How a Leather Cover Crashes the Kindle 280
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has started offering refunds to Kindle owners who own the unlit leather case who claim that it causes their Kindles to reboot, but are playing dumb on the cause: "our engineering team is looking into this." People have been wondering how a leather cover could possibly crash an electronic device, and why is Amazon offering money back if they don't think there's a problem? It seems that some of the folks over at Connectify have figured it out, and it's a doozy!"
Yikes! (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow. That's a pretty major design flaw.
Something we need more of (Score:4, Insightful)
We constantly hear about needing to "program defensively" and test for "can't happen" conditions.
Here's one for defensive engineering.
Re:Yikes! (Score:4, Insightful)
They are not powering a lamp, they just keep the Kindle attached to the leather case.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Insightful)
If amazon didn't think about it, or naively thought that a thin layer of cheap paint would do, they fucked up. If the cover maker looked at a design document that said "Connecting hooks must be electrically separate" and said "eh, one painted part is cheaper than two physically disconnected parts, paint'll do." then they fucked up.
Re:Yikes! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you RTFA, you'll see the hooks are totally different. You're in the right vein, though. The unlit case looks like it uses a single strip of cut metal for the attachment hooks, a pretty simple design, and much cheaper than making hooks that aren't shorts.
My guess is the only reason they're painted black is because they were aware of this problem and thought that would fix it good and cheap. Or the paint is simple corrosion prevention and they didn't know...
2 ohm is not a ahort circuit. (Score:2, Insightful)
If it connects directly to the battery at about 4V, it will only draw 2A, or 8W. This should be enough to warm the case, but not to make it or the device burst into flames.
And also break off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastic has the virtue of being non-conductive, but my guess is that such a tiny part made in plastic could be problematic in terms of strength.
You overlook something we've discussed here... (Score:4, Insightful)
1000 minus, of course, the number of those ebooks that Amazon has decided can no longer be downloaded since the time they were downloaded into the old Kindle. Now, depending on how your tastes in ebooks line up with Amazon's whims in maintaining their public interest, that difference might be zero, or 1000, or anywhere in between.