On 01/25/2010 04:31 PM, Daniel Drake wrote: > Hi, > > What seems to be a lesser-common problem in the other deployments I > have seen seems to be quite common here: chargers are breaking due to > damage to the cable and the point where the cable enters the big green > plug that goes into the power socket. > > Although these problems seem to be due to carelessness with the > chargers, it would certainly help this deployment if the units were > stronger. This is a significant problem here. > > A project partner here has been able to repair almost all of the > broken units by reinforcing the cables and sometimes swapping out the > components inside the charger unit itself. I'll send in more details > once they arrive.
The abuse case is a trade off. Without adding a lot of expense beefing up all the parts in the chain something has to fail its just a question of what. In the XO we decided that we wanted the cable to fail rather than the laptop. The mechanical coupling of the DC jack at the XO is stronger than the cable. The plug is straight rather than right angle in hopes that it would separate from the jack in high stress events but if the force is perpendicular to the jack then its still going to bind. Reinforcing the cable without careful analysis may cause failure at the XO rather than in the cable. As new power adapters are much cheaper than new laptop motherboards they should probably take a closer look at how the cable is getting yanked and attack that problem rather than beefing up the cable. -- Richard A. Smith <[email protected]> One Laptop per Child _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
