this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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A few of us electronics hobbyists have been collecting them (when found discarded on the street) to harvest the battery for re-use in other projects.
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Yes they're nasty, but I pick them up with a dog poo bag and clean them before cracking them open to get the battery.
I was just thinking about this the other day. Any ideas for projects to use them with?
Turn them into a power bank, among other things.
I am dying... 🤣
Also they all have to be 0.1 v from each other otherwise the "whole thing goes south" sounds scary and is now kind of making me rethink my plan of putting up collection boxes outside of high schools and building a battery for my house out of them.
Once it's balanced and wired it's impossible to be imbalanced again though. The risk is only during initial assembly and you accidentally includes an empty cells among fully charged cells.
Uh yeah that's totally different league than building a power bank though.
this is only true if they're 1s. but all bets are off if you have cell groups. God forbid you use them to make anything remotely useful like an ebike battery or home power storage.
... home made ecig?
I guess that's the silver lining, free batteries for anyone willing to deal with a dirty object.
They're also a prime starting supply for lithium battery recycling plants so they can get things figured out before they have to deal with car packs at volume.
I have a small collection from friends that use the disposables. What do you use them for? I had the idea to make keychain flash lights or a battery conversion of some kind.
At the moment I have several strings of LED Christmas lights on various houseplants that are powered by salvaged batteries.
Also a dollar store magnetic "spotlight" that I modified and have mounted to the chest freezer in the basement so I can see what's in there.
You can also use them as mini fog machines if you hook up a small pump. I build dioramas and have been experimenting with them.
For anyone wanting to learn more there's a bigclive video covering the extraction process.