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Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up
TimWeigel writes "Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA? This article on CNN touches on this very important facet of our lives - why the power sources for our Palm Pilots and Gameboys haven't matched the advances in computing power. In a word: physics." I had an interesting conversation with a person who's been doing a lot of research into batteries. Batteries have grown at standard normal industrial rates - which are much slower then Moore's Law, and hence, the source of our problem.
Batteries have come a long way - at least lets say, more devices use rechageable battery packs now then before. Remember when everything, and i mean, everything that did not plug directly into the wall, used an alkaline? At least now many things just go back on their base and charge back up.
Don't Tread on Me
perhaps it's good that efforts have been made to design around energy limitations. while i'm all for better power supplies, designing circuits that use as little power as possible to do a given task means that less is wasted. just look at the amount of excess processing power we have in our computers and how much unnecessary code there is in a standard application.
engineering around power limitations means smart, efficent designs, not wasteful products that just suck up energy. i think these limitations helped designers innovate.
What's most interesting to me is not the lack of progress in battery technology - it's not Moore's law, but with NiCad, NiMH, LiIon and so forth, there's clearly progress. What interests me is the lack of standardisation in battery sizes. We've had AA (and AAA, and A, and so forth) forever. Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and so forth? I understand that there are a bunch of issues such as form factor and suitability for design, but wouldn't standard sizes and capabilities for batteries help everyone out?
There's the argument that the laptop makers (and so forth) would lose their revenue streams from replacement batteries, but they also wouldn't have to pay a premium on putting the things into the laptops in the first place, if we had newer battery standards which specified the characteristics of a set of 'standard' laptop batteries.
Perhaps I'm over-optimistic, but I'm certainly hoping that commoditisation eventually leads to not having to buy the 'special' AA rechargeables for my camera, or being able to walk into any computer store and get a new XX for my laptop...
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA?
:o).
Another reason not touched by the article: compatibility. How many people here would replace all their AA-weilding devices if new batteries wouldn't work in them? Actually, knowing the slashdot crowd, all of them would. But hey, that's the whole point! There's a market for a newer, better battery.
I always hated my TI-85, fresh batteries at the start of a school year would run out just days before the final exam. My last calculus exam was a whole lot of squinting at the screen with the contrast turned up to 9
The speed of time is one second per second.
Granted, batteries come in all shapes and sizes and can a lot for a well equipped geek to keep track of. We have to remember that, technically, a battery is a collection of cells that have been wired together. Since batteries are made from cells there are far fewer types of cells than batteries.
How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.
I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.
"They're holding us back big time," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, "a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke."
sombody slap this guy silly(ooh, someone already did). bateries have evolved big time. the battery in the old 386 laptop in my closet couldn't power a modern lalptop thru' the bios(okay, it probably would, but not much longer).
The real problem with recarable bateries is people. of you leave the battery fully charged, lat say over the summer, it's broken. the cemical compunds have reacted and formed stable elements(wich won't produce power). I hate to see poeple who leave their cell phones plugged in the wall so it's full when they take it with them once a week.
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If battery technology would've followed Moore's law, we'd prolly have the same running times as now, since the incentive to design all the battery saving tricks wouldn't have been there...
True, but I wish the rechargeable batteries were more standardized. I know they need different sizes for different devices, but there could be SOME standardization. Most devices that use a Lithium Ion battery uses a proprietary size, shape, voltage, current, etc. This is partly because they design the battery around the device, rather than vice-versa, but more than likely is also a marketing decision, because they can charge you out the nose for their special batteries. Unfortunately, if they stop making those batteries for whatever reason, your equipment may soon become unusable. Even rechargables die eventually. I would be more likely buy products that use standard rechargeables, than a proprietary one.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants, where it can be controlled more closely. There are already very tight limits on how much sulphur, etc. can go out the chimney at your average coal/oil/natural gas generating plant.
Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.
Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.
One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.
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Vpered na Mars!
What happened when Timothy McVey filled a truck full of commonly available fertilizer, kerosene, mixed well, and lit the fuse?
Damned near anything can be turned in to a weapon, and most household products, when mixed the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) way can level a large office building. Are we going to ban everything that can cause harm when used in the wrong way? Name me a product that CAN'T be used to cause harm.
So no, I don't think your fear is reasonable. If it were, we'd all stay locked in our homes, never venturing out, and the Attorney General of the United States would make damned near everything illegal just out of paranoia. Wait a minute...that's already happening...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.
Flywheels in portable devices have several drawbacks, the biggest of which is the angular momentum. You can't have a laptop that does a backflip every time it's jostled. And think about the noise and vibration a big, heavy rotor would cause.
What, are you kidding me? Game Boy Advance goes for 14 hours on it's AA batteries. This is due to advances in efficiency, not batteries. Isn't that what we should be more concerned about?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
How feasible is it to use electromagnetic waves to transport energy? IANAP (P=Physicist), but a science fiction fan, who once read a short story how solar energy was collected and "beamed" from an orbital to the earth...und woe to any airplane that flew through that beam.
I was only thinking that since batteries are a problem (because of size and durability) why not take them out of the gadget. Actually, even without being a PhD in Physics I could probably think of many reasons why not, but could anyone tell me how and if this could be feasible?
Naturally if such a energy transport system were to be possible, it would only be feasible in mostly urban areas with infrastructure resembling that of cell phone networks.
- Is it possible to transport _enough_ energy (and not lose too much in the conversion?
- Would a direct line-of-sight be necessary, and would crossing it be hazardous?
- Would it be possible to "encrypt" this energy to make it possible to subscribe and protect from freeloaders?
- What types of waves (and/or photon beams?) are best suited for this application?
- How long would it be before we all die with brain cancer because of the free energy being transmitted around?
Pebble manufacture is probably the smallest problem. If your graphite moderator is sufficiently pure, you can use natural uranium and you have no enrichment or other steps and no byproducts. Yellowcake (uranium dioxide) is probably one of the least-difficult materials to work with; it's been used as a colorant in pottery glazes.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
That's a problem for any high-density energy storage application: there's a lot of energy in a small space, so what if it gets released all at once?
Transmeta hedged their entire business model on getting partners early on after the release of the Crusoe and hope Intel or AMD didn't eat their lunch. Intel and AMD did just that, not only did they eat their lunch but they kicked their ass for their lunch money. Duh. I mean come on did Transmeta SERIOUSLY think AMD and Intel weren't working on really low power chips and probably had prototypes working already? Shit yes. They just didn't have a reason to release them as there was no third party competition for the lower power x86 chip market until Transmeta came along.
You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.
You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I remember buying my first minidisk (Sony MZ-50) a few years back. I could get about 20hours playtime out of it. Recently I bought the new sony minidisk (still MZ series, don't remember the model), and I can easily get over 50 hours playtime with a battery that weights less.
Congratulations! You just compared different minidisc players AND different batteries. They probably just improved the power consumption of the new minidisc player!