Kibbles & Bytes Blog

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Help the Mom, Dad, or Grad cut the cord this season! Technology is in almost every aspect of our lives, and sometimes it begins to feel like we are tied to our devices. Wouldn’t it be nice to just get up and go to another room, or continue listening to your favorite song out on your deck? There is no need to spend summers tethered to devices, buy any new iPad and save $75 on a Beats Solo2 Wireless headphones or save $50 on Beats Pill+.

Do you have someone on your list that’s wishing they could capture all those great moment out on the lake this summer? Save up to $100 on a GoPro Camera! Wishing to make the Apple TV experience just a little easier and faster navigation when looking for a favorite movie? Buy any new 32gb or 64gb Apple TV and get an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard for $34.99.

Moving in the right direction: iPhone recycling using Liam, Apple’s ultimate take apart tool.

I was one of the lucky people here at Small Dog Electronics that was able to invest a little time (while doing other work in my office), observing a live blog of the recent Apple event from 1 Infinite Loop in CA. After a few days, Apple posted the entire keynote to their website and I got to watch, among other portions, the details of their commitment to being a green company and their iPhone recycling effort. Their head of green initiatives, Lisa Jackson, went over what happens when an iPhone cannot be repaired and repurposed. They give it to a highly specialized robot named Liam!

Liam is a research and development project conceived a number of years ago as the iPhone 5 (for the prototype robot) and iPhone 6 were being developed, as a means of maintaining the commitment Apple has made to be a fully green and carbon neutral corporation. If you add another device to the consumer marketplace and resulting waste stream, the least you can do is allow a means of taking it back. A prototype of the robot kept the phone being taken apart in one place and applying individual tools to it. Liam is more of an assembly line, with 29 different arms taking various components and saving them aside for later use and/or recycling while the phone husk is whisked to another station. A quick list of potentially harmful materials kept out of landfills include nickel, aluminum, cobalt, copper, lithium, and tungsten. Components such as screws, sim card trays, batteries and cameras can all be repurposed and recycled in some way, not to mention various plastic and glass being recovered. Apple claims a 97 percent success rate for component removal despite some phones coming back with visible corrosion from being dropped in water. It’s an iPhone 6/6S-eating monster!

Apple’s intentions are great, but the sad truth is that the process of recovering phones is still somewhat failing. Returning iPhones to Apple is only a voluntary thing. They are trying to make it worth your while by offering an Apple gift card with value depending on the condition of your device (all models back to iPhone 5 may have value). Their website has a mail in option for credit process as well. It’s called the “**Apple Renew**”:http://www.apple.com/recycling/ program. Apple is making iPhones at a furious rate compared with how much time it takes to tear them apart, so actual recycling of the entire iPhone 6/6S line seems an impossible battle. Also, Liam currently only takes apart that one model. It would seem that they are forced to build a whole new warehouse sized building to contain the next version of Liam each time a new model is unveiled. A necessary cycle, but a vicious one considering the rate at which new devices are introduced. Still, you have to start somewhere.

Kudos to Apple for leading the way in showing there is a responsible method for both introducing and recycling their products. By building these goods in carbon neutral facilities and receiving them back and breaking them down, Apple lives up to its declared goal of impacting the environment as little as possible. We all hope other manufacturers are willing to follow Apple in this ever important endeavor.

It’s April 22nd, which means it’s Earth Day! I thought in honor of the day, I’d revive an old topic I wrote about some years ago and provide an update about how things have gone since then.

Back in 2011 I stared developing plans for building a micro photovoltaic power station. I wanted something that would be reasonably compact, semi portable and capable of providing a few hundred watts of 120V AC power. Looking back it’s amazing to see how long I had been developing my idea. I built several 10-15 watt prototypes. For those I built my own controllers and regulators.

After I became more confident with how things worked and what was going to work and what wouldn’t, I started drafting plans for my full-size power station. Around February of 2014 I finally pulled the trigger and placed an order for all of my carefully chosen components. I ended up deciding on a 50-watt polycrystalline panel, “**Genasun**”:https://genasun.com/ 5A MPPT controller, “**Concorde Sun Xtender**”:http://www.sunxtender.com/ 34 amp hour AGM battery, and a “**Samlex**”:http://www.samlexamerica.com/ 300-watt pure sine wave inverter. The system was small enough that it was kind of overkill to have detailed monitoring, but I chose to use a “**Bogart Engineering**”:http://www.bogartengineering.com/ Trimetric 2025 to monitor everything.

Over time I cleaned up the system, mounted everything to a relatively portable board and stored it in my apartment connected to the panel which I mounted outside. It’s been two years, so what have I learned?

* I learned that AGM batteries are really nice, but they’re not indestructible. During my first year, I relied on the station very heavily. I would often dip pretty far into the battery’s reserves, though never more than 50%. Still, doing this consistently, and struggling to keep it charged properly in the winter months meant that after a year the battery wasn’t able to maintain voltage under load anymore. In March of 2015, I replaced the 34-AH battery with a 42-AH battery from the same manufacturer. I’ve been much more meticulous about keeping that battery charged properly and it’s still running very well a year later. I use my Trimetric meter to automatically warn me if the charge condition that I set for the battery has not been met in more than 48 hours.

* I also learned just how much it was possible to rely on my power station for every day things. Currently, my “**AppleTV (3rd generation)**”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/Apple/Apple_TV, iPad Air, and iPhone 6 are all powered pretty much exclusively by the station. I can do that year round. In the summer, I’m able to add on things like my floor lamp, my “**MacBook Air**”:http://www.smalldog.com/Macs/MacBook_Air, 27-inch display, and a fan to cool off. I could probably run all those things for 2-3 hours without dipping into deep battery reserves and 4-5 hours if I really had to. Apple’s notebook computers are very power efficient, and the MacBook Air is one of the most power efficient. That was a major factor in my decision to buy it over a MacBook Pro.

* I’ve become __extremely__ aware of how much power things consume, even in every day life. I’ll often just think of some thing and I automatically think, “Could my system power this?” 300 watts is actually a lot. It’s enough to power most desktop computers, virtually all laptops, certain heating pads, fans, and more, but some things we use casually take a TON of power. Hair dryers (over 1000 watts generally), clothes irons (over 1000 watts) and pretty much anything with a heating element use way more power than I can generate.

So as we get further into 2016 I’m excited for yet another summer with my power station. I don’t have any upgrades in mind. I had always considered adding more generating capacity, but that would make my little system a bit too large. I think it’s a good size right now.

Happy Earth Day!