Batteryless OP-1
shred.zone
shred.zone
> Their suggestion was to keep using the original battery.
> Would I have to throw away my OP-1 which is still looking almost pristine?
Why not just charge it? Am I crazy to think, if it swells it swells? You turn it off, remove it then and get to the problem then. I've used a MacBook air from 2012 with a swollen battery since 2014, every day pretty much. It's not a nuclear bomb.
If it short circuits a cell, it will heat up. Once it reaches a critical temperature, it will start releasing it's stored energy in a self-sustaining reaction. (You need to dump water into it fast enough to carry away the heat faster than it can produce it.) You've now got a class D fire on your hands.
Hope you've planned ahead and stored that laptop in an ammo crate or other fire-safe container, because it's gonna be burning long and hot and releasing toxic smoke the whole time.
Low probability, high severity.
It takes catastrophic circumstances to bypass the fail-slow idiot proofing engineering that goes into consumer device batteries. The gassing off bubbles and warped laptop frames and all the stuff that goes into preventing things from catching fire and/or exploding makes it a vanishingly small probability, on the level of things like getting struck by lightning, attacked by a shark, or having space rocks land on your house. Such things happen, but it's not something you need to expend resources on. Sure, if you're a surfer, a golfer, live near an ISS dumping lane, or run a laptop repair shop, then take measures. If you're replacing a battery on your own laptop, once every couple years, it's not anything to waste concern on.
Hoverboards and DIY vape rigs are honorable mentions, but problems with those tended to be caused by shoddy, third rate manufacturing of the electronics and batteries, and now even the third rate cheap crap is pretty darn safe. Apple isn't putting components teetering on the edge of catastrophic failure into their products, and judging by the absolute numbers, neither is anyone else. That there have been fewer than 10k incidents in the last decade of consumer device failure causing battery fires or explosions, and many many tens of billions of battery powered devices, paints a picture of humans successfully taming lightning.
Big batteries in electric cars like Teslas and other higher powered uses do require a different safety mindset. The consequences are orders of magnitude higher, and rate of failure are higher as well, with frequent chain reactions and runaway, uncontrollable fires that can melt rock being a thing first responders and junkyard operators have to contend with.
If you can explode a MacBook or laptop doing anything a normal consumer might plausibly attempt, the manufacturer would probably pay you a bounty. Batteries are safe.
The odds of being struck by lightning over the course of your life are around 1 in 15k.
The odds a device you own catches fire during your lifetime are around 1 in 1 million, assuming 20 such devices. Those odds get better year over year, and solid-state electrolytes, among other innovations, will make fires and explosions a thing of the past.
People die from lithium ion battery fires. Sure, the little ones may not be as big as what’s in e-bikes, but they are in far more intimate areas and under far less scrutiny.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/nyregion/ebike-charging-s...
https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2022/04/26/app...
Second: NYFD is one of if not the busiest fire department in the world because it's a city of nearly 9 million people. They respond to 36,500 fires a year. That means that the e-scooter fires represent 0.7% of the total number of fires they respond to.
To further put things in perspective: roughly 160 people die per day in NYC.
If your battery is a forbidden pillow, you should stop using it. It's far from a new battery with a 0.0001% chance of fire.
On the inside of the synths we make, there's a link to a documentation repository. If people are desperate enough to remove screws, why not help them?
If you think that's bad, read the terms and conditions and warranty. I ranted about it in another comment so I won't repeat it here, but they seem to be going very much out of their way to be as big a bunch of dicks as they can be.
Looking forward to a bright future where technological progress becomes synonymous with expensive materials and design proximity to Dieter Rams.
There is a service that says they will do it in like Chicago. I just haven't bit that bullet.
If anyone knows of a replacement battery that ships to Hawaii, please let me know before I drop $200 to get a $2 battery replaced in my brick.
> Still, I wish they had a better solution to offer than just suggesting that I keep using the original battery, even at the risk of swelling (which would ruin the case and be a potential fire hazard). In essence, they were telling me to throw away a machine that was otherwise still good.
I was with the author until here. There is a weird entitlement. The manuf was honest and upfront about what the were capable of doing in terms of support for a discontinued 10 yr old product.
Also, it's generally not a good idea to connect supercaps directly to a power source with no current limiting because their internal resistance is low enough that they behave like a short when first connected.
There are many ways to solve this problem that are easily found via googling. EEVblog etc.
These clowns are charging more than one of the most cutting edge laptops on the market. Don't tell me "it's the software that you're paying for" because Ableton Live is $600. You can literally buy Ableton Live and a Macbook Air for what that thing costs. I'd certainly expect consumer policies less slimy than a used car dealer for that kind of hipster markup.
The internals say "If you can read this, your warranty is gone", a lawyer (or judge) would laugh at them for. And the way they put it feels almost abusive. I mean... they actually paid extra money to print that on the cable. https://shred.zone/cilla/page/503/cap3.jpg
Then read through the terms and conditions on the site. It's...a trip. There's a forced arbitration clause which you have to email them to opt out of. Forced/mandatory arbitration has been ruled explicitly illegal under Magnuson Moss by the courts.
From the "what is not covered":
> (f) repair or attempted repair by anyone other than or approved by teenage engineering;
BZZZT, another Magnuson Moss Act violation. Thanks for playing!
> if you believe your product is defective and covered by the product warranty, you must notify us promptly by submitting a message at support.teenage.engineering/hc/en-us/requests/new, as soon as possible after you have discovered the defect, but in no case later than two months after discovering the defect.
You have two months to report a defect? What the fuck for? There's no legitimate reason for this beyond having yet another excuse to deny a warranty claim.
They have "waiver of implied warranties" which is likely not legal in many jurisdictions and at the very least yet another asshole move. If you're a manufacturer and you feel the need to waive implied warranties, my question is: "Have you instead tried making a product that isn't shit?"
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2022/07/ftc-says-co...
https://www.engadget.com/2018-04-11-ftc-warranty-warning.htm...
Anyway, any such "warranty void if removed" and other labels don't mean anything in the US. It should be illegal to even sell anything with those labels, but somehow they still pop up. Despite that, they 100% mean nothing.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2018/04/...
That's a very strange decision to me. While a customer should be able to choose what they do with their device, I don't see why a company needs to uphold a warranty on a product modified by someone other than them. No wonder hardly anyone provides a warranty long enough to even matter.
I don't think this rule has much to do with companies deciding to have bad warranties.
I wonder what percentage of TE's sales are made up of these kinds of situations
E.g. eurorack synthesizers are notoriously consumerist, electric guitars are commonly owned in pairs or more, camera enthusiasts have shelves full of lenses, etc.
Don’t ask me how I know that.
When the batteries die, I just replace them with new D-cells.
At least lots of Eurorack builders are small passionate shops as opposed to big soulless corporations
[1]: https://www.modernsounds.co/pluto
[2]: https://www.ericasynths.lv/shop/eurorack-systems/black-syste...
I'd recommend anyone interested in any of this to have a play with Cardinal[1] for free. But I will say that it's a lot easier to play with the real thing. The difference reminds me a lot about when I was really into rubiks cubes and how much easier it is to learn the different variants of twisty puzzles with the physical puzzle in hand, compared to the computerised versions that required clicking and draging, and felt removed from the real thing. So for that reason I'd say that it has been worth actually getting eurorack for me. But even so I've barely played any real songs on the system.
My OP-1 battery also needed replacement after sitting unused for a long time. Fortunately (not for my wallet) I was still able to get one at the time.