Apple sued over death blamed on faulty iPad battery
Was iPad’s Lithium-ion battery to blame for apartment fire that killed 64-year-old man two years ago?
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Category Archives: fire
Arduino Fights Fire with… Water?
We don’t think we’d want to trust our fire safety to a robot carrying a few ounces of water, but as a demonstration or science project, [Tinker Guru’s] firefighting robot was an entertaining answer to the question: “What do I do with that flame sensor that came in the big box of Arduino sensors I bought from China?” You can see a video of the device below.
You can see, it is a pretty standard two-wheel robot with the drive wheels to the rear and a skid plate up front. There are a flame sensor and a water pump up …read more
Fail of the Week: EPROMs, Rats’ Nests, Tanning Lamps, and Cardboard on Fire
It all started when I bought a late-1990s synthesizer that needed a firmware upgrade. One could simply pull the ROM chip, ship it off to Yamaha for a free replacement, and swap in the new one — in 2003. Lacking a time machine, a sensible option is to buy a pre-programmed aftermarket EPROM on eBay for $10, and if you just want a single pre-flashed EPROM that’s probably the right way to go. But I wanted an adventure.
Spoiler alert: I did manage to flash a few EPROMs and the RM1X is happily running OS 1.13 and pumping out the …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: EPROMs, Rats’ Nests, Tanning Lamps, and Cardboard on Fire
My Oscilloscope Uses Fire
If you want to visualize sound waves, you reach for your oscilloscope, right? That wasn’t an option in 1905 so physicist [Heinrich Rubens] came up with another way involving flames. [Luke Guigliano] and [Will Peterson] built one of these tubes — known as a Rubens’ tube — and will show you how you can, too. You can see a video of their results, below. Just in case a flame oscilloscope isn’t enough to attract your interest, they are driving the thing with a theremin for extra nerd points.
The guys show a short flame run and one with tall flames. …read more
Fail of the Week: A Candle Caused Browns Ferry Nuclear Incident
A colleague of mine used to say he juggled a lot of balls; steel balls, plastic balls, glass balls, and paper balls. The trick was not to drop the glass balls. How do you know which is which? For example, suppose you were tasked with making sure a nuclear power plant was safe. What would be important? A fail-safe way to drop the control rods into the pile, maybe? A thick containment wall? Two loops of cooling so that only the inner loop gets radioactive? I’m not a nuclear engineer, so I don’t know, but ensuring electricians at a nuclear …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: A Candle Caused Browns Ferry Nuclear Incident
Fail of the Week: A Candle Caused Browns Ferry Nuclear Incident
A colleague of mine used to say he juggled a lot of balls; steel balls, plastic balls, glass balls, and paper balls. The trick was not to drop the glass balls. How do you know which is which? For example, suppose you were tasked with making sure a nuclear power plant was safe. What would be important? A fail-safe way to drop the control rods into the pile, maybe? A thick containment wall? Two loops of cooling so that only the inner loop gets radioactive? I’m not a nuclear engineer, so I don’t know, but ensuring electricians at a nuclear …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: A Candle Caused Browns Ferry Nuclear Incident
Fail of the Week: How Not to Electric Vehicle
If you ever doubt the potential for catastrophe that mucking about with electric vehicles can present, check out the video below. It shows what can happen to a couple of Tesla battery modules when due regard to safety precautions isn’t paid.
The video comes to us by way of [Rich], a gearhead with a thing for Teslas. He clearly knows his way around the EV world, having rebuilt a flood-soaked Tesla, and aspires to open an EV repair shop. The disaster stems from a novelty vehicle he and friend [Lee] bought as a side project. The car was apparently once …read more
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Mysterious Hole Shooting Out Flames in Arkansas Is Definitely ‘Not Satan,’ Officials Say
Officials don’t know what caused flames to fly out of the Midway Fire Hole. Continue reading Mysterious Hole Shooting Out Flames in Arkansas Is Definitely ‘Not Satan,’ Officials Say
Friday Hack Chat: Playing With Fire
We’re pretty sure all the hackers and tinkerers and makers out there were a tiny bit of a pyromaniac in their youth. That’s what makes this week’s Hack Chat so exciting: we’re talking about Hacking With Fire.
Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Brice Farrell], who, like most of us, has been interested in fire his entire life. He’s taken this interest and turned his amateur passion into something semi-professional. He’s a PGI certified pyrotechnician, an electrical engineer, and an ice carver. This year, he appeared on BattleBots where he built the flame system for Battle Royale …read more
Fail of the Week: Solid State Relay Fails Spectacularly
A lot of times these days, it seems like we hackers are a little like kids in a candy store. With so many cool devices available for pennies at the click of a mouse, it’s temptingly easy to order first and ask questions about quality later. Most of the time that works out just fine, with the main risk of sourcing a dodgy component being a ruined afternoon of hacking when a part fails.
The stakes are much higher when you’re connecting your project to the house mains, though, as [Mattias Wandel] recently learned when the solid-state relay controlling his …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Solid State Relay Fails Spectacularly