Collaborate Disseminate
We’re willing to bet most Hackaday readers have accidentally spot welded a few electrical contacts together over the years, complete with the surge of adrenaline that comes with the unexpected …read more Continue reading Wiring Up 100 Car Batteries So You Don’t Have To
When the power goes out, it goes without saying that all the lights and sockets in a house stop working. Savvy rural homeowners stock up with candles, batteries, LED lights, …read more Continue reading The CPSC Says Plug To Socket, Not Plug To Plug, Please
A huge part of the work our community does, aside from making things and doing a lot of talking about the things we’d like to make, involves repair. We have …read more Continue reading Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?
Before deciding whether the headline of this article is clickbait, please take a moment to watch the excellent video by [BigClive] below the break. And then, go to your local …read more Continue reading The Most Deadly Project On The Internet?
At the intersection of saving a few bucks and expensive home insurance claims due to a house fire, we find clones of certified and tested electrical connectors, even when many …read more Continue reading Testing 7 Wago-like Wire Connectors For Science And Fire
Rechargeable lithium chemistry battery cells found their mass market foothold in the field of personal electronics. The technology has since matured enough to be scaled up (in both physical size and production volume) to electric cars, making long range EVs far more economical than what was possible using earlier batteries. …read more
Continue reading The Quest To Find A Second Life For Electric Vehicle Batteries
To describe the constraints on developing consumer battery technology as ‘challenging’ is an enormous understatement. The ideal rechargeable battery has conflicting properties – it has to store large amounts of energy, safely release or absorb large amounts of it on demand, and must be unable to release that energy upon failure. It also has to be cheap, nontoxic, lightweight, and scalable.
As a result, consumer battery technologies represent a compromise between competing goals. Modern rechargeable lithium batteries are no exception, although overall they are a marvel of engineering. Mobile technology would not be anywhere near as good as it is …read more
Continue reading The Science Behind Lithium Cell Characteristics and Safety
When you take an item with you on a camping trip and it fails, you are not normally in a position to replace it immediately, thus you have the choice of fixing it there and then, or doing without it. When his LED camping lantern failed, [Mark Smith] was in the lucky position of camping at a friend’s compound equipped with all the tools, so of course he set about fixing it. What he found shocked him metaphorically, but anyone who handles it while it is charging can expect the more literal variation.
The lamp was an LED lantern with …read more
Everything you do bears some risk of getting you hurt or killed. That’s just the way life is. Some people drown in the bath, and others get kilovolt AC across their heart. Knowing the dangers — how drastic and how likely the are — is the first step toward mitigating them. (We’re not saying that you shouldn’t bathe or play with high voltages.)
This third chapter of an e-book on electronics is a good read. It goes through the physiology of getting shocked (DC is more likely to freeze your muscles, but AC is more likely to fibrillate your heart) …read more
When we recently covered the topic of high voltage safety with respect to mains powered equipment, we attracted a huge number of your comments but left out a key piece of the puzzle. We take our mains plugs and sockets for granted as part of the everyday background of our lives, but have we ever considered them in detail? Their various features, and their astonishing and sometimes baffling diversity across the world.
When you announce that you are going to talk in detail about global mains connectors, it is difficult not to have an air of Sheldon Cooper’s Fun With …read more
Continue reading Hackaday’s Fun With International Mains Plugs And Sockets
