems for Large Lithium-Ion Battery Packs" book (updates are available at http://book.liionbms.com/).

Davide lives in a small condominium in Boulder CO, shared with his girlfriend Ann, just minutes by bicycle to Elithion's office, actively minimizing his daily carbon footprint on this Earth.