About a year and a half ago I got an Onion Oboo Smart Clock as part of a Kickstarter campaign. I had posted about how disappointed that I was that Onion had not been able to meet the goals that they had set out in their campaign.
Oboo Smart Clock - Finally Here
Oboo Smart Clock - Very Disappointed
Zheng Han the CEO at Onion had seen my posts and followed up with me to address my concerns. Unfortunately, this clock was a stretch for their team and outside of their main mission so they finally gave up and released their code as open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/ObooSmartClock in November 2019. There is an online community that is still active but I just haven't had the energy to participate. The clock works well as an Internet connected clock and keeps time, so I've just been using it as a digital clock (without using the other features) in my computer room.
Late last week I noticed that the LCD panel on the right side of the clock display wasn't working and after a couple of power cycles didn't fix it I decided to leave it until this weekend to troubleshoot.
Yesterday I noticed that the front screen of the clock had detached from the case (apparently it is only held in place with adhesive tape). I could see a very bowed PCB behind the main display and with a flashlight I could see that the cause was a bulging Lithium battery that had swollen enough to cause the case to come apart. Sorry that I don't have pictures but my immediate concern was to get the power off and the unit into a fire safe container in the garage. Using appropriate PPE (goggles and gloves) I managed to unmount the PCB and remove the battery.
Here are a couple of pictures from the Onion FAQ that showing the interior of the case:
and here is what the swollen battery looked like:
I checked the community posts and I am not the only one to have experienced this problem. Not sure what the cause of this failure is or if it could have resulted in a fire. Fortunately, the battery was not hot.
I checked the PCB and reconnected everything and the good news is that it still works. Luckily there were only 3 screws at the corners holding down the PCB. If there had been 4 screws I think the PCB would have cracked.
Here is the re-assembled unit:
So, don't know if this was a design problem or a defective battery but I'm definitely not going to put a replacement in there. I've always been cautious with drone batteries because of the high current and physical abuse but I have lots of these small Lithium batteries in circuits that I should probably worry about and inspect frequently.
Now I have a couple of more things to be thankful for - that I didn't have a fire and that the clock still works.
