NASA 'nauts do what flagship smartphone fans can only dream of: Change the batteries Astronauts may have swapped a set of ISS batteries, but it may be a little while yet before they get a ride on Boeing's finest in this week's round-up. Spacewalking 'nauts swap ISS batteries (iFixit teardown not required) Demonstrating that it is possible to design battery-powered tech with power-packs that can be switched out …
Not incredible, inevitable. There's only so much budget, and since the Russkies were beaten, there were top-of-the-line carriers to build.
What is incredible is that there are now privately-owned industries that have not only the money, but also the know-how to build rockets and get to low orbit. They are the ones that will get us to the stars, not the governments.
Let Musk sell stock to suckers to fund a company to send people to Mars. That's just a huge waste of effort since there's no real advantage to living there over the Moon and several huge disadvantages.
It remains to be seen if private manned LEO launches are safer than NASA's, but at least they'll be cheaper since there will be multiple companies offering it a few years from now.
... pneumatic trenching. I used one of these tools a couple years ago to dig a trench up a rather rocky, tree covered hillside that I couldn't safely get my backhoe into. It won't shift large stones, but it will get rid of the matrix surrounding them, making lifting them out a breeze. A nice side benefit is that it doesn't cut large roots, so if you don't want to ruin the trees/bushes this is the tool for you. I'll never go back to a shovel for this kind of work ... in fact, I bought one and use it eight or nine times per year. Recommended.
Rental yards carry them, and the required air compressor (most folks home compressor can't handle 160cfm @ 175psi (3500 L/min @ 12bar)).
the thing about LiPo and LiIon batteries is that they tend to wear out faster than NiMH (from my experience, anyway) although their weight is significantly lower.
That, and the tendency to catch on fire if you don't treat them right.
(Being surrounded by a vacuum might make LiPo/LiIon safer, though)
Lithium, next to hydrogen, is the most reactive material, and is the most reactive metal. And lithium batteries have a charge/discharge behavior curve that you need to be very careful with. Over-discharge them and they start outgassing, which greatly reduces their performance and life expectancy.
And for some reason, I never seem to get a typical LiPo or LiIon to last NEARLY as long as an NiMH battery can last. Laptop batteries in particular seem to fail more readily when they're lithium based, but I still have old NiMH batteries for old laptops that work just fine, even 15 year old batteries (with reduction in capacity, but still holding a charge). Go fig, yeah.
(worthy of note, I was deeply involved with charge cycles on a LiPo battery for a customer project a short while back, from charging circuits to undervolt protection and why I needed to design that in)
Anyway, lithium batteries are a bit overrated in that regard. But as it's only for another, maybe 5 or 6 years, I can see (because of weight alone) why NASA would swap in lithium batteries for NiMH.
The equivalent here would be scramming the reactor and right after that the motors re-latching and pulling the control rods on their own, again. And again. And again. Rinse, lather, repeat. That isn't taught as it should be impossible, not just improbable, although I use impossible advisedly.* Nothing in the training covers that. Now I know, because I can draw the whole damned plant from memory to have the circuit breakers tripped thus removing power from the motors. However, for those pilots, they weren't aware of MCAS and it's instrumentation. Don't know means don't know. How, exactly were they supposed to disable MCAS?
* -If you really, really know you theory, there's some impossible things that can happen in certain regimes that are very remotely possible. This isn't one of them.
"There is no software in the world that can make up for pilot error."
I think you mean training error on the part of the manufacturer and the manual contents. Self-study, user paced, on the job training generally isn't the best solution when flying a passenger airliner.
….was cancelled... "When you have the option of just switching the people, the mission becomes more important than a cool milestone," NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz told the New York Times.
Just do the damn job, history will figure out later if it was significant enough to note for whatever "milestone" was achieved.
You can still get smartphones with replaceable batteries. You just have to be willing to settle for one not made by any of the top 5 or so companies by market share. I make it a priority when I'm buying a phone since the battery's usually the first part to go.
my understanding is that you can purchase replacement batteries for all the top phones. Apple replaced the battery in my iPhone 6, plenty of guys in my local town centre offering to replace batteries and they are wildly available on line.
Not as easy to do as in the old days where the cover was designed to be removed without tools, but nonetheless still possible albeit a longer process now. Given the number of people who ever actually swapped batteries in the past, statistically its not really a problem nowdays.
Also, the equipment list required to replace these space station batteries is rather more involved than most smart phones (even of the sealed type).
1) A human rated Medium capacity rocket.
2) 2 highly trained astronauts
3) 2 EVA spacesuits
4) Specialist zero G toolkit
Time to complete: 6h 39m
"Given the number of people who ever actually swapped batteries in the past, statistically its not really a problem nowdays"
WRONG! Removable battery means you can remove it and hold a button to drain all residual power from the circuits. That's been the Ultra Restart for electronic devices since forever, and l don't want to lose that trick to stupid design.
Yes, stupid because nobody has ever shown how non-removable batteries improve the consumer's experience. Apple wanted them non-replaceable (or only by Apple for a hefty fee) and the sheep blindly followed (like screen notches, arrgh).
Non-removable batteries don't need their own solid case and therefore save weight and size. And it's fractionally cheaper (given that people weren't buying the spare batteries when they were available and thus no profit from them)
Personally, I'd prefer the convenience of swappable batteries, but I can at least see why THEY would chose the non-removable style.
" (given that people weren't buying the spare batteries when they were available and thus no profit from them)"
People didn't buy them much because they were an item that if you needed it, you *needed* it, resulting the high street pricing them at a ridiculous mark-up that made a big dent in the cost of a new phone and made the idea of having a spare look extravagant. If enough people had been shopping online a wee bit earlier, and not been beholden to greasy electronics retailers, I think things would've looked different.
Yeah the uber-slim Sony Ericsson’s we’re notorious for that. They weren’t waterproof either...
“Hence the spacewalk, which saw NASA 'nauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague exit the airlock at 08:01 EDT (12:01 UTC) and return at 14:40 EDT 18:40.”
Still, even I can change an iPhone battery faster than that, so pros and cons.
"Yes, stupid because nobody has ever shown how non-removable batteries improve the consumer's experience."
Exactly. Ancient motherboards with WELDED BATTERIES, have you seen them? They didn't improve anyone's experience one bit. That 8-bit guy got one of these, and did himself the favor of cutting them out and welding a battery holder in its place, so the batteries can be easily swapped.
my understanding is that you can purchase replacement batteries for all the top phones. Apple replaced the battery in my iPhone 6, plenty of guys in my local town centre offering to replace batteries and they are wildly available on line.
Not as easy to do as in the old days where the cover was designed to be removed without tools, but nonetheless still possible albeit a longer process now. Given the number of people who ever actually swapped batteries in the past, statistically its not really a problem nowdays.
If you have to take it to the shop and/or use specialized tools to replace the battery then it is not what any sane person would call a "replaceable battery". That's sort of like the popped capacitors in older electronics: Technically replaceable, but not really as far as 99% of the population is concerned.
That's good to know. I have a 6 year old Samsung with now on its 3rd battery. I'll need a new phone soon but simply will not buy one where the battery can't be easily replaced. The phone review sites never think this issue important since they only use a given phone for such a short time that the battery life does not figure. But real users do. If only all of us refused to buy phones with a battery that the user could not replace, then the manufacturers would get the message.
You would think that it would be "easy" with replacement batteries. The problem is that when you just want to get some data off of the "failing" phone, you might think that plugging it into a power source would be enough to get it viable to get the data from the device. Unfortunately in my case I need to have the battery replaced on a phone that I really don't want, JUST to get the data from it.
This is insane, and I am currently beating my head against the wall about it.
(*SIGH*)
The funny thing is that older translations did spell it "Bereshit" and I wondered if it was changed for presumed offensiveness. But no, Wikipedia keeps the spelling:
Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz. .בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ
In the beginning the Elohim created the heavens and the Earth.
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It seems like phone manufacturers have not heard of the concept of selling replacement batteries and a charger. This is something the 'Luddites' manufacturing DSLR cameras do all the time, a feature that comes in real hand sometimes. </snark>. Seriously, replaceable batteries would probably require a redesign of the phone and make somewhat thicker to accommodate a reasonably shaped rechargeable battery. Though I wonder how much the hype about thinness is marketing department driven and does not consider the engineering details of a thinner phone. Also, are people really clamoring for a thinner phone, most I know really do not care as long as the phone is small enough to fit into a pocket or purse. Human anatomy restricts how small a phone can be before it is impractical.
Completely agree, frankly the main effect of these new super slim phones is to make them super difficult to stop from sliding out of your hand and smashing the screen on the floor....
It's just stupid that they try and sell you one of their Apple branded cases that then double the thickness of your phone... because it needs the protection?!?
Phone manufacturers (until very recently) saw customers line up on day one at the Apple Stores for the latest, greatest iPhones seemingly regardless of what they did. Their view: Apple has the Midas Touch. Better copy them before the market gets saturated.
Plus there's the matter of Planned Obsolescence, which really is a thing if a bit exaggerated in places.
Cameras with at least some modicum of quality tend to get sold as amateur-level at least. The more professional the grade of camera, the more remote portability (being able to take lots of pictures in the field, far from a socket) becomes a selling point, meaning the ability to swap out for spare battery packs. The same can't be said of phones which usually don't stray far from civilization, and for those few that do, external battery backs will usually do it these days.
...but I bet it's still more expensive and requires greater technical expertise than just bringing your phone round to the shop.
"Good news: The battery in your phone can be replaced! Bad news: The battery is half a million dollars, not including shipping, and takes two people in special clothes several hours to swap."
Fire icon because hey, Li-Ion.
Every single thing I jerry-rigged, that was meant to last 3 months, survived 9 years without a proper replacement.
Every single thing that was properly designed to last 10 years, was replaced or upgraded in less than 6 months.
My solution was to force every jerry-rigging to survive a 10-year test, or to be easily replaced by another jerryrig every 3 months. And to include plans to proper replacement on every 10-year project.
Except for double-ball-bearing DC fans, which were designed to last 10 years, have been working for 15, and have not failed me yet.
Murphy's Law is quite whimsical.
Erm , was that "jerry built" or "jury rigged"......Jury Rigged? Surely thats an Uber Or Facebook thing, cue annoyed cat noise........Agree with your post completely otherwise , hack on compadre , there's them that can write a cheque and there's them that can hardware hack , the more hands on , the more evolved , the ghost of erstwhile phone hardware hacker Lord Stephen of Jobness smiles benevolently from his "cloud" which is white , slim , round edged and may evaporate from the heat of a million soldering irons , salut!
P.S still using the old algorithm "Wall o' text" for my posting , its a statistical density thing , soz .
I've heard all four variations on the theme (j-r, g-r, j-b, g-b) for as long as I can remember. I would venture to suggest that all are correct in the vernacular. English is a kludge of a language. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
In the world of phreaking, Jobs was a phone skiddie; he never came up with anything new (other than packaging for the masses). I note with some amusement that his blue box had square corners ... mine had rounded corners. I suspect he bought his "project box" from chicken shack; I most likely got mine from Haltec.
This "feature" of English can result in a confusion over what is really meant. "Jury rigged" and "jerry built" have two precise and different meanings. Jerry built means (meant) shoddily built from the start. Jury rigged means something repaired not with the proper materials and procedures, but with whatever is at hand. Jury rigged does not require that the fix was poorly done. As the original poster notes, some jury rigs last longer than a "proper" repair would.
I assume people who misuse these at least get the "built" versus "rigged" part correct. But what does "jerry rigged" mean? Are they using it to state it was a shoddy fix?
Along the same lines, the transformation of "literally" into an emphasis word with random meaning has meant that English has lost a word for which there is no true synonym.
If only that were the case where I live. In the US at least "literally" has the following meaning in descending order of usage:
- figuratively
- adjective to express emphasis, e.g. "literally bonkers"
- indicates exact meaning, usually followed by some version of "I mean this actual thing happened" because people can no longer tell what is meant by the word literal. As in this El Reg headline from a few years back "Apple iOS 7 makes some users literally SICK. As in puking, not upset".
And that's about as good a phone as you can get these days where you CAN do that. Samsung stopped with the S6/Note 5 series and LG with the V30. If anyone can find a phone with better specs, an SD slot (for low-priority stuff I don't want to encrypt because a bricked phone will scramble the SD's contents) and a user-replaceable battery, I'd love to hear it, but it seems once my current Note 4 bites it, it'll probably be the V20. I just wish with the phone market saturating and maturing the trend reverses and longer-lasting user-serviceable phones become fashionable again, especially not that Apple's lost most of its Midas Touch.
For over 20 years now I have been reading stories on groundbreaking new batteries that are just around the corner yet everything, including the space station, is using crappy Li-on still. It NEVER changes!!! Why are we stuck with stone age batteries? I want an answer damit! ;)
Vaporware. That's what I stopped reading most articles about new technologies being developed until they at least reach the "real-world testing" stage, simply because you can't count on things getting real until there is actual product for us to try. The graveyard of "new technologies" that never actually entered the market is enormous. Think holographic 3D data storage (touted back in the 90's when CD-ROMs were just coming into use) for starters.
When it comes to battery technologies, the big obstacle is sheer physics. Concentrating energy creates risks for spontaneous discharge among other things (when a lithium battery goes up, that's what's happening). It's kind of the point with concentrated energy sometimes (for example, petrochemical fuel), so it's something you can't avoid. Highly-controllable concentrated energy storage is HARD.
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