On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 03:31:17 -0400, Paul Gave us:

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).

The battery technology in such devices is far less advanced than that
used in a portable computing device, not to mention the "chargers" they
incorporated.

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.

Lead acid batteries merely need a voltage greater than the battery
voltage to take on a charge. They do not car about ripple. Device
chargers are not only meant to charge the device battery, but the power
they feed must be clean enough to power the device as well.

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.

Car batteries can literally explode if overcharged.

But in terms
of construction, they couldn't make it much cheaper -

They only need to rectify the AC so that it make DC pulses which are
higher in voltage than the battery. They are not meant to power a
device, nor do they have to provide what is known as 'a clean source'.

removing the selenium rectifier thingy would leave
you with only an AC transformer.

No ****. And they usually use a simple diode rectifier or diode
bridge, not expensive Selenium.

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

Those batteries age and that is why they were phased out for more
advanced power storage devices.

It's the fact that Lithium Ion battery packs are
so dangerous (from a corporate liability point of view),

They are dangerous from a real POV as well, not simply some lame
liability like lawn darts, or "coffee is hot".

that a lot more care is put into them.

More is done because the 'juice' they provide must be CLEAN for the
device to not puke all over itself.

If it wasn't
for Lithium Ion, we might never have seen precision
charging chips.