Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Knew a Third Replacement Note 7 Caught Fire On Tuesday and Said Nothing (theverge.com)
If you had started to feel sympathetic for Samsung, or safer with the Note 7, its latest flagship smartphone, don't be. Another replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has caught fire, making it three of such incident this week alone. Read how poorly Samsung has dealt with the situation, via The Verge: This one was owned by Michael Klering of Nicholasville, Kentucky. He told WKYT that he woke up at 4AM to find his bedroom filled with smoke and his phone on fire. Later in the day, he went to the hospital with acute bronchitis caused by smoke inhalation. "The phone is supposed to be the replacement, so you would have thought it would be safe," Klering told WKYT, saying that he had owned the replacement phone for a little more than a week. "It wasn't plugged in. It wasn't anything, it was just sitting there."The most unsettling part is that Samsung knew of Klering's phone, and didn't say anything.
I left my Samsung Phone in my Tesla and they both went up in flames. Now what should I do?
Tell me how this is a good thing for Samsung and how bad this is for Apple.
I know the drill here.
I'm beginning to wonder if it's an issue with something other than just the battery. Otherwise Samsung would be incredibly idiotic to send out replacement parts that suffer from the same problem. The alternatives are that a massive mistake led to sending out defective units as replacements without fixing them first, or that Samsung's battery supplier (I think I read that the source all or most of them from third parties) wasn't fully aware of the extend of their problems and have shipped more bad batteries.
The full Samsung text message was "Just now got this. I can try and slow him down if we think it will matter, or we just let him do what he keeps threatening to do and see if he does it"
Someone Mr. Klering conveniently failed to share with the news station what exactly he was threatening to do against Samsung that lead to that text message exchange between Samsung employees and which accidentally reached him instead. I'm guessing it was something more than just "I'm going to share what happened to my phone with the authorities".
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/were-now-up-to-five-reports-of-safe-galaxy-note-7s-exploding-worldwide/
Is Samsung now in the circle the wagons mindset regarding problems with their latest phone?
So what is the real culprit here? I thought it could have been from using the wrong charging IC or someone in the battery department changing the chemistry and not telling the EEs. But they are catching fire without charging.
Lithium chemistry batteries are finicky little bastards. They are not just dangerous from over-charging (or charging too fast), but also from over-discharging and discharging too rapidly. If they are drawing 1A from a battery that is only designed to handle 1/2A, or worse, if their control circuitry allows the battery to fall below a minimum voltage, then the batteries can go into runaway thermal overload. The worst part is that all of the various factors change with pressure, so at 35k feet, you have to be far more conservative with the batteries to avoid a fire. With Li batteries, getting the extra capacity out of them can be very dangerous, and it only take a small error to end up with fires or explosions. Worse still parameters can vary widely from individual battery to individual battery and is made far worse when the batteries are sloppily made.
It should also be noted that it is unlikely that the phones have a dedicated battery monitoring chip as these cost a couple bucks, even in large quantities, and all they really are is a small microprocessor and a couple cents worth of transistors. Since cell phones already have the processor, they just use that, and add the couple of small transistors they need to handle the charging and discharge monitoring.
The root problem could be as simple as a badly chosen set of constants for cutoff voltage and thermal protection, or could be more insidious, such as a thermal protection sub-routine that doesn't work properly because at shutdown the processor looses power and reboots, thus continually drawing power from the battery.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Samsung: We don't need no recall, let the motherfucker burn
Customer: None of you did anything to prevent this!
Samsung: There was nothing we could do! We were totally unprepared for this.
Customer: Oh don't give me unprepared! You knew then! And you did nothing!
Samsung: We didn't start the fire. Blame it on the battery yeah yeah.
fpmita prison time and it happen on air plane so they can Throw the book at them
Is it unsettling that a company who's in the middle of a problem doesn't straight away come out and shout from the hills when they find a case (probably yet to be investigated) that makes the situation worse?
Does the submitter even live on planet earth let alone know how businesses normally operate?
So the big allegation is that a Samsung didn't announce this for a couple days? Shouldn't they investigate it before issuing a press release?
Their phones are literally starting on fire. That's bad enough. There's no need to hype it into a big secret conspiracy based on when the announcement occurred.
The sad part is that lmr is an option and is far less touchy. Enough so that they don't need continuous management. They don't use it because it is a little more bulky and then you couldn't use your phone as a chefs knife.
This is an indication of a huge problem in Samsung's management in so many ways. Competent engineers all over the world understand the design & manufacturing & use issues.
High level managers had to pressure the "Note 7" division leaders to ignore everything but getting their advanced phone out in front of the iPhone. Heads must roll.,
it is unlikely that the phones have a dedicated battery monitoring chip as these cost a couple bucks, even in large quantities,
Complete bollocks.
No sig today...
The most unsettling part is that Samsung knew of Klering's phone, and didn't say anything.
That reminds me of how Tesla handled the first few fatal accidents with the Autopilot.
It's still not as dangerous as this incident: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
No sig today...
How many battery power devices have you designed?
Theres a big difference between the LiPo pack you bought for your toy RC car, and the packs that go in commercial devices. Almost any LiPo you can buy "off the shelf" has built in battery protection circuits. That is not true for built in batteries and devices in quantity. It is left to the device manufacturer to decide if they want the built in circuits or not, and in most cases where there is a processor in the device, the manufacturer elects to add their own software to handle the charging and circuit protection as they are cheaper by quite a bit. This is especially true in cell phones and tablets where the battery is custom designed and manufactured, typically for a specific model or line of phones. The cost of adding the protection circuit to the pack is significantly higher, as is the space and weight penalty. The actual circuit to charge the phone or do battery protection is extremely simple and small, the complexity is transfered into the software domain where a processor is used to handle the logic involved. If your device already has a processor (or in the case of phone more than one), this extra chip is a wasted expense.
Even NiMH packs are supposed to have that thermistor you talked about, but except in rare cases, I have not seen a single pack that actually has the thermistor. Its not much of an expense, but they seem to forego that altogether. Cutting corners in pack manufacturing is the norm, since the packs are high volume low margin devices (All cells and most packs are made in china to varying degrees of quality), and every company making and using them is looking for every opportunity they can find to cut costs.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
When you’re a star they let you do it.
How many battery packs have YOU designed, Internet-guy?
Over here in facts-based land, the Note 7 has a MAX77838 keeping track of power.
Kid-proof tablet..
Over here in facts-based land, the Note 7 has a MAX77838 keeping track of power.
The MAX77838 is a power management IC. It claims to have some other circuitry for battery management, but since MAXIMs website does not acknowledge that part number, we have no way of knowing what it really has or doesn't have. All outward appearances would suggest that it is a custom chip for Samsung (probably used in several of their product lines). Personally, I expect that the MAX77838 is similar to the MAX77829 (PMIC + single cell Lion charging circuit). This would make some sense since it looks like Samsung elected to use an external PMIC, and since they had to have one anyways, getting one that had the charging circuit built in would not be that big a deal. Unfortunately for Samsung, the charging circuit has to be relatively tuned to the specific battery being used. Generically designed Lion chargers have a habit of failing. (So much so that Tenma actually ships many of their battery chargers with a fireproof pouch to put the battery in while charging it...
This just goes to show how stupid Samsung is for designing it this way. Since the fault lies either with the Custom Maxim Chip, with the battery itself (or a mismatch between the two), Samsung has backed itself into a corner. They cannot just replace the defective Maxim Chip with an off the shelf component because there is no drop in replacement or they wouldn't have had Maxim build a custom chip in the first place. Nor can they simply change the battery easily, as the batteries are manufactured to spec as well.
If samsung had offloaded the charging and battery management control into software running on one of the processors in the phone, then they would likely have been able to fix the problem with a firmware update. Now, because they did not have the sense to do what everyone else is doing, they are fucked.
The best kept open secret in the Phone / Tablet world are the PSOC processors that are used extensively for all of the low level work in these devices. Cypress sells nearly as many processors as Broadcom, and nobody has ever heard of them. Their processors come with built in PMIC, Capacitive touch sense (which is why everyone started using them in the first place), and a host of other powerful features that reduce part count and unit cost. I have personally designed a half dozen devices that used them, two of which had battery charging circuits and charge control software. The irony is that the PSOC processors cost cost about $5 each and they are full featured processors while the Maxim ICs Cost more than that and are just a PMIC.
TLDR: Samsung is staffed by incompetent engineers. Its no wonder they have exploding phones, their engineers designed a phone with at least $5 more parts than they should have had, but skipped on the thermostat protection on the battery to save $0.50. If they used this same chip in the S5, then they lost more than 60 million dollars in excess unit cost in just the first three months of sales, and now with the S7, its going to cost them billions.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Every phone I've had for the past 15 years, going back to my flip phones, has had to power on to charge. It boots into a striped down firmware for charging only, but my bet is that the main processor is involved.
So what is the real culprit here? I thought it could have been from using the wrong charging IC or someone in the battery department changing the chemistry and not telling the EEs. But they are catching fire without charging.
Lithium chemistry batteries are finicky little bastards. They are not just dangerous from over-charging (or charging too fast), but also from over-discharging and discharging too rapidly. If they are drawing 1A from a battery that is only designed to handle 1/2A, or worse, if their control circuitry allows the battery to fall below a minimum voltage, then the batteries can go into runaway thermal overload.
My Samsung S5 came with a 2A charger.
Thought at first that was the reason as well, charging too fast.
Samsung has sold millions of these things. Three of them have caught fire. That makes the odds of a device catching fire less than 1 in 1,000,000. Business Insider says that 17 cars catch fire every hour. Where are the cries for recalling cars?
They have a driving assist, they don't have a full auto-pilot. The drivers were naive in assuming they could fully relinquish control of their driving. Even self driving google cars have a QA person behind the wheel.
Depends on who did the software. A bunch of Java application people, who think battery management is just calling UseSafeBatteryMode(true), or programmers who read the data sheets and worked out the math?
I don't know where you are getting your "facts", but there have been much more than 3 phones catching fire.
As of September 15, 2016, the US CPSC reported 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage.
As of October 10, 2016, there have been at least 5 reports of replacement phones catching fire.
I have bought rechargeable batteries for the last 20 years. Not a single one of them has caught fire. In the case of the Galaxy Note 7, there is obviously a single, focused product that has a critical flaw.
Makes no sense due to the varying nature of phone ignition, some charging, some not charging, some being used, some not being used. The only thing that sort of follows that is high CPU usage in higher temperatures zones and the CPU to close to a poorly insulated (super cheap) battery. This significantly altering the design operating conditions of the battery allowing increased heat development in the battery in conjunction with the heating CPU. So just an overall bad design, so the Note 7 is inherently a bad design and will fail, either early battery failures or spontaneous combustions, definitely a phone to be avoided. The Note is pretty much dead until Samsung go back to a removable battery.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Nothing quite gets across the impression of a half-baked, wonky website than a summary written like that. Pretend to be factual, for fucks sakes, even if it breaks your little heart to do it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Bring a knife to a gun fight...
Thanks for sharing these detailed responses. This is why slashdot used to be such a wonderful place; informed answers from real experts.
What did Samsung know about his phone? And why would Samsung need to say anything to the media? my god what kind of crap reporting is this, and what kind of childish behavior of "I need to know everything, if they didn't say anything about it they should have, otherwise they are bad, bad.. oh daddy please make them say everything, I want to know it".
I didn't see a fight.
Kid-proof tablet..
Which you said the device wouldn't have had, but there it is.
All outward appearances would suggest that it is a custom chip for Samsung
It's not like they're a small customer. This isn't unusual.
Because you Googled MAX77838 and found MAX77829 in the top few hits, just like anyone else who has used teh Intarwebs can do.
Gosh, I wonder why they used a custom part. Any guesses?
Oh.
Are you seriously using Shenzen China Export products resold by MCM Electronics as a basis for comparison? Tenma has always been garbage. We might as well be discussing electronics from Harbor Freight.
You say that, but you don't use your words to demonstrate it. Does the term "red herring" ring a bell?
You don't know what is in the MAX77838. You've said as much.
They fucked this one up, for sure. But are you at all aware of the millions of wildly popular Samsung devices out there which don't tend to autoignite?
Mistakes happen, even with competent engineers. Sometimes, big ones. I recall a certain incident wherein BMW tried to sell diesel cars in the US, but our (relatively) crappy fuel ate the cylinders and ruined compression. They put a new engine in each car they sold here, with updates to make it not an issue.
Also, the Ford Pinto.
Firestone Rollover Tires. Unintended Toyota acceleration. Concrete falling from the roof of the Big Dig tunnels. Et cetera.
It happens. Engineers are human, just like you.
Kid-proof tablet..