This could have been solved by wiring the power lines of the working external usb charger to a hacked up plug and the data lines back to the PC. They even sell premade cables for this usecase where you have a car with android auto, but the car's USB port is incapable of delivering net+ power to the phone.
I was thinking the same. Also, I would have liked if they discussed/measured the worst-case power draw of the device before starting to add capacitors, as it's possible a PC USB port just doesn't supply enough current to power it at steady state.
> Considering the age of the battery, I decided not to charge it again, because there is a risk that it would swell and damage the OP-1.
> Their suggestion was to keep using the original battery.
> Would I have to throw away my OP-1 which is still looking almost pristine?
Why not just charge it? Am I crazy to think, if it swells it swells? You turn it off, remove it then and get to the problem then. I've used a MacBook air from 2012 with a swollen battery since 2014, every day pretty much. It's not a nuclear bomb.
If it short circuits a cell, it will heat up. Once it reaches a critical temperature, it will start releasing it's stored energy in a self-sustaining reaction. (You need to dump water into it fast enough to carry away the heat faster than it can produce it.) You've now got a class D fire on your hands.
Hope you've planned ahead and stored that laptop in an ammo crate or other fire-safe container, because it's gonna be burning long and hot and releasing toxic smoke the whole time.
Only one mainstream mass produced device in recent history ran into that as any sort of significant threat, and it was Samsung Note 7, of which there were ~95 reported fires, half as many reports of damaged property, and ~30 injuries.
It takes catastrophic circumstances to bypass the fail-slow idiot proofing engineering that goes into consumer device batteries. The gassing off bubbles and warped laptop frames and all the stuff that goes into preventing things from catching fire and/or exploding makes it a vanishingly small probability, on the level of things like getting struck by lightning, attacked by a shark, or having space rocks land on your house. Such things happen, but it's not something you need to expend resources on. Sure, if you're a surfer, a golfer, live near an ISS dumping lane, or run a laptop repair shop, then take measures. If you're replacing a battery on your own laptop, once every couple years, it's not anything to waste concern on.
Hoverboards and DIY vape rigs are honorable mentions, but problems with those tended to be caused by shoddy, third rate manufacturing of the electronics and batteries, and now even the third rate cheap crap is pretty darn safe. Apple isn't putting components teetering on the edge of catastrophic failure into their products, and judging by the absolute numbers, neither is anyone else. That there have been fewer than 10k incidents in the last decade of consumer device failure causing battery fires or explosions, and many many tens of billions of battery powered devices, paints a picture of humans successfully taming lightning.
Big batteries in electric cars like Teslas and other higher powered uses do require a different safety mindset. The consequences are orders of magnitude higher, and rate of failure are higher as well, with frequent chain reactions and runaway, uncontrollable fires that can melt rock being a thing first responders and junkyard operators have to contend with.
If you can explode a MacBook or laptop doing anything a normal consumer might plausibly attempt, the manufacturer would probably pay you a bounty. Batteries are safe.
The odds of being struck by lightning over the course of your life are around 1 in 15k.
The odds a device you own catches fire during your lifetime are around 1 in 1 million, assuming 20 such devices. Those odds get better year over year, and solid-state electrolytes, among other innovations, will make fires and explosions a thing of the past.
There were 268 e-bike battery fires in NYC alone in 2023. 18 were killed and 150 injured. In a single year.
People die from lithium ion battery fires. Sure, the little ones may not be as big as what’s in e-bikes, but they are in far more intimate areas and under far less scrutiny.
Second: NYFD is one of if not the busiest fire department in the world because it's a city of nearly 9 million people. They respond to 36,500 fires a year. That means that the e-scooter fires represent 0.7% of the total number of fires they respond to.
To further put things in perspective: roughly 160 people die per day in NYC.
The distinction between e-bike and scooter is unimportant. The battery technology is the same, contains the same potential energy which gets released and causes fires.
I think it's important to note that, as your article says, the laws being passed in New York in response to the fires are all in regards to battery certifications. Not all lithium ion batteries are the same and it's important to understand why some (the 268) catch on fire and others (all the other ebikes in NYC) don't.
Jump starters. Some of the early ones, including at least one highly ranked on a review site, had the jumper cable socket directly connected to the battery. Wild West stuff. Get a UL listed one.
Synthesizer manufacturer here. It's really disappointing to see the message "IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOUR WARRANTY IS GONE, SORRY" printed on the inside of the OP-1... super helpful guys.
On the inside of the synths we make, there's a link to a documentation repository. If people are desperate enough to remove screws, why not help them?
It's illegal in the US under the Magnuson Moss act (not the text, but if they deny a warranty claim.)
If you think that's bad, read the terms and conditions and warranty. I ranted about it in another comment so I won't repeat it here, but they seem to be going very much out of their way to be as big a bunch of dicks as they can be.
Why not help? The primary audience of teenage engineering are not folks who self-repair, but buy this stuff for the beauty. Not saying that’s a bad thing.
Sadly, this is the truth. The market of Teenage Engineering customers are not people that buy their gear out of necessity but as technical jewelry. TE knows their market self-selects the indiscriminate, and that lets them treat their customers like shit while retaining the lovely Reality Distortion Field.
Looking forward to a bright future where technological progress becomes synonymous with expensive materials and design proximity to Dieter Rams.
> What I've Learned
To be honest, I was very disappointed with Teenage Engineering. The OP-1 was an expensive item. It's ok for me if the manufacturer doesn't offer warranty after this long. It's also fine if they don't have spare parts in stock after almost 10 years.
> Still, I wish they had a better solution to offer than just suggesting that I keep using the original battery, even at the risk of swelling (which would ruin the case and be a potential fire hazard). In essence, they were telling me to throw away a machine that was otherwise still good.
I was with the author until here. There is a weird entitlement. The manuf was honest and upfront about what the were capable of doing in terms of support for a discontinued 10 yr old product.
Hopefully, because if they were wired in series that's a nasty failure waiting to happen as they'll get imbalanced and then one will go overvoltage and let the magic smoke out.
Also, it's generally not a good idea to connect supercaps directly to a power source with no current limiting because their internal resistance is low enough that they behave like a short when first connected.
There are many ways to solve this problem that are easily found via googling. EEVblog etc.
Holy moly are Teenage Engineering assholes from a consumer rights standpoint and probably violating US consumer laws in multiple ways. I can't think of the last time I saw a company so consumer-hostile.
These clowns are charging more than one of the most cutting edge laptops on the market. Don't tell me "it's the software that you're paying for" because Ableton Live is $600. You can literally buy Ableton Live and a Macbook Air for what that thing costs. I'd certainly expect consumer policies less slimy than a used car dealer for that kind of hipster markup.
The internals say "If you can read this, your warranty is gone", a lawyer (or judge) would laugh at them for. And the way they put it feels almost abusive. I mean... they actually paid extra money to print that on the cable. https://shred.zone/cilla/page/503/cap3.jpg
Then read through the terms and conditions on the site. It's...a trip. There's a forced arbitration clause which you have to email them to opt out of. Forced/mandatory arbitration has been ruled explicitly illegal under Magnuson Moss by the courts.
From the "what is not covered":
> (f) repair or attempted repair by anyone other than or approved by teenage engineering;
BZZZT, another Magnuson Moss Act violation. Thanks for playing!
> if you believe your product is defective and covered by the product warranty, you must notify us promptly by submitting a message at support.teenage.engineering/hc/en-us/requests/new, as soon as possible after you have discovered the defect, but in no case later than two months after discovering the defect.
You have two months to report a defect? What the fuck for? There's no legitimate reason for this beyond having yet another excuse to deny a warranty claim.
They have "waiver of implied warranties" which is likely not legal in many jurisdictions and at the very least yet another asshole move. If you're a manufacturer and you feel the need to waive implied warranties, my question is: "Have you instead tried making a product that isn't shit?"
Such stickers are expressly illegal in the US. They mean nothing here.
Something something "The power of freedom compels you!"
Anyway, any such "warranty void if removed" and other labels don't mean anything in the US. It should be illegal to even sell anything with those labels, but somehow they still pop up. Despite that, they 100% mean nothing.
> The FTC says the choice is yours, and companies that void your warranty for choosing an independent shop or to fix it yourself may be breaking the law.
That's a very strange decision to me. While a customer should be able to choose what they do with their device, I don't see why a company needs to uphold a warranty on a product modified by someone other than them. No wonder hardly anyone provides a warranty long enough to even matter.
If a piece breaks in a way unrelated to the modifications, why should the company get to skip out on fixing it? If it's within the legal minimum, they should be held to the standard of making their product work. And if they want to draw in more customers with a longer warranty, they need to be held to that. Arbitrary exceptions don't save them much money in comparison to the harm it does to purchasers. Also if they can force first-party repairs then that's an instant overpriced monopoly.
I don't think this rule has much to do with companies deciding to have bad warranties.
>I got one in 2016 because I was fascinated by its abilities that were shown in many YouTube videos. But to be honest, my musical talent is limited, and so it became more of a toy that was finally stowed away in a cupboard for several months.
I wonder what percentage of TE's sales are made up of these kinds of situations
E.g. eurorack synthesizers are notoriously consumerist, electric guitars are commonly owned in pairs or more, camera enthusiasts have shelves full of lenses, etc.
As easy as it is to pick on Teenage Engineering you could say the same about tons of other instruments, pedals, etc. It’s just gear, if only talented musicians bought them then the market for such things would be tiny in comparison.
That applies to the entire synth/groovebox industry. People get addicted to the dopamine of buying new gear (Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or GAS) but never use it.
That's why you don't buy eurorack modules, you buy complete systems instead (insert guy tapping head meme). There is something for every pocket, from pluto[1], to black system[2], to...
That's kind of almost been me with eurorack. It is in many ways just a toy to play with. But it's quite a lot of fun, and it's allowed me to experience what it's like to create music far further than just playing sheet music on a piano did. The OP-1 does seem much more focused on actually making the end product of a song than just playing around with sound design on eurorack though, so I'd probably react to it the same way as the OP.
I'd recommend anyone interested in any of this to have a play with Cardinal[1] for free. But I will say that it's a lot easier to play with the real thing. The difference reminds me a lot about when I was really into rubiks cubes and how much easier it is to learn the different variants of twisty puzzles with the physical puzzle in hand, compared to the computerised versions that required clicking and draging, and felt removed from the real thing. So for that reason I'd say that it has been worth actually getting eurorack for me. But even so I've barely played any real songs on the system.
I have 4 of their Pocket Operator things which I haven't taken out of the drawer for t least a couple of years. Do not regret a single cent of what I paid for them. If anything, I occasionally regret not (yet?) having drunk-ordered a few more - I'd quite like a PO-33 and a PO-35, but while sober I know I wont use them any more than I use the ones I already have.
