14 ms·
Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use
- raffraffraff 4y agoI've been finding these things everywhere. How the fuck are they legal?
- exabrial 4y ago... I mean, at least here, there's a ton of illegally parked Bird Scooters that might be a little more efficient use of your time.
- davidmurdoch 4y agoWhat is going on with the "st" ligature on this site?
- smegsicle 4y agoautomatic font ligatures and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race
- moritzwarhier 4y agoSorry to be snarky, but this whole comment thread borders on satire for me. If I can think of a "disaster for the human race", it's probably people being paid obscene amounts of money in exchange for advancing the destruction of the environment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Cerium 4y agoThere is a CSS rule: font-feature-settings: "liga", "dlig" [1]. This rule enables both standard (liga) and discretionary ligatures (dlig). The discretionary set often includes a loop "st" ligature [2]. [1] https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-feature-settings/ https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/font-feature-set... [2] https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/open-type-syntax.html#dlig https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/open-type-syntax.html#dl...
- iamflimflam1 4y agoHopefully fixed - didn't see anything on my machine so was wondering what people were talking about!
- moritzwarhier 4y agoCouldn't see it on FF Android either
- iamflimflam1 4y agoFunny, just looked at one of my previous blog posts and it's strangely appropriate! https://www.atomic14.com/2020/08/25/how-do-we-debug.html https://www.atomic14.com/2020/08/25/how-do-we-debug.html
- moritzwarhier 4y agoInteresting, I had not yet heard of or thought about that CSS property, but it makes sense that it exists. For example, one could enable them for headlines only, or only for smaller font sizes, only with a minimum DPR...
- robocat 4y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-feature-settings https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-featur... says “Whenever possible, Web authors should instead use the font-variant shorthand property or an associated longhand property such as font-variant-ligatures, font-variant-caps, font-variant-east-asian, font-variant-alternates, font-variant-numeric or font-variant-position. These lead to more effective, predictable, understandable results than font-feature-settings, which is a low-level feature designed to handle special cases where no other way exists to enable or access an OpenType font feature.” Using https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-variant-ligatures https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian... you can disable font ligatures (yayyy!). Safari Mobile allows JavaScript shortcuts to run in any web page: I created a web shortcut in the Apple Shortcuts App to disable ligatures using JavaScript, and run it from the page share icon in Mobile Safari - unobvious functionality! I only learned that feature was available on the iPad today! I would prefer a user style sheet override. . .
- cabirum 4y agoIt sticks out like a sore thumb and is completely unnecessary for this typeface.
- mattlondon 4y agoHave to agree - very distracting. After a while I kinda lost track of what the article was saying and just started "spotting" the ligatures.
- greatartiste 4y agoThese things are now everywhere , not just litter but an environmental horror story and a fire risk as well. Previously I had seen them & wondered what they were then this Big Clive video explained all .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65DpT2nqEI&ab_channel=bigclivedotcom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N65DpT2nqEI&ab_channel=bigcl... I must admit the ones with 1500 mah batteries are very useful.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoStill waiting to find one of those - so far I've only found the 500mAh versions.
- failTide 4y agoI've even seen them ending up in the ocean and harbors. Teens will litter them on the shoreline and not realize (or care) that the high tide will take them.
- Blackthorn 4y agoMy God, that video made me wince when he revealed the insides of all those devices. Perfectly good lithium and manufacturing, made to be used once and literally thrown away. Such a disgusting level of waste.
- tsol 4y agoHow is that cost effective? To me, it seems like something is wrong with our economy if it's cost effective to waste so many resources. I'm sure the cost to an individual to extract and refine those resources are low-- but the cost to society as a whole of littering those resources is great
- tiagod 4y agoIn many countries, tobacco is very highly taxed (over 10£ for a pack in the UK). Some recent legislation made reusable vaporiser products hard to purchase and sell, limiting tank sizes, nicotine contents, etc, which opened the market for these. Due to the highly taxed nature of nicotine products, the battery/circuitry cost is negligible if it helps getting around restrictions.
- lnsru 4y agoSo so, electronic waste landing everywhere while illusion of closed loop electronic recycling is being sold as a solution. My proposition: deposit of 25€ for small electrical devices and 50€ and more for bigger ones so that these do not land in landfills.
- kennywinker 4y agoThis kind of solution is absolutely what's required. Two addendums: First, make the deposit a function of battery size not item size or cost (small battery $5 deposit, medium battery $10, large $50). This way the environmental cost of a specific battery is linked to the consumer's cost in a way that it isn't really now when the variation in battery cost is swallowed up in the cost of the item itself. Second, peg this deposit to inflation. 20 years ago the 5c deposit on a beer can meant a lot more than it does today. I'm old enough to remember my fairly well off grandparents saving up their cans and returning them. Today, nobody I know bothers.
- BizarroLand 4y agoYeah, if soda bottles had a $1 deposit on them to ensure proper recycling that would be pretty tough to adjust to but good for the environment.
- bombcar 4y agoIt also provides an effective income for those disadvantaged enough; if the five cent deposit on cans had increased with inflation there'd still be an incentive to do it. $1-5 for vape devices would be similar.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoThird, make manufacturers pay for deposit on devices with non-replaceable batteries. As in tax them at the time of purchase, on batteries that render a device unusable.
- Nition 4y agoI have to say, it seems ridiculous that we're at the point where people are dying in Europe this week from a heatwave exacerbated by climate change, and we're not even implementing basic measures like this yet.
- pxmpxm 4y agoDidn't he short out the battery when snipping both wires at the same time? Neat idea though, will see if i can find any.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoFortunately it was just the atomiser wires - so it briefly powered on before it was snipped off.
- gumby 4y ago> So far, I’ve only managed to score a couple, but I know of people who can’t seem to stop finding them. I guess it’s the same people who always seem to find pennies when they are walking around. I don’t find pennies, but the first lock picks I made I made from street cleaner bristles someone gave me. I’d never seen one before up close, but since that day I’ve been unable to not find them and pick them up, typically one or two a week. Except that day I was working really late and when I looked at the empty parking lot as the sun rose and the ground flashed at me :-) The same thing happened with four leaf clovers: a friend claimed they are reasonably common and we went out to a lawn and looked. Within a couple of days I’d trained my brain to detect them as I walk around.
- pxmpxm 4y agoHuh, street sweeper bristles are metal?
- bombcar 4y agoThe ones I've seen are either metal (black ones) or very hard plastic (blue).
- gruez 4y ago>very hard plastic (blue). mmm... microplastics
- jakzurr 4y agoThat is correct. Decades ago, my cousin was into recreational lock-picking, and it turns out the bristles are perfect for machining into such tools. EDIT - whoops, I stand corrected, metal or plastic.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoRecommended by the MIT guide to lock picking - https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf page 44
- stavros 4y agoI wanted to buy some VTC6 cells (for my RC planes), but there's a big counterfeit problem here, so I did what any one of us would do: I wrote a capacity testing program to graph the battery capacity. It's fairly easy to use, if you want to test your own cells, all you need (TM) is an electronic load and a drone FC (they come with voltage/current sensors and cost $15, plus I had a few lying around). Here are some pretty graphs of fake and real VTC6es: https://notes.stavros.io/maker-things/battery-discharge-curves/ https://notes.stavros.io/maker-things/battery-discharge-curv... The software is called Assault and Battery: https://gitlab.com/stavros/assault-and-battery/ https://gitlab.com/stavros/assault-and-battery/
- gumby 4y agoI suppose the opposite is true too: you could make a little circuit in volume that could turn junk (or any) batteries into firestarters. Glad nobody seems to have made these IFDs.
- BizarroLand 4y agoI'm assuming IFD stands for "Idiotic F##K#NG Devices", right?
- aoki 4y agoNot knowing anything about vape internals and with him referring to them as “lithium” instead of LiPo or LiIon, I thought on first reading that he was recommending recharging primary lithium batteries. Which would already be a kind of stochastic IFD!
- odiroot 4y agoI see a lot of these disposable e-cigarettes here in England. Usually discarded around big parks in the centre. I did consider picking them up to reuse before.
- nibbleshifter 4y agoI see dozens of these scattered about every time I go walking in my area. Need to order a bunch of those protection/charging boards and start harvesting the free batteries.
- diimdeep 4y agoI still have a few Lithium polymer MacBook batteries after replacing them due to swell. I think it is possible to get individual cells from them and use protection circuits like this. The problem of course is that they swelled, there is videos how people puncture outside shell to release gas, but it is a very dangerous and scary thing to do.
- olivermarks 4y agoBe extremely careful about damaged batteries, they are a major fire risk indoors. Strongly recommend outdoors disassembly away from structures. Metal ammo boxes are a good idea to store the batteries in as a lot of RC hobbyists know
- Wingman4l7 4y agoYou can also purchase heavy zippered containers or Velcro-ed pouches made of fire-retardant fabric that are intended for use as safe charging containers for lithium polymer batteries.
- picture 4y agoI personally wouldn't trust anything less than steel ammo boxes. I've exploded batteries before and they get seriously hot. It will completely burn through anything without a lot of thermal mass. There are videos on youtube showing how cheaper pouches are completely useless
- jrockway 4y agoWhat is a battery fire like in an ammo box? I imagine flames shooting up, catching the ceiling on fire, and the bottom getting so hot that it catches the shelf on fire. I made a lithium battery pack for amateur radio once. I was scared of it for a while and charged it in my fireplace. If it catches on fire, well, that's the place, right? (They were A123 cells though. Not as firey as other chemistries.)
- olivermarks 4y agoA damaged battery's trapped energy is very explosive. A decent steel ammo box will contain the blast. It seems likely that a discarded battery found on the street might have been crushed or punctured by a vehicle wheel or similar https://youtu.be/HCGtRgBUHX8 https://youtu.be/HCGtRgBUHX8
- 4y ago
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoI wonder if someone did the math how the plastic straw "problem" compares to vape litter.
- fragmede 4y agoWhere I am, flavored nicotine products are illegal (along with plastic straws) so the math is both are bad.
- daneelsan 4y agoScott's thots part 2
- squarefoot 4y agoThis is a good way to limit somehow the environmental damage created by those disgraceful single use vape devices; I wonder how on earth they're allowed to be produced and sold! Other users warned about recovered batteries: true, give them a good visual inspection first, always check they're not damaged and measure above a certain safe level (usually 3.0V for Li-Ion) before attempting their recharge. Also keep in mind that those small TP4056 boards were set up for recharging bigger cells and output a higher current. With 500mA charging a 550mA cell we're close to C, which is perfectly doable, however it's a stress I wouldn't subject a unknown used cell to. To stay on the safe side, I'd limit the output current to 250mA or less, which is doable by swapping the resistor going from pin 2 of the chip to ground with a 5KOhm or more one.
- emson 4y agoGreat article, it does make you think what more we could be doing to track and recycle waste. There must be a data analytics play here?
- explodingwaffle 4y agoThey should be illegal- the waste of RECHARGEABLE lithium cells in DISPOSABLE vapes is insane. At least in the UK, anywhere there are teenagers these things follow. I'll admit as an electronics hobbyist these can be a good source of free batteries though (hell, it'd probably be cheaper and certainly quicker for me to walk into a vape shop and shuck these for the batteries than it is to buy them online). Real evil villain stuff tbh- wasting rare metals, getting kids addicted to nicotine, probably shipped by the boatload from China...
- tsol 4y agoThese types of situations make me think some externalities should be priced in, perhaps through taxes. It's ridiculous that these devices make litter of rare metals that also have a risk of fires. If we're gonna allow it, it ought to include the cost of inevitably cleaning them up off the streets
- spaetzleesser 4y ago"These types of situations make me think some externalities should be priced in, perhaps through taxes. " Why not all? Externalities are hard to determine but in general this should be a principle in a capitalist market economy.
- labster 4y agoThe free market already accounts for externalities by making other people pay for them.
- culi 4y agothat's not how that works
- oarsinsync 4y agoIn theory or in practice? How should/does it work?
- moralestapia 4y agoWait are those things disposable? Vape sticks or whatever they're called? WTF! I can't believe this is tolerated, that is a massive amount of environmental damage for an incredibly stupid distraction that lasts for a day or so. Damn!
- Gigachad 4y agoAnother one was a trend of "single use" phone battery banks. Where its a rechargeable lithium battery but without the recharge circuit so once its flat you just throw it in the bin.
- atVelocet 4y agoYeah.. they sell them for 8€ and you can‘t refill them or change anything. When the liquid is empty it get’s thrown into the garbage.
- rsch 4y agoI started reading it, saw the first photo and went oh my gaaaaaaaaad wear gloves. And not just for the goop inside the thing, people had this thing in their mouth. The next paragraph confirms the author came to this conclusion too.
- djmips 4y agoI made the mistake of getting the goop on my bare hands. What a rookie mistake!
- derekdahmer 4y agoDon’t know much about batteries - what makes these 500mAh battery packs useful/valuable for home projects? 2800mAh NiMH AA batteries are like $1.50 each. Will they not do the job?
- GekkePrutser 4y agoLithium batteries are easier to charge, have a more suitable voltage, are lighter for the same energy and have no memory effect. They also have a great even voltage drop during discharge which makes for accurate charge indicators (Sony used to advertise them as "infolithium" back in the day) Lithium batteries are pretty great except for the fire risk. And Lithium mining is bad for the environment (lots of chemical waste during extraction) so using them for single use stuff is horrible.
- fsckboy 4y agoNiMH batteries don't have a memory effect either, that's NiCd that does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_battery#Loss_of_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93metal_hydride_b...
- GekkePrutser 4y agoOh I thought they did but it was significantly reduced compared to NiCd. Edit: Yeah it has some but it's reversible according to that article. I didn't know that part.
- rruark 4y agoI built a USB power back using these cells a couple months ago after finding out that disposable vapes have rechargeable batteries. A friend had already taken the cells out of several of his own vapes; I don't know how I'd feel about taking apart ones that I found on the street. http://robruark.com/projects/power_bank/power_bank.html http://robruark.com/projects/power_bank/power_bank.html
- sgtnoodle 4y agoIn my experience, the ESP32's ADC isn't noisy so much as buggy. When using the most straight forward mode of operation, software triggering, the ADC frequently spits out garbage. It's almost as if it's an internal pin mux problem. The ADC can instead be clocked by the I2S peripheral, and when doing so it seems to bypass that particular bug. I did that for a hobby project. I was trying to detect 500uS wide pulses, and I went from regularly missing them to getting every single one. I suspect that the software trigger mode goes through an intermediate MCU in the guts of the ESP32, and there's some race conditions in it's firmware.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoThat's very interesting - I've done a lot of work with the ADC for getting audio from the ADC, didn't consider using it to just get values as well.
- trhway 4y agoJust today was on the Ukrainian TV - a student group in Kiev Polytech collects those batteries and reuses in the drones what they make for the army.
- kstenerud 4y agoReminds me of a movie I saw as a kid where a guy from the future comes back to the 80s. There's a scene where he's looking for new batteries for his gadgets. Woman at the store counter (peering suspiciously at the battery): "What kind did you say they were?" Traveler: "Plutonium." My only thought at the time was "My god, what an ecological nightmare that would unleash when people start throwing these things out with the trash!"