There was a mysterious evil that extinguished all the Pioupious, one after the other.

I identified the culprit. It's a chemical reaction story! And fortunately for us, who says problem identified, says solution not far away.

The stupid idea

(You will excuse my language.)

J 'had made an assembly where the battery is screwed on the electronic card.

The goal was to have better electrical contact between the two elements. In theory, it should work fine. On the prototypes too, it worked well.

Where I didn't pay attention is that I end up with 3 metal parts, in 3 different materials.

Then during editing, I had the good idea to put a small drop of
conductive grease – to prevent it from corroding. Bingo!

So I made… a battery. A bit like this:

There is a potential difference between the copper coin and the zinc paper clip. The electrons from the paper clip travel through the lemon juice. At the end, the trombone has melted and the piece is covered with Zinc.

In our Pioupiou, fat played the role of lemon juice (electrolyte). It nibbled away at the tin of the electronic board. Suddenly, the electrical contact deteriorated, until no longer let the current flow at all. (It's not necessarily visible to the naked eye.)

Consequence: all the Pioupious go out one after the other. It happens at the same time, because the chemical reaction goes at the same speed everywhere. (All the Pioupious having exposed to substantially similar temperatures).

Why make it simple?

If I had done like everyone else… The solution is to put a classic connector in place of this assembly.

That's good, I ordered and already received all the parts:

It's a connector from JST − the top of Japanese technology. I think it is widely used for batteries in model making.

Now, all you have to do is mount it on all the Pioupious.

On the other hand, it is not a manipulation that you can do at home. You have to do technical work on the electronic board, and you need a special method to solder the wire to the battery (which you don't want to try at home because it's not cool to have a face of badly burned due to an exploding battery).

It will therefore be necessary for the Pioupious to go back to my lab. I will send you the instructions tomorrow. (Tonight I don't have time, there's the Startup Weekend which starts in 15 minutes.)

I take this opportunity to remind you thatdo not try to disassemble or make modifications to Pioupiou yourself (unless I'm the one who told you to do it as part of a very specific manipulation…). You risk damaging it unintentionally and I could then no longer support it under the warranty. If your iPhone breaks down, you take it back to the store. For Pioupiou, it's the same: if there is a problem, you have to contact me. In 90% of cases I can do remote diagnosis without a single disassembly. Everything is optimized and miniaturized, there is not much that we

can fix it yourself.

And while we're in the warnings: I moved. SO wait for my instructions to return your Pioupiou. Otherwise it may get lost at La Poste because of an address that no longer exists.

It still rolls

Finally, we almost got lucky with the story axes late. As a result, we will be able to change everything at the same time.

By the way, I have fresh news from the new axes: Machining is finished. They are on the mend. They should then leave at the beginning of the week for passivation. Which means that, in the most optimistic scenario, we will receive them at the end of next week.

What an adventure !