In touching tribute to Samsung Note 7, fidget spinners burst in flames Fad-crazed parents have something new to worry about, as reports suggest that fidget spinners can pose a fire risk. A family in the US says one of the smash-hit toys caught fire as it was charging its Bluetooth speaker in their home, and it only narrowly avoided becoming a much larger blaze. Kimberly Allums, of Gardendale, …
How about this - a smallish, fire-proof box with a lid and small gap for the cable, that you can put your cheap e-cigarettes, Galaxy Note 7s, fidget spinners and Tesla battery packs (oops,no, too big), so you can leave them charging with complete peace of mind. If they do end up venting with flame, you don't lose the whole house whilst you're out. Think it'd sell?
A colleague has a simple procedure when charging R/C batteries - outside, on concrete, in a metal dish and with a large plastic bag of dry sand or cat litter on top of the batteries, just in case.
I gather one of their club members lost his house from leaving one charging inside and unsupervised.
Needs to have built in mains sockets as the plug top chargers (USA Wall warts) are a major cause of fire now.
May need to be large enough for Whirlpool tumble driers and hotpoint fridge / freezers.
Obviously the certification schemes (which MUST include random in shop / etailer sampling and tests) are rubbish.
"Obviously the certification schemes (which MUST include random in shop / etailer sampling and tests) are rubbish."
The certification schemes are good.
But just try something for me.... head over to Google Image Search and try to find a CE logo. Loads of them, right? Plenty good enough to put on a box. Same with any other certification scheme you'd like to suggest.
Sadly the enforcement seems to be the rubbish bit. I could market anything I wanted to with effectively zero chance of being caught using whatever marks I wanted to.
The real opportunity is Fidget Spinners: The Movie.
A humble young fidget spinner ("Fidget", voiced by Channing Tatum) from the country is in danger of having his family's farm taken over by an evil land developer (Daniel Day-Lewis) who wants to turn it into a golf course. Just when Fidget is about to give up all hope, his grandma (Meryl Streep) tells him a story about his dearly-departed father (Liam Neeson, in flashback), who used to be a world-champion spinner but gave it all up to raise his family when a nefarious plot by a rival spinning team resulted in him being suspected for cheating he didn't commit (unsanctioned grease) - little Fidget has had the gift all along! And wouldn't you know it, the National Spinning League competition is being held next month in The Big City (Spinnerville? I dunno) and the grand prize is $50,000 - enough money to pay off the family's debts and save the farm!
Obligatory Training Montage Scene (with Grammy-nominated original song by the Weeknd) wherein Fidget - along with his farmyard pals: Frankie the pig (Chris Pratt), Lila the goose (Elisha Cuthbert), and the grumpy bull Donnie (Dan Stevens) - unlocks the hidden potential that is his birthright. After a first few easy, confidence-building victories in the Junior Circuit, Fidget meets his match in Spinny (Zoe Saldana), the rich-kid fidget spinner from Spinnerville (I'm going with it) who has had a lifetime of training and the best spinning coaches money can buy.
Fidget barely makes it to the semifinals but, the night before the final spinoff against Spinny, he sees some shadowy characters (Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer cameo) secretly swapping out Spinny's regulation grease for same unsanctioned grease that caused his own father to slip up (lots of puns in this movie) all those years ago! Now Fidget has to decide between saying nothing and exposing Spinny after she wins (implied that he won't be able to match her moves) or Doing The Right Thing. After some soul searching - and a surprise visit from a wise old retired spinner (Sam Elliott) - Fidget decides that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he wins through trickery, even if he had nothing to do with it. Spinny is understandably wary when Fidget tells her about the plot to ruin her career but, after he shows her the evidence (pictures on an Huawei Honor, good product placement), they hatch a scheme to expose the crooks in front of everyone (no idea, not good at schemes) and it turns out that they've been in league with the evil land developer the whole time.
After the highly irregular preceding events, the decision is made to award the championship to both Fidget and Spinner, who perform a doubles spinning routine based on some of the moves they used to thwart the crooks previously (Grammy WINNING original song by Adele). But the victory is bittersweet, as half the prize money isn't enough to save his family's farm. Fidget returns to the farm and, while making his tearful goodbyes to the only home he's ever known, wouldn't you know it, Spinner shows up and offers to help him in gratitude for having helped her! Fidget pays off the farm's debts and turns it into a school for training aspiring spinners like himself, Spinner goes on to have a successful career on the World Circuit (will they fall in love? wait for the sequel!), and the evil land developer gets thrown in jail.
Cash only, no checks please.
"The real opportunity is Fidget Spinners: The Movie."
Dear Lord, what did I just watch... wait, WTF, I didn't even _watch_ anything! Sir, I'm gonna need you to put your hands behind your back, you're under arrest for section 14 paragraph 3 of the Mind Crimes Act, "attempt to plant false memories"...
Standard metal GI Ammo Can with a cutout between the lid and the container would do the job quite nicely.
Since it has a handle on collapsible wire hinges it can be grabbed and moved to an outside location quickly and safely.
Technical Note: Don't try this with one of the plastic copies. If it goes wahoonie shaped you will just have a portable fire, that being a plastic box with a fire inside that is in the process of melting and a convenient handle on the top so you can spread the melting plastic over a wider area.
I rather prefer the clay pot approach, as a metal can gets hotter on the outside from the fire within (though it is indeed quite fine if placed on a concrete floor). A handle is nice, but for best safety, the container must survive total burnout of the battery without setting anything else on fire.
The savvier R/C model fliers have known of this battery hazard for years. A Web search for "Lipo battery bunker" will show both commercial and home-built versions of fireproof charging containers for flight batteries. Some battery chargers make this a tad difficult by turning the charger into a wall-wart that the battery physically slots into, so the whole thing normally sits on the wall socket.
I have little to no interest in the silly spinners, so the idea of electrifying them evokes only a goggle-eyed wonderment, followed by "Gee, I wonder if they can be hacked remotely to go poof."
...okay, I'd like to patent "flip spinners", please - they have a supercap / brushless hub that's inactive for most of the time, but once the spinner has been spinning for a while it abruptly slows then spins up in the opposite direction, then keeps spinning for a while, then flips direction again...
Really?
The mythical beardy one was there in your living room stopping you from leaving?
God: "Just wait a few more minutes, did I tell you about the time my son got lost in the desert? Sent one of my earlier creations down to offer him some food and water, flat out refused.... that's gratitude for you."
It was luck, not divine intervention. I don't believe in the chap myself, but from a theological point of view the guys got a non-intervention thing going on.
If He wanted to destroy the fidget spinner without hurting the people, it would have been a whole lot less drama to just miracle the thing "lost."
Or, as the woman claims, if God was "saving "them, it'd be less hassle for him to stop the damn thing catching fire than going to all the trouble to make them late and ruin their whole day. But I'm sure she'd say it was teaching a lesson.
Spinners arrived like locusts where I live. One day, nothing, the next; everywhere in abundance. Every market trader, street hawker, phone accessory and e-cig shop seems to have them stocked from floor to ceiling.
"Toothpick crossbows" which can shoot metal needles tens of metres look set to become the next craze.
In more ways than one -->
"I guess everybody who isn't "held back by God" and loses a house due to an easily prevented fire is hated by God?"
Yes, absolutely; if your house burns down it's because God hates you. He also hates sparrows too, that's why he likes to watch them fall.
There is no metallic lithium in Li-Ion batteries - normally.
It is possible to generate metallic lithium by overcharging. This makes the battery quite volatile for future use.
Another trick you can do is over discharge, which causes the copper to dissolve. On charging it back up again, the dissolved copper precipitates in random places, and may or may not cause a short. Slower version of Russian roulette.
He reached forth His Noodly Appendage, but lo, the Li-Ion was too darn hot, and so He said, "Sh--! Let someone NOT made of cookable pasta save your stupid a__ from cheap toys made in China!" And so it was that God stepped in to save them from their own ignorance instead, by making them late with His mysterious ways. (Because His other superpower, a thunderbolt from the sky, probably wouldn't have helped the situation all that much.) And from somewhere in China could be heard the combined laughter from the Trickster Gods Trading Co. Ltd. product factory chaired by Loki, Coyote, and Monkey.
Or, maybe it was just that a cheap toy made in China had a less-than-perfect battery or charger that would have resulted in a fire at some point, and a family was running late as they pretty much always do, and it was all just a combination of inevitability and pure coincidence.
Who is to say?
"Fortunate enough to be unaware" can have a few meanings. If you are fortunate that your loved ones don't require the therapeutic devices, then you may not be aware; once it hit the fad stage then you are fortunate if you don't have kids flicking, spinning, dropping, etc. the toy all around you.
Nothing with Bluetooth speakers is therapeutic.
They're the reason why wearables/smartwatches hadn't taken off.
They're the reason why we're enslaved to constantly recharging our device.
They're the reason why the Samsung Note 7 fiasco happened.
They're the season why batteries are the first to be replaced within 1-2 years when the rest of the hardware is still working perfectly fine.
They're the reason why we produce a mountain of toxic lithium waste.
If there's no conspiracy of planned forced obsolescence or evil lithium battery manufacturer overlords holding the tech world ransom, I do hope the world graduates from last century's battery technology.
Maybe sea salt battery. Maybe silicone battery. Whatever it is, we need to move on from lithium.
Nobody measured how many G's you can apply over electronics housed in fidget spinners.
I wouldn't be surprised if it went above 100 G. Electronics that are already prone to burst into flames even when they are not submitted to higher degrees of acceleration, are now regularly submitted to several thousand RPM for, let's say, 60 seconds at a time. What can go wrong?
Unless they are housed in the static center. I hope so. So we are dealing just with cheap Chinese components.
Only SD cards that I heard are certified to survive 1000G acceleration, by the way.
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