mike wrote:


Even 20 years later, there are engineers still ****ing up
designs. You find out after it's too late.

The charger industry is proud of abusing electronic
components to come up with cheaper and cheaper
solutions.

This is why my Black and Decker cordless screwdriver
reduced three battery packs to puddles of goo. The
charging solution has absolutely no merit at all
(no charge termination).

On the other hand, I like my car battery charger,
which uses only a transformer and selenium rectifiers
to make a "high impedance" charging circuit. The packaging
claims an amount of current will flow, which is never
achieved. So it's pretty hard to cook a battery (or
charge it quickly) with the charger. But in terms
of construction, they couldn't make it much cheaper -
removing the selenium rectifier thingy would leave
you with only an AC transformer.

If your laptop had NiCd batteries in it, I'm sure they
could have cut a few more corners.

It's the fact that Lithium Ion battery packs are
so dangerous (from a corporate liability point of view),
that a lot more care is put into them. If it wasn't
for Lithium Ion, we might never have seen precision
charging chips.

Paul