23 ms·

This site is no longer solar powered for now

303 points by adriangrigore 3y ago

throwaway834zz 3y ago
I leave my MacBook pro plugged in most of the time. Should I be concerned?
- frowin 3y ago
  I think not. It keeps battery cycles low and is likely better than some other behavior. As far as I remember, batteries don't like to go way below 20% and don't like fast charging from 80% upwards. However, to my knowledge, it is wise to drain the battery 1-2 times a year so that the charging controller can calibrate. A way to do that is to type "yes" in your terminal (or 3-4 terminals) and wait, it will make the CPU run at 100%. After your MacBook shut off, leave it for some hours before you charge it again.
  - as4296 3y ago
    Somee MacBook Pro models also incorporate a feature called "Battery Health Management."It can help optimize the charging patterns based on your habits and usage to reduce the wear on the battery over time. It may slightly adjust the charging levels to prevent the battery from staying at maximum charge for prolonged periods (to stop battery aging).
tleilaxu 3y ago
The pictures do indeed speak for themselves! Goodness me. What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios (e.g. heat), or do we only hear about the failures when 99.9999… of the time they are fine as they are everywhere? Are all lithium-ion batteries created the same?
- reisse 3y ago
  Take a look at this guy's setup. He put consumer modem into a closed outdoor box under the sun without any ventilation or cooling whatsoever. Given there is enough sun to power the solar battery, I'd bet the temp inside the box is >70 degrees C. I am honestly amazed the whole setup lasted for so long.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    That is what you have to plan for when dealing with consumers. That someone will stick the device somewhere in the messy real world because it is easy. You have to engineer for people "holding it wrong" when failures can lead to loss of life.
  - j45 3y ago
    With so many unused hotspots out there maybe it’s a few tweaks away. Battery management aside, those portable 12v fridges are great at using a fan to heat or cool
  - ajvpowell 3y ago
    Author here. You are totally right, this whole thing was a self-confessed shoe-string hack job so it was far from ideal in any respect. I was pleased how long it lasted though and performed. Regarding temps, the modem itself, I seem to remember, never reported a temp higher than 55 degrees C. I don't live in a very warm place though...
- bob1029 3y ago
  I like to do a bit of napkin math when storing batteries. I don't care what the technology or marketing says. Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective. Energy is energy and if you don't really think it through, you may wind up with much worse than LTE modem/router fires. Tesla power walls are an example of something I could never install in my home due to this simple math. I would not be able to sleep at night knowing there is a chance they could go up while bolted to my home. I've got one of those EcoFlow batteries (2kWH) for emergencies, but I keep it on a concrete slab (protected from weather) outside my home. Go look at how a datacenter does their batteries if you want to get a sense of this very same paranoia at scale. All the DC-scale UPS systems I've seen typically consist of gigantic, low voltage cells installed in a manner expressly designed to deal with the worst case. I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable, but its a hell of a lot easier to inspect room-scale components, prove they are safe, and deal with emergencies before they turn into catastrophes.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    If I am ever in a scenario where I could have a house-sized battery system, I intend to have a disconnected concrete shed dedicated for storing them. Seems like a simple mitigation which would make me feel significantly better about the situation.
  - reisse 3y ago
    > Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective. Nah, that's the wrong way to think about it. Oxidation (well, burning) of lithium releases far more energy than the electric charge of the battery. Electric (dis)charge merely gives the initial heat to break structural integrity and set lithium on fire. And even then the problem is not in the amount of energy, but in that it's almost impossible to extinguish a lithium fire. And the fumes from battery are thick and toxic. > I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable... Nah again. Lead-acid just does not burn so spectacularly. And about the energy density - filled fuel tank of a regular car has much higher energy density than Tesla battery, but is significantly harder to ignite, easier to extinguish, and when burning, releases the energy slower.
- fer 3y ago
  > What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios If you wanna get more paranoid: https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ Jokes aside, hard to say, but it's mostly scenarios. Some batteries have proper venting (or puffing), protection circuits and sensors to prevent thermal runaway, and they are very unlikely to fail catastrophically, they would stop working before, generally. Now those take more space, so such features are often offloaded onto the PCB designers to make them fit, and you may trust them more (or less) than the battery manufacturer. More or less the same can be said about the charging circuit, and how it might handle low voltage or trickling/stop charge. Personally I've seen flashlights that burn through the 18650 without respecting the minimum voltage whatsoever, and that would put 5V to charge. There a proper battery will refuse to charge or just die, but an unprotected one might catch fire. As anecdotal data, after dozens and dozens of devices, I've only owned two batteries that became spicy (without catching fire), a Chinese-brand laptop and a cheap quadcopter battery.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  > Are all lithium-ion batteries created the same No They have different chemistries with different characteristics. Some are safer than others See here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_commercial_battery_types https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_commercial_bat... Beyond the actual chemistry there's regulators of various quality and strategies that can be found in many modern battery packs. I'm not a professional in battery manufacturing but I'm sure there's somebody around here who is that can give more details
fzeindl 3y ago
> External power was never quite enough, with enough activity the thing was liable to randomly reboot. Maybe there was a fault in the circuitry to begin with.
- Avamander 3y ago
  Unfortunately the Pi-s, especially the 4 and 3, have really finicky power circuitry. That lack of robustness combined with your usual SD-cards that can't handle it either is in my opinion one of the worst aspect of the Pi-s. https://hackaday.com/2021/02/12/pcb-mods-silence-voltage-warnings-on-the-pi-4/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/12/pcb-mods-silence-voltage-war...
  - Brybry 3y ago
    I think the article was saying the issue was the Netgear AC800S 4G/Wifi[1] modem rebooting if it didn't have its removeable battery inserted. I believe the RPi and the car battery they were using are still fine. [1] https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/mobile/ac800s_optus.pdf https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/mobile/ac800s_optus...
ElongatedMusket 3y ago
This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read. When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.
  - MandieD 3y ago
    56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
    - felipemnoa 3y ago
      >>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!
  - leereeves 3y ago
    > the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.
Mizoguchi 3y ago
I had a barely used first generation iPhone in my safe and went to get it the other day to show it to some friends just to discovered it had blown up. It didn't look charred as your modem but it definitely exploded. Next day I ordered a few fire retardant boxes where I put all of my lithium batteries and power banks.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The problem is that there is plenty of stuff that you probably don't even realize has a Lithium Ion battery in it. With a phone at least it's obvious. But what about that controller for your e-bike? Camera? Remote control? Headphones? Authentication token? Toy? Microscope? and so on... they're everywhere. And they are not always announced properly, especially smaller pouch cells.
  - jhdias 3y ago
    https://www.phonak.com/en-us/hearing-devices/hearing-aids/lyric https://www.phonak.com/en-us/hearing-devices/hearing-aids/ly... I find this egregious: "Lyric requires no maintenance or batteries to change or charge." and again "No batteries or charging needed." But you have two tiny potential bombs inserted into your head.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      > Better yet, Lyric requires no maintenance or batteries to change or charge. > The battery is specifically designed to withstand the deep ear environment for months at a time Have Phonak/Lyric achieved the impossible building a battery that never runs out of power? How does that work?
      - zerocrates 3y ago
        Looks like rather than replacing or recharging the battery, you have the entire thing removed and a new one placed.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
robertlagrant 3y ago
This is why I cringe a little when people say "you can buy li-ion batteries for this much, therefore scaling it up to do renewable energy storage is cheap enough to do right now."
- kachnuv_ocasek 3y ago
  Utility-scale batteries are a little bit different from these units in cheap consumer electronics.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    They're different in scale but the cells are pretty much identical. There are only so many manufacturers and so many form factors and just about all of them are used industrially as well as for consumer stuff. Where they differ is how the cells are organized, safety measures taken outside of the cells themselves and things like cooling, mechanical construction of the assembly and so on. And even big manufacturers get things wrong, notably: Bosch. They have a pannier mounted e-bike battery pack that has serious problems with water ingestion, boards frying and balancing wires catching fire.
    - dangus 3y ago
      Your proof that utility-scale batteries don't work is that some random e-bike battery pack has design flaws? Utility-scale battery packs are climate-managed and are in real actual use right now. O'ahu has sunsetted its coal power generation and added utility-scale batteries: https://insideevs.com/news/614726/tesla-megapacks-hawaii-arrive-coal-is-finished/ https://insideevs.com/news/614726/tesla-megapacks-hawaii-arr...
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        > Your proof that utility-scale batteries don't work is that some random e-bike battery pack has design flaws? I have absolutely no idea how you got that from what I wrote.
tau255 3y ago
Seeing the carnage I thought that there were no fuses for devices powered from 12V lead acid battery and some few hundred amps went through device. But, this is not really a failure of solar power system, just failure of a Netgear device. It seems that it used it's battery as a high current source for when it needed more peak power for wireless transmission, thus the instability and failures when just plugged to USB charger. I don't think such constant drain and constant recharge was really healthy for the battery. I wonder if it was/is stated in manual that it was supposed to be used charged and unplugged and not really as full time usage device.
samtho 3y ago
I’m not sure which SD card was chosen in the past, but I do recommend upgrading to an industrial one (and not just high endurance), and they are typically purchased through electronics components retailers/suppliers. One brand I use is ATP for my ruggedized systems[0]. Yes, they may be an order of magnitude more expensive than even a high endurance from SanDisk or Samsung, but I started using these in 2015 or 2016 and found they hold in harsh terrain, tolerate brown outs (these devices are solar powered and run off of super capacitors), and JustWorks(tm). [0]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-inc/AF64GUD4-BBBXM/12336510 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-i...
- tssva 3y ago
  Or just run it off a USB drive.
  - frowin 3y ago
    Or an SSD. Is easy and cheap these days.
    - tssva 3y ago
      I didn't mean exclusively a flash drive. Since this is a RPi 3+, any SSD used to boot is going to be a USB attached SSD.
- brainbag 3y ago
  I clicked that link expecting to see an outrageous price, but it appears to be $28 for a 256 GB highly reliable SD card. That doesn't seem right. Am I missing something?
  - samtho 3y ago
    There are varying degrees of ruggedness, this line I use when moisture or vibrations are not an issue (just temperature fluctuations and minor humidity changes).
dbg31415 3y ago
I’m sure Optus appreciates the brand mention! =P
HotGarbage 3y ago
Leaving hotspots connected via USB 24/7 is a no-no, and people put some effort trying to run them without a battery: - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-to-run-without-battery-directly-wired-to-psu/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-... - https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass/ https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass... - https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_8000_without_battery/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_... I feel like there's some liability on Netgear's part here: People can't be expected to know they can't leave it connected and a charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery. It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this. Hotspots with batteries tend to be a lot cheaper than battery-less routers and USB dongles. The latter of which isn't even available for 5G.
- j45 3y ago
  It might be better to buy a USB modem instead of a hotspot. Rocket sticks come to mind.
  - worldofmatthew 3y ago
    In the UK, USB 4G LTE adapters are cheaply available 2nd hand. Plug that into a SBC and away you go.
- wrs 3y ago
  This just seems like a ridiculous consumer-safety violation. How is it legal to sell these things?
- bityard 3y ago
  I have a battery powered hotspot from my provider. Like a phone, it refuses to run off usb without a battery installed. But it yells at you and shuts down when plugged in for too long. I need to have it online all the time. I "fixed" it by plugging the charger into an old school mechanical timer. Every six hours, it runs off the battery for 30 minutes. Has been working great for 2 years.
- 3y ago
dheera 3y ago
I have some old phones mounted on my walls in various locations as control panels for Home Assistant. However every now and then one of them gets hot and its battery starts bulging, and I have to toss it. It's a problem even though they are (old) flagship phones. I'm looking for some kind of tablet that is wall-mountable but doesn't contain a Lithium battery. Some other kind of safe battery (NiMH?) that can last through momentary brownouts and power cuts of a few minutes would be nice.
- spockz 3y ago
  How are you powering the server running home assistant and all the smart devices during the brown out? Can you hook up the tablet to the same power source? Or if they are not powered, what do you expect to manage during the Brownout?
  - dheera 3y ago
    The server is a VM on a rack-mounted machine with a UPS. The tablets are wall-mounted in multiple places elsewhere in the apartment. I don't want them to go into a full reboot cycle if power is lost only for a couple of seconds or even minutes.
latchkey 3y ago
I run a NetGear M5 in my campervan. It has a battery that is charged with the solar on the van. The thing gets stupid hot and I'm always afraid it is going to combust. I just leave the back cover off of it and put a fan on it, and that seems to help.
Saris 3y ago
>I was actually aware this could happen and technically shouldn't have left the battery in the device while it was hooked up to power constantly This really isn't on them at all, a properly designed Li-ion system will be absolutely fine left plugged in 24/7. Netgear either doesn't understand how to design a safe battery powered device, or this was a rare case of a bad battery just going off regardless of how you treat it.
mastax 3y ago
For the price of a mifi and a pi you can get a cellular wifi router and run code directly on there. Either from "random string of characters" on Amazon or Mikrotik or Teltonika. Then you have something designed to run 24/7 and most of them will run off DC power. Of course the router isn't as nice of a software environment as a pi but that's part of the fun, no? If you want easy just use GitHub pages or square space or whatever.
louwrentius 3y ago
My solar powered blog [1] is on LiFePo4 in part for this reason: no risk of spontaneous combustion. [1]: https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lithium-iron-phosphate.html https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lith...
pengaru 3y ago
I've gone through more swollen LiPo pouch batteries at my CA desert property than I can count, fortunately none have caught fire. The cheap ZTE devices in particular seem especially bad at keeping the thermals within a safe range. Even with a 100% full battery they'll let the electrolyte boil if left plugged in for their charging logic to do as it wishes in a hot environment. What's so frustrating is practically every consumer electronics device seems to now have some form of LiPo pouch cells in them. I wish it were normal for manufacturers to offer chunkier variants using NiMH AA/AAA cells to consumers. Instead I've been resorting to "industrial" stuff having no battery at all like the Gl-Inet X300B [0] I eventually ended up with. For a while I used a hacked together pack of four NiMH AAs with a battery board stolen from the LiPo on a ZTE/AT&T hotspot that kept swelling its pack. The battery board kept the device happy enough to believe it had the proper LiPo connected. The now external AAs stayed charged more-or-less, and didn't care how hot the ambient temps got through summer. But it was a sprawling mess of wires, soldered AAs arranged like an 80s-era RC-12L saddle-pack, kept ~together with Duck tape. [0] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/
- ed25519FUUU 3y ago
  Does NiMH handle overcharging better than lithium ion? I can't really find cheap charge controller ICs for NiMH batteries.
  - invalidator 3y ago
    NiMH handles gentle overcharging gracefully. They generate a little bit of hydrogen, and the battery has an internal catalyst to convert it back. It can do that indefinitely as long as it's at a low rate. When aggressively overcharged they may rupture, but they don't go up in flames like Li-ion does.
- aredox 3y ago
  Why go back to NiMH when there is LiFePO4?
  - pengaru 3y ago
noipv4 3y ago
Charge level control for such devices should be standard. All my always connected devices with LiPo batteries have led to eventual bloating and safety hazards.
noipv4 3y ago
Are there any super capacitors based batterys which emulate a LiIon which won't bloat but will still act as a battery for intermittent high drain situation?
squarefoot 3y ago
I wouldn't use LiPo cells, especially consumer ones, for anything that stays on 24/7 and unattended in rural areas. LiFePo4 ones are safer and more durable although for medium/low current solar powered devices with backup battery, Lead Acid might still be a viable, cheap and very safe choice. Unfortunately the author area isn't served by broadband, so he's forced to rely on mobile connectivity, which restricts the options wrt available router devices. I would have either used a (more costly) external DC powered (no internal battery) router supplied by a 12V battery and the solar panel, or modified the portable one to work only through external supply. Also, the author says the SD card in the Raspberry Pi developed errors. This is normal as SD cards are quite unreliable and prone to errors with time and use; I would have used a eMMC capable board, plus external disk with moderately aggressive spin down (to save power) for data storage.
nrki 3y ago
Really lucky this didn't start a forest fire.
coding123 3y ago
I too had dreams of an all solar future, until recently when my bms had failed, I temporarily removed it so I could still have power to my well... Fast forward a few weeks and we had a frost. About $2k worth of Prismatic cells are now swelling and probably at 20% the original capacity. Ughh. I still want to do solar, but it's expensive, unreliable and... Maybe kinda dangerous if you're doing not so kosher things.
slicktux 3y ago
I’ve had a LiPo swell on me once…it was embedded in a tracking device I used for anti theft on my car…tucked away hidden… I always knew in the back of my mind that I should check on it since it got so hot inside… Anyhow I sold the car and removed the tracking device and opened it up…that’s when I noticed the swollen LiPo. Counted my blessings that day.

303 points by adriangrigore 3y ago

throwaway834zz 3y ago

I leave my MacBook pro plugged in most of the time. Should I be concerned?

frowin 3y ago
I think not. It keeps battery cycles low and is likely better than some other behavior. As far as I remember, batteries don't like to go way below 20% and don't like fast charging from 80% upwards. However, to my knowledge, it is wise to drain the battery 1-2 times a year so that the charging controller can calibrate. A way to do that is to type "yes" in your terminal (or 3-4 terminals) and wait, it will make the CPU run at 100%. After your MacBook shut off, leave it for some hours before you charge it again.
- as4296 3y ago
  Somee MacBook Pro models also incorporate a feature called "Battery Health Management."It can help optimize the charging patterns based on your habits and usage to reduce the wear on the battery over time. It may slightly adjust the charging levels to prevent the battery from staying at maximum charge for prolonged periods (to stop battery aging).

tleilaxu 3y ago

The pictures do indeed speak for themselves! Goodness me. What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios (e.g. heat), or do we only hear about the failures when 99.9999… of the time they are fine as they are everywhere? Are all lithium-ion batteries created the same?

reisse 3y ago
Take a look at this guy's setup. He put consumer modem into a closed outdoor box under the sun without any ventilation or cooling whatsoever. Given there is enough sun to power the solar battery, I'd bet the temp inside the box is >70 degrees C. I am honestly amazed the whole setup lasted for so long.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  That is what you have to plan for when dealing with consumers. That someone will stick the device somewhere in the messy real world because it is easy. You have to engineer for people "holding it wrong" when failures can lead to loss of life.
- j45 3y ago
  With so many unused hotspots out there maybe it’s a few tweaks away. Battery management aside, those portable 12v fridges are great at using a fan to heat or cool
- ajvpowell 3y ago
  Author here. You are totally right, this whole thing was a self-confessed shoe-string hack job so it was far from ideal in any respect. I was pleased how long it lasted though and performed. Regarding temps, the modem itself, I seem to remember, never reported a temp higher than 55 degrees C. I don't live in a very warm place though...
bob1029 3y ago
I like to do a bit of napkin math when storing batteries. I don't care what the technology or marketing says. Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective. Energy is energy and if you don't really think it through, you may wind up with much worse than LTE modem/router fires. Tesla power walls are an example of something I could never install in my home due to this simple math. I would not be able to sleep at night knowing there is a chance they could go up while bolted to my home. I've got one of those EcoFlow batteries (2kWH) for emergencies, but I keep it on a concrete slab (protected from weather) outside my home. Go look at how a datacenter does their batteries if you want to get a sense of this very same paranoia at scale. All the DC-scale UPS systems I've seen typically consist of gigantic, low voltage cells installed in a manner expressly designed to deal with the worst case. I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable, but its a hell of a lot easier to inspect room-scale components, prove they are safe, and deal with emergencies before they turn into catastrophes.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  If I am ever in a scenario where I could have a house-sized battery system, I intend to have a disconnected concrete shed dedicated for storing them. Seems like a simple mitigation which would make me feel significantly better about the situation.
- reisse 3y ago
  > Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective. Nah, that's the wrong way to think about it. Oxidation (well, burning) of lithium releases far more energy than the electric charge of the battery. Electric (dis)charge merely gives the initial heat to break structural integrity and set lithium on fire. And even then the problem is not in the amount of energy, but in that it's almost impossible to extinguish a lithium fire. And the fumes from battery are thick and toxic. > I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable... Nah again. Lead-acid just does not burn so spectacularly. And about the energy density - filled fuel tank of a regular car has much higher energy density than Tesla battery, but is significantly harder to ignite, easier to extinguish, and when burning, releases the energy slower.
fer 3y ago
> What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios If you wanna get more paranoid: https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/ Jokes aside, hard to say, but it's mostly scenarios. Some batteries have proper venting (or puffing), protection circuits and sensors to prevent thermal runaway, and they are very unlikely to fail catastrophically, they would stop working before, generally. Now those take more space, so such features are often offloaded onto the PCB designers to make them fit, and you may trust them more (or less) than the battery manufacturer. More or less the same can be said about the charging circuit, and how it might handle low voltage or trickling/stop charge. Personally I've seen flashlights that burn through the 18650 without respecting the minimum voltage whatsoever, and that would put 5V to charge. There a proper battery will refuse to charge or just die, but an unprotected one might catch fire. As anecdotal data, after dozens and dozens of devices, I've only owned two batteries that became spicy (without catching fire), a Chinese-brand laptop and a cheap quadcopter battery.
kristopolous 3y ago
> Are all lithium-ion batteries created the same No They have different chemistries with different characteristics. Some are safer than others See here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_commercial_battery_types https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_commercial_bat... Beyond the actual chemistry there's regulators of various quality and strategies that can be found in many modern battery packs. I'm not a professional in battery manufacturing but I'm sure there's somebody around here who is that can give more details

fzeindl 3y ago

> External power was never quite enough, with enough activity the thing was liable to randomly reboot. Maybe there was a fault in the circuitry to begin with.

Avamander 3y ago
Unfortunately the Pi-s, especially the 4 and 3, have really finicky power circuitry. That lack of robustness combined with your usual SD-cards that can't handle it either is in my opinion one of the worst aspect of the Pi-s. https://hackaday.com/2021/02/12/pcb-mods-silence-voltage-warnings-on-the-pi-4/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/12/pcb-mods-silence-voltage-war...
- Brybry 3y ago
  I think the article was saying the issue was the Netgear AC800S 4G/Wifi[1] modem rebooting if it didn't have its removeable battery inserted. I believe the RPi and the car battery they were using are still fine. [1] https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/mobile/ac800s_optus.pdf https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/mobile/ac800s_optus...

ElongatedMusket 3y ago

This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read. When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.

CydeWeys 3y ago
The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.
- MandieD 3y ago
  56k dialup? Luxury! 1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for. Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect. I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
  - felipemnoa 3y ago
    >>Bonus Army I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again. Thanks!
- leereeves 3y ago
  > the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps. I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.

Mizoguchi 3y ago

I had a barely used first generation iPhone in my safe and went to get it the other day to show it to some friends just to discovered it had blown up. It didn't look charred as your modem but it definitely exploded. Next day I ordered a few fire retardant boxes where I put all of my lithium batteries and power banks.

jacquesm 3y ago
The problem is that there is plenty of stuff that you probably don't even realize has a Lithium Ion battery in it. With a phone at least it's obvious. But what about that controller for your e-bike? Camera? Remote control? Headphones? Authentication token? Toy? Microscope? and so on... they're everywhere. And they are not always announced properly, especially smaller pouch cells.
- jhdias 3y ago
  https://www.phonak.com/en-us/hearing-devices/hearing-aids/lyric https://www.phonak.com/en-us/hearing-devices/hearing-aids/ly... I find this egregious: "Lyric requires no maintenance or batteries to change or charge." and again "No batteries or charging needed." But you have two tiny potential bombs inserted into your head.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > Better yet, Lyric requires no maintenance or batteries to change or charge. > The battery is specifically designed to withstand the deep ear environment for months at a time Have Phonak/Lyric achieved the impossible building a battery that never runs out of power? How does that work?
    - zerocrates 3y ago
      Looks like rather than replacing or recharging the battery, you have the entire thing removed and a new one placed.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago

robertlagrant 3y ago

This is why I cringe a little when people say "you can buy li-ion batteries for this much, therefore scaling it up to do renewable energy storage is cheap enough to do right now."

kachnuv_ocasek 3y ago
Utility-scale batteries are a little bit different from these units in cheap consumer electronics.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  They're different in scale but the cells are pretty much identical. There are only so many manufacturers and so many form factors and just about all of them are used industrially as well as for consumer stuff. Where they differ is how the cells are organized, safety measures taken outside of the cells themselves and things like cooling, mechanical construction of the assembly and so on. And even big manufacturers get things wrong, notably: Bosch. They have a pannier mounted e-bike battery pack that has serious problems with water ingestion, boards frying and balancing wires catching fire.
  - dangus 3y ago
    Your proof that utility-scale batteries don't work is that some random e-bike battery pack has design flaws? Utility-scale battery packs are climate-managed and are in real actual use right now. O'ahu has sunsetted its coal power generation and added utility-scale batteries: https://insideevs.com/news/614726/tesla-megapacks-hawaii-arrive-coal-is-finished/ https://insideevs.com/news/614726/tesla-megapacks-hawaii-arr...
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > Your proof that utility-scale batteries don't work is that some random e-bike battery pack has design flaws? I have absolutely no idea how you got that from what I wrote.

tau255 3y ago

Seeing the carnage I thought that there were no fuses for devices powered from 12V lead acid battery and some few hundred amps went through device. But, this is not really a failure of solar power system, just failure of a Netgear device. It seems that it used it's battery as a high current source for when it needed more peak power for wireless transmission, thus the instability and failures when just plugged to USB charger. I don't think such constant drain and constant recharge was really healthy for the battery. I wonder if it was/is stated in manual that it was supposed to be used charged and unplugged and not really as full time usage device.

samtho 3y ago

I’m not sure which SD card was chosen in the past, but I do recommend upgrading to an industrial one (and not just high endurance), and they are typically purchased through electronics components retailers/suppliers. One brand I use is ATP for my ruggedized systems[0]. Yes, they may be an order of magnitude more expensive than even a high endurance from SanDisk or Samsung, but I started using these in 2015 or 2016 and found they hold in harsh terrain, tolerate brown outs (these devices are solar powered and run off of super capacitors), and JustWorks(tm). [0]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-inc/AF64GUD4-BBBXM/12336510 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/atp-electronics-i...

tssva 3y ago
Or just run it off a USB drive.
- frowin 3y ago
  Or an SSD. Is easy and cheap these days.
  - tssva 3y ago
    I didn't mean exclusively a flash drive. Since this is a RPi 3+, any SSD used to boot is going to be a USB attached SSD.
brainbag 3y ago
I clicked that link expecting to see an outrageous price, but it appears to be $28 for a 256 GB highly reliable SD card. That doesn't seem right. Am I missing something?
- samtho 3y ago
  There are varying degrees of ruggedness, this line I use when moisture or vibrations are not an issue (just temperature fluctuations and minor humidity changes).

dbg31415 3y ago

I’m sure Optus appreciates the brand mention! =P

HotGarbage 3y ago

Leaving hotspots connected via USB 24/7 is a no-no, and people put some effort trying to run them without a battery: - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-to-run-without-battery-directly-wired-to-psu/ https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/trick-the-hotspotphone-... - https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass/ https://jibout.com/verizon-7730l-mifi-hotspot-battery-bypass... - https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_8000_without_battery/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Calyx/comments/lorkrv/running_mifi_... I feel like there's some liability on Netgear's part here: People can't be expected to know they can't leave it connected and a charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery. It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this. Hotspots with batteries tend to be a lot cheaper than battery-less routers and USB dongles. The latter of which isn't even available for 5G.

j45 3y ago
It might be better to buy a USB modem instead of a hotspot. Rocket sticks come to mind.
- worldofmatthew 3y ago
  In the UK, USB 4G LTE adapters are cheaply available 2nd hand. Plug that into a SBC and away you go.
wrs 3y ago
This just seems like a ridiculous consumer-safety violation. How is it legal to sell these things?
bityard 3y ago
I have a battery powered hotspot from my provider. Like a phone, it refuses to run off usb without a battery installed. But it yells at you and shuts down when plugged in for too long. I need to have it online all the time. I "fixed" it by plugging the charger into an old school mechanical timer. Every six hours, it runs off the battery for 30 minutes. Has been working great for 2 years.
3y ago

dheera 3y ago

I have some old phones mounted on my walls in various locations as control panels for Home Assistant. However every now and then one of them gets hot and its battery starts bulging, and I have to toss it. It's a problem even though they are (old) flagship phones. I'm looking for some kind of tablet that is wall-mountable but doesn't contain a Lithium battery. Some other kind of safe battery (NiMH?) that can last through momentary brownouts and power cuts of a few minutes would be nice.

spockz 3y ago
How are you powering the server running home assistant and all the smart devices during the brown out? Can you hook up the tablet to the same power source? Or if they are not powered, what do you expect to manage during the Brownout?
- dheera 3y ago
  The server is a VM on a rack-mounted machine with a UPS. The tablets are wall-mounted in multiple places elsewhere in the apartment. I don't want them to go into a full reboot cycle if power is lost only for a couple of seconds or even minutes.

latchkey 3y ago

I run a NetGear M5 in my campervan. It has a battery that is charged with the solar on the van. The thing gets stupid hot and I'm always afraid it is going to combust. I just leave the back cover off of it and put a fan on it, and that seems to help.

Saris 3y ago

>I was actually aware this could happen and technically shouldn't have left the battery in the device while it was hooked up to power constantly This really isn't on them at all, a properly designed Li-ion system will be absolutely fine left plugged in 24/7. Netgear either doesn't understand how to design a safe battery powered device, or this was a rare case of a bad battery just going off regardless of how you treat it.

mastax 3y ago

For the price of a mifi and a pi you can get a cellular wifi router and run code directly on there. Either from "random string of characters" on Amazon or Mikrotik or Teltonika. Then you have something designed to run 24/7 and most of them will run off DC power. Of course the router isn't as nice of a software environment as a pi but that's part of the fun, no? If you want easy just use GitHub pages or square space or whatever.

louwrentius 3y ago

My solar powered blog [1] is on LiFePo4 in part for this reason: no risk of spontaneous combustion. [1]: https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lithium-iron-phosphate.html https://louwrentius.com/my-solar-powered-blog-is-now-on-lith...

pengaru 3y ago

I've gone through more swollen LiPo pouch batteries at my CA desert property than I can count, fortunately none have caught fire. The cheap ZTE devices in particular seem especially bad at keeping the thermals within a safe range. Even with a 100% full battery they'll let the electrolyte boil if left plugged in for their charging logic to do as it wishes in a hot environment. What's so frustrating is practically every consumer electronics device seems to now have some form of LiPo pouch cells in them. I wish it were normal for manufacturers to offer chunkier variants using NiMH AA/AAA cells to consumers. Instead I've been resorting to "industrial" stuff having no battery at all like the Gl-Inet X300B [0] I eventually ended up with. For a while I used a hacked together pack of four NiMH AAs with a battery board stolen from the LiPo on a ZTE/AT&T hotspot that kept swelling its pack. The battery board kept the device happy enough to believe it had the proper LiPo connected. The now external AAs stayed charged more-or-less, and didn't care how hot the ambient temps got through summer. But it was a sprawling mess of wires, soldered AAs arranged like an 80s-era RC-12L saddle-pack, kept ~together with Duck tape. [0] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/ https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-x300b/

ed25519FUUU 3y ago
Does NiMH handle overcharging better than lithium ion? I can't really find cheap charge controller ICs for NiMH batteries.
- invalidator 3y ago
  NiMH handles gentle overcharging gracefully. They generate a little bit of hydrogen, and the battery has an internal catalyst to convert it back. It can do that indefinitely as long as it's at a low rate. When aggressively overcharged they may rupture, but they don't go up in flames like Li-ion does.
aredox 3y ago
Why go back to NiMH when there is LiFePO4?
- pengaru 3y ago

noipv4 3y ago

Charge level control for such devices should be standard. All my always connected devices with LiPo batteries have led to eventual bloating and safety hazards.

noipv4 3y ago

Are there any super capacitors based batterys which emulate a LiIon which won't bloat but will still act as a battery for intermittent high drain situation?

squarefoot 3y ago

I wouldn't use LiPo cells, especially consumer ones, for anything that stays on 24/7 and unattended in rural areas. LiFePo4 ones are safer and more durable although for medium/low current solar powered devices with backup battery, Lead Acid might still be a viable, cheap and very safe choice. Unfortunately the author area isn't served by broadband, so he's forced to rely on mobile connectivity, which restricts the options wrt available router devices. I would have either used a (more costly) external DC powered (no internal battery) router supplied by a 12V battery and the solar panel, or modified the portable one to work only through external supply. Also, the author says the SD card in the Raspberry Pi developed errors. This is normal as SD cards are quite unreliable and prone to errors with time and use; I would have used a eMMC capable board, plus external disk with moderately aggressive spin down (to save power) for data storage.

nrki 3y ago

Really lucky this didn't start a forest fire.

coding123 3y ago

I too had dreams of an all solar future, until recently when my bms had failed, I temporarily removed it so I could still have power to my well... Fast forward a few weeks and we had a frost. About $2k worth of Prismatic cells are now swelling and probably at 20% the original capacity. Ughh. I still want to do solar, but it's expensive, unreliable and... Maybe kinda dangerous if you're doing not so kosher things.

slicktux 3y ago

I’ve had a LiPo swell on me once…it was embedded in a tracking device I used for anti theft on my car…tucked away hidden… I always knew in the back of my mind that I should check on it since it got so hot inside… Anyhow I sold the car and removed the tracking device and opened it up…that’s when I noticed the swollen LiPo. Counted my blessings that day.