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"Michael Straight, a former jockey paralyzed from the waist down, was left unable to walk for two months after the company behind his $100,000 exoskeleton refused to fix a battery issue. "
“I called [the company] thinking it was no big deal, yet I was told they stopped working on any machine that was 5 years or older,”
Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.
A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.
It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.
This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.
In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.
However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.
Honestly, the law should be that the batteries need to be designed to be replaced by off the shelf options. Basically, add instructions on how to relatively easily to replace the battery cells with the same ones found inside laptop batteries that can be ordered off Amazon or similar places.
But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.
From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.
Until something goes wrong and they discover (usually too late) that they actually did want that.
Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?
In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.
That’s a false comparison. We have Lithium and NiMH batteries available off the shelf for common things that aren’t phones. The technology is available for a COTS phone battery replacement, as long as it matched a common form-factor.
And if phones can’t work around a common battery form-factor but yet all look like fucking candy-bars, then I call bullshit.
Why not use off the shelf 18650 or 21700 like some electric cars, then you just need to bundle the 18650 in a way that they can be desoldered or whatever
How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that’s what the article implicates is the problem. For the exoskeleton itself there are no excuses.
Guess I shoudl’ve read a bit more, thought the skeleton was the issue not a shitty watch
I remember learning about this back when I took a smog certification class back in community College. Learned the only computer approved to run the modern smog diagnostic stuff is from 1986 and it’s made by like one company to this day.
Add onto that all the dinosaur lathes and welding machines I’ve seen over my career and I wouldn’t be surprised seeing a commodore running the dmv database for the entire state at this point.
“Ancient” lathes, milling machines work fine. You don’t need the newest control software when the old one does the job. And good luck convincing someone to buy a $100k machine just because it is new.
Usually, you’re right. But having the actual machine is only half the problem.
Last place I was at we had this big beautiful ride along mill that was just magnificent. Between the attachments and tooling we had, it was capable of producing any part of itself down to the last nuts and bolts. With the right know how and materials, it was capable of self replication.
We torched it for scrap. Not me, as a dumb dumb welder, but the business. There was nobody we could find with any combination of a) space to put it, b) ability to pay for it, and c) know how to run it. Best we ever managed was two of the three, and since there was no money in it for the business, they elected to cut it down for scrap value. Got one of the best t-tables I’ve ever had to weld on out of the deal, but it was still a travesty.
So yes, while the machines work fine, it’s hard to find people with the skills to run them effectively, the space to actually house the machine, and the spare cash required buy and maintain it.
Well, yeah you need people to run em, maintain them and you need the space. Thing is - most people wouldn’t be looking for an older machine specifically when needing to buy something. Those machines stay in machine shops and crank out parts since forever.
Like, a neighbor of mine has three older lathes, one cnc, one larger, one smaller. He had to redo the wiring from scratch on one of them because it was so old the isolation from the wires fell off and it was just copper left hanging in the control box. No company would buy that stuff.