i love the minimalist concept of a laptop with so much battery life: Dell and Apple could learn something from this.
so that gray piece on the right is the solar collector, right? since it can go 2 years, what's to stop it from going forever? what if you added a 2nd collector on the left? how big would the solar panel need to be in order for it to run indefinitely?
Thanks! The biggest obstacle to running forever may be the chemistry of the li-poly battery which has a relatively low number of charge cycles and is known to degrade over time. A promising option is li-ion capacitors or supercapacitors, which I'm looking into. This is the board I've purchased for testing. https://www.tindie.com/products/jaspersikken/solar-harvestin...
Id just personally go with replaceable parts. AA NiMHs are like $1 to $2 these days, and 6V 5Ah lead acid is like $20 (Lol, first hit on google is $4 from some no-name brand).
Replace the battery every few years and you're set. Rely upon mass production, standard part numbers and highly recyclable parts (lead acid wins at this).
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Lead Acid is particularly good at UPS style power usage patterns. It's very easy to perpetually trickle charge lead acid.
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If you're set on Li-ion, then use a standard 18650 cell, so you know that you'll always be able to buy a replacement. But given the attributes I see here, lead acid probably wins. So you have to replace a part every 3 years that costs $5 to $10, big whoop.
As it happens, I've spent a lot of time over the last week talking to a guy in Romania who's trying to fix a sulfated lead-acid battery in his backyard garage. (I don't know if you've been to Romania, but the apocalypse happened 40 years ago there, so his available resources are kind of limited.) I think he's going to succeed, and may eventually progress to being able to recycle the lead into a new battery, but it's not going to be a weekend learning process or even a week-long one.
He reports that it's a "very complex electrochemical device".
The USPTO (?) has assigned the code H01M10/06 to lead-acid battery patents. https://patents.google.com/?q=(H01M10%2f06)&oq=(H01M10%2f06) finds 44'593 patents in this category. You don't need any of them to get a working lead-acid battery, but a significant subset of them are going to be helpful. Some are order-of-magnitude improvements.
And in a Mad-Max future (lots of cars around, but not enough fuel), there will be plenty of Lead Acid batteries laying around to recycle.
I do consider it effectively an apocalyptic kind of battery design. It was invented in the 1800s, its chemistry is incredibly simple (Sulfuric Acid + Lead), and is very well studied.
i prefer the phrase "anti-apocalyptic." Because by designing an energy efficient laptop/phone, less lithium/capacitor resources are manufactured and everyone can have one, unlike that single coke bottle in that 80s movie, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" which will lead to one. ;)
Would it be possible to use standard 9v rechargeable cells? I’m sure the lifetime would be even less, but if a battery swap cost $10 and could be found at any corner drug store…
You can look into LFP (aka LiFePo4) cells, which have higher durability than lithium ion. Beware they have different chemistry so charging voltages differ from standard Li-poly or Li-ion (they are also safer, which is nice). I haven't looked at the data, but I suspect supercaps may not be optimized for very low leakage, and generally the energy density is not so good (though if you have access to energy harvesting I guess it may not matter!).
FPGA soft core CPUs can't beat the same logic implemented in ASIC silicon in terms of static power consumption. The MCU at the core of this project has a very impressive uA/MHz specification that's difficult to achieve alone. I'm surprised to see it being much lower than even STM32L0 running off external SMPS
Dell and Apple can learn that there are consumers out there who want low cost minimalist options with long battery lives and long operational lives. Not everyone wants to buy a brand new 600$ computer every 5 years. They can learn that some consuemrs aren't going to put up with the crap of planned obsolescence.
Not really planned obsolescence, just lack of spare parts. 10 year old laptop will work just fine, it will just be hard to get replacement keyboard or batteries.
> Dell and Apple can learn that there are consumers out there who want low cost minimalist options with long battery lives and long operational lives.
They don't want their business and low marigin sales.
Also Macbook air has what, 18 hours of battery life ? That's enough for vast majority of users.
A MacBook has up to 18 hours when new, but you can get far less than that.
The real advantage of long battery life isn’t so much the duration when new but both reducing the number of charge cycles and preserving battery life as the device ages.
> They can learn that some consuemrs aren't going to put up with the crap of planned obsolescence.
The number of consumers who not only complain about planned obsolescence but also put money where their mouth is, is tiny. It's easy to get people on board with the idea behind projects like Fairphone, but then they do a price comparison and buy a cheap Huawei.
The market for Linux laptops is already a small niche and those aren't all that limiting for users when it comes to processing power and software support. Now take away the modern web browser and very few people would consider it for anything more than a little tinkering.
Unfortunately this is almost the least profitable market segment imaginable and isn't going to be addressed well by capitalism.
I don't mean this in a "capitalist bad" way, it's mostly great but there are certain innovations and technologies that don't fit well with a need to get the most return possible on capital invested. There's a "dead space" of techs that would benefit everyone, need some capital to create - but don't allow a lot of value to be captured.
A bit like how we see more VC excitement about "vat grown meat" (a centralised industrial model that exacerbates supply chain dependency and further alienates people from their food - but is perfect for capturing value) vs working on "super potatoes" or algae-based systems that would be low-dependency and could scale down to individuals.
Orthodoxy is that government is supposed to help with this stuff but they have their own incentives (some of them a result of industry capture) which rarely align with decentralisation, degrowth or reduced dependency. For example recent battles to get laws passed to even allow you to repair your own stuff.
If you had said that there are consumers who want long battery lives and long operation lives and are willing to pay a premium for that, then Dell and Apple might have something to learn - but the existence of consumers who want a low cost option for that is irrelevant, since serving that market would just lower your profits by cannibalizing your sales to the people who are not only willing to pay $600 every 5 years but $1000+ every 3 years.
I'd say HN quality is way way better than Reddit, entirely due to the audience. Reddit is very much anti-knowledge, anti-solution, anti-reason whereas HN features intelligent discussions, often supported by facts.
those salaries aren't so inflated when you consider the cost of living over there. Want to rent a modest 2 bedroom house in palo alto? that'll be about 90K per year. After taxes, the average software engineer would be lucky to spend only 50% of their take home pay on rent.
personally, i think you'd be better off making 1/3 as much in the mid-west but who wants to leave all their family and friends?
most people at these companies don't last very long. if you doubt that, just take a look at the average person's linkedIn or resume. You'll see the average tenure at a tech company is about 2 to 3 years.
While many people do job-hopping because they might get more money etc., others value stability, short commute, a project they like, their colleagues and more money is not as enticing. Even others found a cushy job they don't want to lose - many reasons to stay.
i really don't understand why people don't like facebook. they're no worse than apple or your ISP (now they're truely evil).
dissinfo? just unusubscribe or don't follow that account? do you really want facebook censoring everything you can see or don't see based on political correctness? or some other filter?
and how is it "selling user data". I've always found this to be wholly inaccurate. it's targetted advertisement. do you really prefer untargetted advertising?
I'm no facebook fanboy. personally i don't use it much. i've read articles on the matter but they never make any sense. Is there an article somewhere that explains all the vitriol towards facebook, because i really don't get it.
Ctrl+F "sell" doesn't have any matches on that page. It seems like FB was using Onavo to spy on people for its own competitive advantage. That's obviously extremely shady and unethical but it's not the same thing as 'selling'.
I don’t think they are some evil scourge on humanity, but I also don’t like them and won’t work for them.
For a few reasons: they copy/steal or acquire all their new ideas, have diluted most of the real human element of their social network products into “promoted” content or “recommended” reel spam - leading to an “Instagram culture” of flexing and showing off to gain an audience.
But I do agree with you that “misinformation” and user data issues are blown out of proportion.
Re: “no worse than Apple”: Apple implemented features to make my phone give me less notifications by default when I am driving, at work, or close to going to bed. These features are helpfully turned on by default. Contrast this with Facebook’s design philosophy of increasing the amount of time a user spends staring at their phone at all costs.
Apple’s tracking prevention has put such a huge hole in Facebook’s panopticon-like internet-wide surveillance scheme that it is almost certainly one of the causes of these layoffs. You ask “who wants untargeted ads,” and it turns out, when you give users a choice, the answer is “most people, actually.”
There is no rational basis for saying that Facebook is “no worse than Apple.” Facebook is an actively malign force in society, worldwide, and we would all be better off if they shut down completely.
here are the reasons I hate apple more than facebook:
1. they force developers to buy mac os x to work on their platform
2. their app store monopoly is extremely hostile towards developers and thus democracy
3. they force me to enter my financial information when I sign up with them
4. they won't allow me to use their products without an apple account which means I need yet another password to sign in
5. they won't even allow me to download apps without signing into my apple account.
6. the whole apple ecosystem kinda locks you in.
7. planned obsolescence, which I really hate.
On the other hand for facebook. I can just ignore it completely for months on end and easily block all my notifications or emails from it. or block them one by one if I choose. if i dont like the feed, then I just don't spend time on it. nothing about facebook isn't easily circumvented whereas apple has a death grip on you, as long as you need to use it's products.
If you were to electrify all the vehicles in the world today (and the developing world hasn't even got lots of cars yet), it would take 1/2 the world's known supply of lithium. and those batteries only last about 8 to 10 years.
Lithium become abundant, no way. Not with the amounts we're using up per capita and the enormous population on this planet. the green revolution is just getting started and there's definitely not enough to go around.
Your numbers prove the exact opposite of your conclusion. If, with the tiny amount of lithium that we have bothered to look for, we can already provide for 2x our current car needs, then we are golden.
Batteries last far longer than 8-10 years, I'm not sure where you are getting that bad number. But even if you were right, our very first attempts at recycling already recover 95% of input metals:
And every year we discover massive new amounts of lithium resources, because until the mid 2010s, nobody really bothered to look for lithium.
FUD about amounts of lithium should be abandoned as a stall tactic; they no longer pass basic sniff tests arms are easily shut down hard. Other stall FUD needs to be invented if the energy interchange is to be stopped.
The total energy cost of producing and using the Tesla Model S Long Range battery pack for example, including battery production, lithium extraction, transportation, the energy cost of building the Gigafactory, battery transportation, battery recycling, diesel fuel required to generate electricity to charge the battery, and the environmental costs of battery disposal and battery fires, is equivalent to about 3,088,431 barrels of oil.
This analysis is off by orders of magnitude. Tesla shipped 1.3 million vehicles in 2022, each of which contained a battery pack [1]. 3 million barrels of oil contains 6.1 * 10^15 joules of primary energy [2]. World primary energy production in 2021 was 5.95 * 10^20 joules [3].
Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.
Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.
my interpretation of this is that the tech recession will take a long time to enter into and the winding down of tech is going to take several years at least.
we as users, need to start finding alternatives to Google and Youtube. Not to stop using google/youtube but to diversify. Sure, today, the vast majority of users of Google and Youtube might be treated fairly. But this sort of thing can happen to anyone. No one company should have so much power, the potential for abuse is too large.
