Tag Archives: Batteries

How Smart is the Grid?

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Marketing and advertising groups often have a tendency to capitalize on technological trends faster than engineers and users can settle into the technology itself. Perhaps it’s no surprise that it is difficult to hold back the motivation to get a product to market and profit. Right now the most glaring example is the practice of carelessly putting WiFi in appliances and toys and putting them on the Internet of Things, but there is a similar type of fiasco playing out in the electric power industry as well. Known as the “smart grid”, an effort is underway to modernize the electric …read more

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Don’t Blame the Batteries For Every Lithium-Ion Explosion

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Lithium-ion batteries are often in the news for terrible reasons, but the problems go well beyond faults in the cells themselves. The post Don’t Blame the Batteries For Every Lithium-Ion Explosion appeared first on WIRED. Continue reading Don’t Blame the Batteries For Every Lithium-Ion Explosion→

PSA: Don’t Let Kids Eat Lithium Batteries

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We get a lot of press releases at Hackaday, but this one was horrific enough that we thought it was worth sharing. Apparently, some kids are accidentally eating lithium coin cell batteries. When this happens with bigger cells, usually greater than 20 millimeters (CR2032, CR2025, and CR2016) really bad things happen. Like burning esophaguses, and even death.

The National Capital Poison Center has done some research on this, and found that 14% of batteries swallowed over the past two years came from flameless candles like the ones above. We know some of our readers also deal with batteries in open …read more

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Counting Laps and Testing Products with OpenCV

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It’s been about a year and a half since the Batteroo, formally known as Batteriser, was announced as a crowdfunding project. The premise is a small sleeve that goes around AA and AAA batteries, boosting the voltage to extract more life out of them. [Dave Jones] at EEVblog was one of many people to question the product, which claimed to boost battery life by 800%.

Batteroo did manage to do something many crowdfunding projects can’t: deliver a product. Now that the sleeves are arriving to backers, people are starting to test them in the wild. In fact, there’s an entire …read more

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Hackathon Alert: Clean Tech At TVCoG

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At Hackaday, we get notified of a lot of the cool events going on in hackerspaces all around the world. We’d like to keep you informed too, just in case there’s something going on in your neighborhood.

So we’re going to start running a weekly column on Saturdays that groups together all of the upcoming week’s exceptional events and noteworthy gatherings. If your hackerspace has something going on, let us know on or around the preceding Wednesday. We’ll see your space in on Hackaday!

Tech Valley Center of Gravity: Troy, New York

What would you hack to clean things up …read more

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