[GTALUG] War story: Hardware bloat

[Don Tai]

There are some spectacular videos of Chinese EVs and ebikes in the process
of catastrophic runaway explosions on Youtube. Metrolinx has banned some
non-CSA certified ebikes from entering their trains, after an ebike
exploded and destroyed a TTC train in 2023 Mar. If you buy any Chinese
device online, for example from Taobao or Alibaba, it may not be CSA
certified and thus a fire hazard, new or older. Lithium ion batteries
should have safety features to prevent spontaneous combustion, but
obviously this is not always the case.

On Thu, 12 Sept 2024 at 14:55, Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> Slightly related to Linux because this ... or rather was ... about an
> Android tablet.
>
> Not a knockoff Alibaba tablet with no vowels in the brand name, an Acer
> Iconia One bought from Amazon in 2015. It served me well for quite a few
> years but, as always happens, support for updates ran out and it was
> replaced for daily use by an Amazon Fire 10 for which I paid almost the
> same amount (on Prime Day) as for the Acer a decade ago.
>
> This raised the issue of what to do with the old tablet, that was not only
> out of updates but also running much slower than the new stuff. I
> investigated the many "what can you do with an old tablet" articles and
> settled into turning the Iconia into a weather station that one could check
> at any time to see what was coming for the next six hours.
>
> It had been doing that task for about two years now, and was stationary
> and always plugged in.
>
> I was looking at it the other day, almost by accident, and noticed the
> back was much thicker than I recall. Everything was functional, and the
> tablet had barely been touched since given this role. I suspected something
> to do with the Lithium battery and immediately became wary. Was this going
> to be one of those times when the device caught fire or exploded? Some
> checking online led me to immediately turn off and unplug the device, and
> put it in the garage.
>
> Today I took it to the hazardous waste disposal depot on Ingram Drive
> (Lawrence/Keele area). Things were deteriorating fast. It had swollen so
> much that the screen had cracked. I drove to the dump gingerly as if I had
> a bomb in the car. After informing the depot staff of the nature of the
> tablet's battery, they were unfazed and had me just put it in the
> designated "electronic waste" portable dumpster, into which people had
> tossed their old printers, screens, faxes and a few desktop CPUs. At least
> it's a thick metal dumpster and any ... incident ... would certainly be
> well contained. Still, the disinterested response was a little surprising.
> I've also disconnected my Google account from the tablet, in case anyone
> has the bright idea to try restarting it.
>
> Lessons learned?
>
>    1. Routinely inspect any devices you have that contain lithium
>    batteries, even if they're off.
>    2. Be especially careful with devices that are rarely unplugged such
>    as old devices being repurposed as photo frames, clocks or weather
>    stations. Overcharging is a common cause of such battery failure.
>    3. This doesn't just happen to Chinese mystery brands, it can happen
>    to household names too.
>    4. Don't scavenge from electronic waste bins, you never know what's
>    there. Hacklab swap events (the next one is sept 22
>    <https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day-5/>) are much more
>    useful for this kind of thing.
>
> --
> Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
> @evanleibovitch / @el56
> ---
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