Sounds like somebody had a really bad day at work, as Western Digital reports that “factory contamination” caused a batch of flash memory chips to be spoiled. How much, you ask? Oh, only about 7 billion gigabytes! For those of you fond of SI prefixes, that’s 7 exabytes of storage; to put that into perspective, it’s seven times what Google used for Gmail storage in 2012, and enough to store approximately 1.69 trillion copies of Project Gutenberg’s ASCII King James Version Bible. Very few details were available other than the unspecified contamination of two factories, but this stands poised to cause problems with everything from flash drives to phones to SSDs, and will probably only worsen the ongoing chip shortage. And while we hate to be cynical, it’ll probably be prudent to watch out for any “too good to be true” deals on memory that pop up on eBay and Ali in the coming months.
Speaking of broken stuff, we came across a site called FailScout, which purports to be “a crowdsourced database of broken and worn-out products.” The idea apparently is to document cases of what appears to be either systematic manufacturing defects, engineering problems, or outright planned obsolescence. The goal of this is ostensibly to hold manufacturers accountable for their products, but we can see how this could just devolve into a morass of ax-grinding by people who have unreasonable expectations about how long products should last. Yes, pretty much everything we buy is subject to “value engineering” decisions in terms of materials and designs, and some of that will no doubt send products to the landfill long before their time. But when someone is complaining about broken five-year-old flip-flops, we think we’ll take a hard pass on this one.
For the numerically obsessive among us, a momentous day is approaching. This coming Tuesday will be “Twos Day,” when everyone’s calendar will show 2/22/22 (or 22/2/22, if you’re so inclined) all day. And for a special treat, if you want to add to the symmetry and don’t mind getting up early, or staying up late, you can watch the clock flip to 2:22:22 on the appointed day. If this excites you as much as watching an odometer flip over, you’ll probably want to visit this interesting Palindrome Date calculator, and see how long it’ll be before some other interesting sequence of numbers will be encoded in the date.
While trolling through Hackaday.io the other day, we happened upon a project that looks interesting: a miniature selective soldering machine. Until we saw this, we hadn’t even wondered how mixed through-hole and SMD boards are assembled; selective soldering seems to be the answer. It seems to be a very localized version of wave soldering. Instead of using a large tank that covers the entire underside of a board, the molten solder is pumped into a special nozzle to form a tiny fountain. This little solder volcano is moved around the board to all the through-hole leads that need soldering, and it’s a very satisfying process to watch.
And finally, because the world is crying out for a car with 80’s styling and a 21st-century electric drivetrain, it looks like DeLorean is trying to make another go of it. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the approaching 40th anniversary of the first installment of the Back to the Future trilogy, or maybe it’s just because they can, but whatever the reason, the hype machine is already rolling, albeit with nothing but a silhouette shot of the iconic and never-practical gullwing doors opening. And even though it’s electric, we wouldn’t count on a 1.21-gigawatt battery. Or a Mr. Fusion.
Hackaday Links: February 20, 2022
Source: Manila Flash Report
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