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What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?
- curiousObject 10mo agoWhy these batteries got all the attention - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135
- krackers 10mo agoThe more interesting thing is that they were actually pulled. Did the manufacturer send a recall notice? (And if so why didn't they send a statement). I can't imagine Amazon themselves taking any action since they allow other junk to stay up
- mberger 10mo agoGummy bears?
- tclancy 10mo agoMy indulgent aunt once let me get a five pound bag of them from one of those Scoop Your Own candy stations. I left them in the rear window of her VW Rabbit for the better part of a summer day and they melted into a horrible blob that scarred me for life. Not sure why this Gummi Bear post is giving me flashbacks to that. But yes, those folks. Check the product shot in the article for their logo.
- runnr_az 10mo agoGood thing you didn’t try and drink the hot gummy bear juice… turns out, molten sugar is surprisingly brutal
- micromacrofoot 10mo agoa struggling company will often license their name without much fuss
- nunez 10mo agostruggling to the tune €2B/yr
- VBprogrammer 10mo agoI stick to Anker for cables, batteries and chargers. I'm sure they've had their own issues but everything I've bought feels well made. The only one I've had an issue with was a USB-C to everything else adaptor which weirdly stopped working after a week or two. I was surprised to find that their support was based in the UK (Cardiff if memory serves) and very efficiently processed a return and replacement. I've watched Big Clive's videos for too long to trust no-name Chinese things with anything involving mains potential or energy storage.
- LunicLynx 10mo agoI bought myself an anker powerbank because of all the rave around them. Mine behaves incredibly strange. Charged in seconds, then not containing half a phone charge. For a 20.000 mAh this was really disappointing. Probably a one of but still leaves the impression that this was looked at because it ruined the price for others.
- literalAardvark 10mo agoThat's obviously a dud cell. Contact support if it's not several years old.
- Melonai 10mo agoHad a tangential issue with an Anker power bank (screen was sometimes showing bogus charge essentially), and can confirm Anker E-Mail support is pretty good in my experience, they sent me a second unit (even though the first is still functional and I still use it just fine to this day), free of charge after a brief exchange. Might be worth a shot.
- LunicLynx 10mo agoOkay thanks, I’ll try!
- ycombinete 10mo agoThey recently did a massive recall on a line of power banks for being fire hazards. Make sure it’s not one of them.
- charcircuit 10mo agoHas anyone reported issues with this battery, from what I've seen online everyone has been happy with its performance. Maybe the uneveness called out by the article is not enough to matter. Not following the industry standard is not necessarily the tipping point of everything going wrong.
- arcfour 10mo ago"Well the batteries haven't caught on fire yet. I'm sure they're fine, despite the serious manufacturing defects that increase the risk of a fire substantially." You realize they stopped selling them, right? They don't do this for "nothing to worry about."
- charcircuit 10mo ago>increase the risk of a fire substantially The article doesn't state by how much it increased. >You realize they stopped selling them, right? I don't think Amazon is an authority on battery safety and are airing on the side of safety than making an actual judgements on the safety of it.
- tclancy 10mo agoNo they are definitely not. You’re completely correct! They are, instead, an authority on what might get their asses sued to the moon and back and apparently found the cost/ benefit of selling this popular product to be negative. Any ideas what might cause that?
- chihuahua 10mo agoIn the past, Amazon didn't care about dangerous products until lots of houses had been burned down by them, so if they ban a product it must be really bad.
- butvacuum 10mo agoThey don't care about safety, life, or limb. Amazon didn't enforce the ban of literal suicide kits until legislation was in the works. It's quite clear: until it threatens to blow away their "we're not an intermediary- We're a service provider." Smokescreen they don't care.
- frumiousirc 10mo agoI'm curious how the cost of performing these CT scans compared to the profit reaped by Haribo while the batteries were selling.
- nhf 10mo agoLumafield sells CT scanners, so these posts serve double duty as advertising for their capabilities. Given how many times their previous posts have been shared I'm sure the ROI is great.
- s0rce 10mo agoThis is basically good marketing content for Lumafield that sell the CT scanners. Cost to them is almost nothing, just opportunity cost of doing something else on the tool.
- Y444 10mo agoI love the summary at the top. Cool thing to have.
- metalman 10mo agonot sure what is more interesting, the detailed information on lithium battery construction, or how they got a CT(cat) scanner, or the idea of having an industrial cat scanner around. those batteries were bizarely cheap and there was prior suggestion that these(others) were actualy fake with empty space or filler, which isn't the case, and all in all they just need to up the precision of there automated processes. nice piece of journalism.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago> how they got a CT(cat) scanner I think they are becoming a lot more prevalent in labs, these days. They aren't the monster devices that many of us may be (unfortunately) familiar with.
- butvacuum 10mo agoThey can be a lot smaller when neither dose nor movement is a factor in imaging.
- notpushkin 10mo ago> how they got a CT(cat) scanner Lumafield is a CT company: https://www.lumafield.com/ https://www.lumafield.com/
- Carioca 10mo agoYup! And their whole social media “thing” is doing these kinds of on-topic analysis of (mostly consumer) devices
- giantg2 10mo agoBatteries that undercut the market price have serious flaws... who would have thought!
- baiwl 10mo agoThis reminds me of when pvs-studio would post every single analysis they would make of popular C++ projects. It was a fun novelty back in the day. Just like these scans, which now are boring and overplayed.
- raphman 10mo agoFWIW, the Haribo charger seems to be rather well made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_t5nvFcoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT_t5nvFcoY (26:50, by ZeroBrain, a German YouTuber that disassembles electronic devices)
- arp242 10mo agoHow or why does a candy company decide to electronics? That's the mystery I need an answer to. What's next, Durex pizzas?
- piyuv 10mo agoDuracell gummies (AA battery shaped) would be pretty cool
- Hackbraten 10mo agoThat would be incredibly dangerous. Infants and small children would get used to the sight of adults eating batteries and before long, one would end up swallowing an actual battery and get seriously injured.
- mschuster91 10mo ago> How or why does a candy company decide to electronics? That's the mystery I need an answer to. A few years ago, Haribo was in a serious crisis [1] - they didn't catch up on competition when it comes to new trends such as vegan candy, and a few years prior they had dismissed their marketing face Thomas Gottschank [2]. The closure of the Saxony plant also seriously soured relations with local politicians [3]. Some of all of that is attributed to the death of Hans Riegel in 2013 [4]. I don't have any particular insights into Haribo, but what I do know is that (especially struggling) brands tend to go towards making money off of the brand by licensing out rights... some of such deals tend to go well for everyone involved (see e.g. anything Lego touches), some run okay-ish (e.g. that's how you end with a "CAT" rugged phone made by Bullitt [5] - the things were rugged, but the performance was abysmal), and some end up in a massive clusterfuck like the Haribo batteries. [1] https://taz.de/Haribo-Werk-im-Osten-vor-Aus/!5755771/ https://taz.de/Haribo-Werk-im-Osten-vor-Aus/!5755771/ [2] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/thomas-gottschalk-trennt-sich-vom-haribo-goldbaeren-a-1001086.html https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/leute/thomas-gottschalk-tren... [3] https://www.rnd.de/promis/werksschliessung-in-sachsen-thomas-gottschalk-ist-sauer-auf-haribo-M62LMN2UJNB6FBHF2SIWQOWY6Q.html https://www.rnd.de/promis/werksschliessung-in-sachsen-thomas... [4] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/haribo-chef-hans-riegel-ist-tot-a-927965.html https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/haribo-chef-ha... [5] https://www.heise.de/news/Outdoor-Smartphones-Bullitt-Group-macht-dicht-9615128.html https://www.heise.de/news/Outdoor-Smartphones-Bullitt-Group-...
- joecool1029 10mo agoFWIW, I have one of the Haribo products, the 65W 3-port GaN charger. No battery to fail. I’ve run the charger standard enumeration test with a ct-3 and it supports everything except for VOOC. I’ve also load tested it with an adjustable usb load tester and it matches all the specs as advertised. It seems like they probably use the same controller as the Anker 3 port charger, but would need to see the teardowns. Otherwise, I’ll continue to recommend it.
- londons_explore 10mo agoI'd be interested to know if a headphone battery can suffer thermal runaway. If the surface area to volume ratio is high enough, however badly it is made doesn't matter - it's not gonna catch fire anyway. If that's the case, there is no safety issue with the headphones - a 0.5mm safety margin either end of a battery which is only 6mm long is insane anyway - and I don't fault the engineers for looking for other ways to get equivalent safety without compromising in capacity.
- GuB-42 10mo agoIt smelled fishy right from the start. It is obvious that energy to weight ratio is one of the most important characteristic of power banks. Reputable manufacturers will optimize for this, and if they are particularly good at it, they can ask for a premium. If a generic powerbank beats the big names, sells for cheaper and is associated with a brand that has no reason to be associated with powerbanks, then it is very likely that the weight savings come from omitting something important rather than an optimized design. If the specs are true that is.
- mitthrowaway2 10mo agoI think a lot of the quality issues described in the article could be fixed without substantially affecting the weight though, couldn't they?
- GuB-42 10mo agoProbably, however, it makes me think of the Galaxy Note 7 problem. For those who don't remember, these phones had a battery problem that can cause them to catch fire, resulting in one of the most infamous smartphone recall campaign. The cause of the problem is that the electrodes were pinched inside the pouch cell, in some cases causing a short circuit and a fire. To put it simply, it was too tight in there. So here it is possible that these defects are a result of having too small safety margins for how these batteries are manufactured. In addition, they only focused on the electrode alignment issue, because it is visible on their CT scans, they didn't study the electronics, the casing, the connectors, etc... There may be some other issues there.
- hnuser123456 10mo agoSay using 20% more electrolyte would prevent insufficient spacing and separation of the plates. You get a safer/higher quality product but it's heavier. And maintaining the same safety with less electrolyte would involve higher development costs. There's a sliding scale where something is just too cheap/dangerous to sell at high volume to a general audience. Hopefully these high quality CT scans show the battery makers that people are going to notice when too many corners have been cut, even if there isn't a flood of reports of their product causing fires (yet).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- skeeter2020 10mo agoI would avoid anything exceed 100 watt-hours (which this does) as you can't fly with it. I do a lot of backocuntry bike trips so flying isn't the primary concern, but I'm not going to own multiples. Anker and other reputable brands tend to design around these type of use-cases which helps.
- asimpleusecase 10mo agoI’ve seen airline training videos about in flight battery fires. But I’ve never considered the risk of ear buds catching on fire. Normally, you should feel them heating up before they catch but they might just blow, that would be very sore. Also if you’re sleeping with buds in you could end up with a fire before you woke up.
- urbandw311er 10mo agoThe thought of a runaway thermal reaction in a cell that’s sitting in your ear, albeit a small one, is pretty sobering.
- daemonologist 10mo agoPouch cells is interesting - I would've expected cylindrical cells in all but the smallest of battery banks. The lack of heavy steel casings might explain the high gravimetric density which was attractive to hikers.
- estimator7292 10mo agoPrismatic cells have an (obviously) higher packing density. They also tend to have better discharge performance. If your goal is weight, pouch cells use mylar or aluminum for the pouch. Cylindrical cells are typically steel I think?
- heelix 10mo agoWell.. it was probably too good to be true. I'm a hiker - and was in on that first wave of purchasers. For $24, the 2000mAh battery was pretty light for what it is - 10.16oz. (more capacity for what I usually need) In comparison, I think my nitecore NB10000 is around 5.98oz for around $50, which is one of the better ones out there. On the cheaper side, the INIU 1000mAh is around 5.96oz for about $26 which does OK. I see amazon already pulled the page to order the haribo battery pack. I also picked up their earbuds, which - for $11, sound and work far better than I expected.
- D13Fd 10mo agoThis is a shame, really. I got a few of these power packs and they have a nice design. I'd be happy to pay 2-3x as much and not have my house at risk of burning down.