161–170 of 201 posts
Nice though would not a A4 (laptop sized) slab instead of a box be better as could then sit under the laptop and also easily fit inside the laptop case. Just a thought.
It's a lot more expensive to make custom-shaped cells than to pop a couple of standard cylindrical cells into a square box.
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I think that it's not about the BatteryBox product per se, but about some technology inside which is supposed to reduce long-term capacity loss. The box itself is basically a demo to sell or license the actual tech to OEMs.
This is straight up not possible. Lithium-ion batteries degrade irreversibly as they're used - the only way to reduce capacity loss is to reduce the depth-of-discharge: add more cells, and discharge them less per cycle. Unless they're fiddling with the actual chemistry of the cells, it's unlikely they've changed anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lithium-ion_battery/Archiv...
But real batteries are obviously unaware of these sources because there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional. The data in the article suggests that these batteries would have expired years ago, so something is clearly wrong.
In fact, real world batteries can last 15 years or more. The one thing on that site that I can positively say is false is the claim that batteries degrade if discharged below 30% charge. I can say this because myself and 2 colleagues made this defect up and deliberately planted it for the guy who actually runs BatteryUniversity to find and incorporate into the site (and he did it within 2 weeks). It was about the most harmles thing we could think of, but several manufacturers did incorporate features in their products to warn of impending discharge below 30% charge (and to be fair, probably did it with the best of intentions).
Actually, most lithium-ion cells have excellent shelf lives (10% loss of charge in 8 years, and military cells still delivering full capacity after 20 years of collecting dust
Li-ion batteries are only dead after 2 years if they are abused or their charge/discharge life is used up. Properly cared for real world Li-ion batteries last for 10 years or more (in spite of Isador Buchmann's claim to the contrary).
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Yes, snake oil salesmen are usually happy to let you buy some snake oil.
This is a little more difficult when knowledge moves faster than product delivery. "Snake oil salesmen" did their thing because they could move from community to community and stay ahead of the news about a fraud coming through. I have no idea if this battery thingy is all it's cracked up to be, but the group won't last that long if they don't deliver.
Even if you do accelerated cycles on the battery, it will be a while (1 year? 2 years?) before you can say "snake oil" and it will be around two times longer before you can confirm the claim.
It isn't a halting problem, but in terms of the pace of electronics, it's close in that by the time you can confirm it isn't snake oil, it may well be irrelevant.
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This is a little more difficult when knowledge moves faster than product delivery. "Snake oil salesmen" did their thing because they could move from community to community and stay ahead of the news about a fraud coming through. I have no idea if this battery thingy is all it's cracked up to be, but the group won't last that long if they don't deliver.
Pre-ordering solves that problem. The product is delivered to everybody at once, before any knowledge can spread.
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The difference in power draw between idle and 100% utilization on a modern computer is enormous . The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100%, but the sort of usage where you get 6-12 hours of use while on battery is very much near idle almost all the time. I have a 15" MacBook Pro, which has a 95Wh battery. Apple claims 8 hours of battery life on it, and in my experience that's an understatement. It also ships…
> The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100% Actually it can't; there used to be a support article on Apple's site named HT2332 that details how Macbooks will underclock with the battery removed, because the adapter cannot supply enough power with the system at full load. Other manufacturer's laptops have also been doing this, so Apple is not alone.
I don't suppose you have any idea exactly how they arrive at the power adapter size for these things? It seems to be almost but not quite 100%, but they still try to optimize it where they ship 45W, 65W, or 85W depending on what computer you have.
Here is a classic example of a startup launching an Altair Basic with the potential produce a Microsoft-like giant. Incidentally, I think this is also the first father/son team we've funded.
A few months ago I looked into building this exact product. If you're a DIY kinda person and you don't mind carrying around some extra bulk, it's somewhat easy to cobble something together. If you want a light/small brick w/ self-contained charging and output regulation that just works, it's much more difficult and potentially dangerous -- especially if you want it to charge fast enough that a 1h airport layover is meaningful. Add in more advanced battery management/conditioning schemes, and I'm just all kinds of impressed.
Though, this claim does irk me a little:
> With the same battery, we could charge to a full 100 percent and it won’t degrade
> Never experience loss in capacity again. A Li-ion battery powered by BatteryOS doesn’t degrade in capacity over time, and as a result has a 4x higher cycle life than when controlled by conventional methods.
I think I need a better definition of "capacity degradation" here - if you acknowledge that there's still a charge cycle limit, I'm curious to know what happens once it's reached. Either way, I'm very sceptical of anything which claims to completely eliminate the effects of entropy.
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Go for Apple then, custom batteries, not user-replaceable, not retailed. They'll sign you a check for $10bn instead.
Fair enough I could see Apple doing this. Although if batteries last as long as indicated here they would have to up the cost nearly twice as much per battery to keep profits steady.
The Air's battery already lasts 12+ hours. How much demand could there possibly be for people to stretch it out even further? HyperJuice (and I would guess others) is already out there and I've never even seen one of those things in the wild.
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You would know by testing it. This company is making an extraordinary claim regarding capacity and cycle-life, and they aren't showing extraordinary proof to back it up.
For what it's worth, they have a graph of a test of a 2 (!) cells at [1]. From a sample of two, it is quite extraordinary, indeed. I find it very hard to believe in the Altair->Microsoft hypothesis. Altair to microsoft was a new practice overlooked by the big guys. Lithium charging is a very concentrated area of research with lots of investment. For comparison, I found [2] which is a test done of pulse-charging by El…
Sad.