Disposable Vape Batteries Power EBike

There are a lot of things that get landfilled that have some marginal value, but generally if there’s not a huge amount of money to be made recycling things they won’t get recycled. It …

Xiaomi M365 Battery Fault? Just Remove A Capacitor

Electric scooters have long been a hacker’s friend, Xiaomi ones in particular – starting with M365, the Xiaomi scooter family has expanded a fair bit. They do have a weak spot, like man…

Ryobi Battery Pack Gives Up Its Secrets Before Giving Up The Ghost

Remember when dead batteries were something you’d just toss in the trash? Those days are long gone, thankfully, and rechargeable battery packs have put powerful cordless tools in the palms of…

Open Source DC UPS Keeps The Low-Voltage Gear Going

We all like to keep our network gear running during a power outage — trouble is, your standard consumer-grade uninterruptible power supply (UPS) tends to be overkill for routers and such. The…

LiPo Replacement Keeps Portable Scanner In The Action

If there’s anything people hate more than being locked into a printer manufacturer’s replacement cartridges, it’s proprietary batteries. Cordless power tools are the obvious examp…

Fail Of The Week: Car Starter Motors Aren’t The Best Fit For EBikes

A lot of what real engineering is all about is designing to the limits of your materials, with a healthy margin for error. On the other hand, seat-of-the-pants engineering often takes the opposite …

Fool A Drone With A Fixed Battery

Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer rechargeable batteries have given us previously impossible heights of electronics power and miniaturization, but there’s a downside they have brought along wit…

Adding A Battery To Extend Speaker Life

Perhaps the weakest point in modern electronics when it comes to user servicability is the lifecycle of the batteries included from the manufacturer. Without easily replaceable batteries, many cons…