I think Ryobi and HDX tools sold at Home Depot need to be one-time unlocked at purchase[1], or they remain brightly-colored paperweights.

1: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/02/home-depot-is-selling-power-...

thanks for the heads up. I know theft is an issue, but cmon.

apparently they haven't seen proof that this is a thing inside the tools (per that article at least) but if i was tasked with this i'd use programmable fuses on the mCU. Battery pack in, hit the trigger twice or something, put it on the activation thing, the mCU nukes the "deactivated" fuses, and it will permanently be enabled.

what do you want to bet it isn't that? btw it could be, i just thought of the first thing that would guarantee the purchaser always had their tool that they had purchased. anything that requires some mechanical linkage to move (a relay was mentioned) will break the first time you drop the tool on its nuts.

Also if your phone breaks on a job you get to go home because "none of my tools work anymore, sorry"

edit: it took me a minute but the theft numbers are like 0.8% and i bet most places would love to have shrink that low.

as a comparison 17% of minimum wage earners have experienced losses averaging a quarter of their gross paychecks. All theft except wage theft in the US (larceny, grand, robbery, fraud) is ~35% of just the recovered wages (in 2012 i am looking at).

0.8% shrink, lol

[0] i got my data from https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo... for this post but i knew what to look for because there was a nice graphic showing the ratios of all theft and wage theft is easily 3x as large as the rest i saw a year or two ago.