👋 Happy Saturday! This week’s highlights include a whitepaper on testing for reliability through stress testing, a build of a residential battery pack built from 500 discarded vape batteries, and a visual on how the electromagnetic spectrum ties together modern communication systems.
Interesting Whitepaper: Reliability Through Stress Testing
From a great Keithley Instruments whitepaper on reliability fundamentals, highly accelerated life testing (HALT) and highly accelerated stress screening (HASS) are two of the most effective methods for exposing design and manufacturing issues in products long before they reach customers. They’re part of a broader reliability toolkit used to accelerate failure mechanisms and uncover real design and process margins.
HALT and HASS apply stresses well beyond normal operating conditions in combined/isolated profiles like temperature, vibration, or humidity to accelerate failure mechanisms. The goal isn’t to verify performance, but to identify how and where a product fails.
- HALT is performed during development. It’s deliberately destructive and used to map out a product’s limits and identify weak points in design/manufacturing.
- HASS follows in production. It applies controlled stress just below those limits to weed out marginal units caused by process variation or assembly defects.
These methods show up anywhere reliability under stress matters, specifically in electronic testing across aerospace, medical, industrial, and consumer electronics.
Interesting Video: Powering a House from Disposable Vapes
Equal parts ridiculous and educational, Chris Doel’s recent build of a rechargeable home battery made from discarded vape cells is one of the clearest visual explainers of how battery packs actually work. It breaks down the core principles of any battery system, and how individual cells are combined in series and parallel to reach the right voltage and capacity.
Series connections boost voltage, parallel connections increase capacity. With around 500 reclaimed vape batteries, the end result is a 14S36P pack (36 cells in parallel per row, 14 rows in series) that produces roughly 50 V and 2.5 kWh of storage.
TLDR; cigar-butt investing meets DIY energy storage.
Interesting Photo: Warfare Across the Spectrum
NATO’s graphic maps how the electromagnetic spectrum ties together communication in space, air, land, and sea. Each system operates on a defined frequency band; electromagnetic warfare targets those bands to jam, deceive, or disable them.
Manufacturing & Startup News
More leftovers from our weekly research:
- EnduroSat raised over $100M to expand manufacturing of mid-sized satellites and opened a new 188k+ square foot space center in Bulgaria for daily production.
- Voltaic Marine raised $3M in pre-seed funding to develop high-performance electric boats, including modular unmanned surface vehicles for defense applications.
- Venus Aerospace secured a strategic investment from Lockheed Martin to accelerate development of its word-first rotating detonation rocket engine. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- Vermeer raised $10M in Series A funding to scale its GPS-independent visual positioning system using AI and cameras for drone navigation in contested environments.
- FibreCoat raised $21.6M in Series B funding to expand production of lightweight coated fibers that provide EMI shielding and thermal protection for space, defense, and automotive sectors.