Battle Born Explains How Its Battery Thermal Safety Works

April 10, 2026 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

Autopsy of Battle Born LFP battery with the 'thermal safety' on the bus bar. (Credit: Will Prowse) — Autopsy of Battle Born LFP battery with the ‘thermal safety’ on the bus bar. (Credit: Will Prowse)

After users of Battle Born LFP batteries encountered issues such as a heavily discolored positive terminal and other signs of overheating, multiple autopsies showed that the cause appeared to be the insertion of a thermoplastic between the bus bar and the terminal. Over time thermal creep loosened the connections, causing poor contact and melting plastic enclosures. According to Battle Born, this is actually part of an ingenious thermal safety design, and in a recently published article they explain how it works.

The basic theory appears to be that if there’s a thermal event, the ABS thermoplastic will soften and reduce the pressure on the bolted-together copper bus bar and brass terminal. This then allows for an aluminium-oxide layer to form on the aluminium connecting bolt courtesy of the dissimilar copper/aluminium interface. Aluminium-oxide is non-conductive and thus interrupts the flow of current.

Of course, there are countless issues with that theory, least of all the many reports of in-field failures. We recently covered [Will Prowse] studying the death of one of these 100 Ah LFP batteries from brand-new to failure under controlled circumstances. This clearly shows the thermal creep loosening up the connection and causing poor contact between the bus bar, the bolt and the terminal, with poor contact and thermal issues resulting.

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Reflecting On Microsoft Windows Vista In 2026

April 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 57 Comments

It’s a bit of an understatement that at release Windows Vista rather fell flat. Much of the problem was due to how rushed of a release it was, with incomplete driver support and various glitches in the OS that ought to have been ironed out prior to release. In a retrospective, [SteelsOfLiquid] takes a look at what used to be the most infamous Windows OS until the arrival of first Windows 8 and subsequently the popcorn-fest that is Windows 11.

After a brief re-run of the development history and initial release of Vista, the OS is installed on a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4 GB of DDR3 and a Geforce 310 card. This being the first NT6-based Windows version (with Microsoft jumping up to version 10 with Windows 10), it’s still got a lot of working software for it in 2026. Some have argued that Windows 7 is basically Vista SE in the vein of Window 98, so it doesn’t face the same software and driver hurdles as e.g. Windows XP does.

Thus the video focuses mostly on the software that was provided with the OS, giving a detailed look at an OS that many of us skipped in favor of sticking to Windows XP to the despair of Microsoft who had to push back that OS’s EOL by a few years as a result. For those of us who joined in the hate-fest against Vista it feels somewhat nostalgic to look back at an experience that in 2026 terms would have been less rough than trying to use Windows 10 or 11 until years of updates made at least the former not entirely terrible to use.

Here’s hoping that Windows 12 will be more of a modern Windows 7, especially in the GUI department, as it’s so nice to have a colorful OS interface with some tasty skeuomorphism rather than monochrome, flat icons.

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Upgrading A MacBook Neo Using A 1 TB IPhone NAND Flash

April 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The nekkid Flash footprint with unused pads perimeter. (Credit: dosdude1, YouTube)

For some reason the newly introduced MacBook Neo appears to be the subject of a lot of modding, though a recent mod by [dosdude1] leans into the fact that this laptop has been assembled using what are effectively iPhone 16 parts inside a laptop case. This consequently means that there’s an overlap with certain iPhone 16 components, such as the NAND Flash. Incidentally storage on the Neo is limited to 512 GB when you purchase it from Apple, which is weird since the same SoC in the iPhone 16 Pro happily uses 1 TB.

Even if it was just a price point thing that Apple went for, there’s seemingly nothing standing between a Neo owner with a hot air gun and sheer determination. As long as you’re comfortable soldering a fine-pitched BGA NAND Flash package, natch.

Of course, there was always the possibility that Apple used a different NAND Flash package footprint, but the installed 256 GB model chip that comes installed matches the replacement 1 TB model K8A5 chip as hoped. This just left disassembly and preparing the PCB for a storage replacement. Removal of the BGA underfill and desoldering the old chip without taking out surrounding SMD parts is definitely the hardest part, but handled in the video with the equivalent of an IC spatula and a temporary removal of some capacitors.

Interestingly, the uncovered IC footprint shows a whole perimeter of unused pads that might target other NAND Flash packages. Regardless, the new chip installed fine, giving the Neo 1 TB of storage and a slightly faster read/write performance.

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TurboQuant: Reducing LLM Memory Usage With Vector Quantization

April 9, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

Large language models (LLMs) aren’t actually giant computer brains. Instead, they are massive vector spaces in which the probabilities of tokens occurring in a specific order is encoded. Billions of parameters, times N bits per parameter, equals N-billion bits of storage required for a full model. Since increasing the number of parameters makes the models appear smarter, correspondingly the size of these models and their associated caches has been increasing rapidly.

Vector quantization (VQ) is a method that can compress the vectors calculated during inference to take up less space without significant loss of data. Google’s recently published pre-print paper on TurboQuant covers an LLM-oriented VQ algorithm that’s claimed to provide up to a 6x compression level with no negative impact on inference times.

The tokens aren’t directly encoded in the vector space, but their associated key value is, which along with the single token per inference process creates the need for a key-value (KV) cache, the size of which scales with the size of the model. Thus by compressing the KV cache using VQ, it will reduce its size and correspondingly speed up look-ups due to the smaller size in memory. One catch here is that VQ is due to the nature of quantization some accuracy will be lost. The trick here is thus to apply VQ in such a way that it does not affect this accuracy in a noticeable manner.

Other aspects that had to be taken into account by the TurboQuant algorithm was fast computation to keep up with real-time requirements, along with compatibility with so-called ‘AI accelerator’ hardware.

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Nissan Shuts Down NissanConnect App For Older Leaf EVs

April 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

Back in late February Nissan Leaf owners began to receive messages from Nissan informing them that the remote features in their cars would cease operation as the NissanConnect app would drop support for Leaf EVs produced before 2020 as well as eNV200 vehicles that were produced until 2022. The indicated cut-off date was March 30, giving affected users about a month to come to terms with the fact that their vehicle would soon to losing any and all remote control features.

What this highlights is an increasingly pertinent question when it comes to ‘connected cars’, which feature a built-in wireless modem to provide a range of additional features. These require access to a remote server for even simple remote features like controlling the charging process or turning on the heating. This has left many Leaf users rather dissatisfied.

While for such basic remote features you could make the argument that they’re just silly convenience features that do not affect the car’s functionality, modern cars are increasingly becoming reliant on such remote features, including for things like navigation and checking subscriptions for features like heated seats.

Increasingly it would seem that we’re looking at the Car-as-a-Service (CaaS) model being implemented.

Espressif’s New ESP32-S31: Dual-Core RISC-V With WiFi 6 And GBit Ethernet

April 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

In a move that’s no doubt going to upset and confuse many, Espressif has released its newest microcontroller — the ESP32-S31. The confusing part here is that the ESP32-S series was always the one based on Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores, while the ESP32-C series was the one using RISC-V cores.

That said, if one looks at it as a beefier -S3 MCU it does have some appealing upgrades. The most obvious improvements are with the use of WiFi 6, as well as Bluetooth Classic and LE 5.4, including LE Audio. There is also Thread and Zigbee support for those who are into such things.

The Ethernet MAC got a bump from the 100 Mbit RMII MAC in previous MCUs and is now gigabit-rated, while the number of GPIO is significantly higher at 60 instead of 45 on the -S3. On the RAM side, things are mostly the same, except for DDR PSRAM support, with octal SPI offering up to 250 MHz compared to 80 MHz on the -S3.

On the CPU side the up-to-320 MHz RISC-V cores are likely to be about as powerful as the 240 MHz LX7 cores in the -S3, based on the ESP32-C series performance in terms of IPC. Overall it does seem like a pretty nice MCU, it’s just confusing that it doesn’t use LX7 cores with the series it was put into. When this MCU will be available for sale doesn’t seem to be known yet, with only samples available to select customers.

Intel 486 Support Likely To Be Removed In Linux 7.1

April 7, 2026 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

Although everyone’s favorite Linux overlord [Linus Torvalds] has been musing on dropping Intel 486 support for a while now, it would seem that this time now has finally come. In a Linux patch submitted by [Ingo Molnar] the first concrete step is taken by removing support for i486 in the build system. With this patch now accepted into the ‘tip’ branch, this means that no i486-compatible image can be built any more as it works its way into the release branches, starting with kernel 7.1.

No mainstream Linux distribution currently supports the 486 CPU, so the impact should be minimal, and there has been plenty of warning. We covered the topic back in 2022 when [Linus] first floated the idea, as well as in 2025 when more mutterings from the side of [Linus] were heard, but no exact date was offered until now.

It remains to be seen whether 2026 is really the year when Linux says farewell to the Intel 486 after doing so for the Intel 386 back in 2012. We cannot really imagine that there’s a lot of interest in running modern Linux kernels on CPUs that are probably older than the average Hackaday reader, but we could be mistaken.

Meanwhile, we got people modding Windows XP to be able to run on the Intel 486, opening the prospect that modern Windows might make it onto these systems instead of Linux in the ultimate twist of irony.