Slashdot Mirror
Software Defined Smart Battery Arrays Extend Laptop Life
An anonymous reader writes: A Microsoft research paper, titled 'Software Defined Batteries', outlines a radical charging alternative which uses a smart battery system to keep consumer-grade gadgets going for much longer than the current norm, by monitoring user habits. Making use of existing technologies, the engineers place multiple battery control under the duties of the operating system to create a software-defined approach optimized for different scenarios, such as word processing, email or video streaming.
The batteries are not software defined, their usage is. Get it straight. I understand that its very 21st century to make things "Software Defined", but they just aren't.
What!?! You mean I can't just sit at my desktop and code out a new battery for my laptop? WTF? This is the 21st century!
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Just as a software defined datacenter still needs lots of hardware. This is the same definition of software defined. There is plenty hardware available, But instead as using it as"just hardware", or "just a battery" you optimize it as it is used.
e.g. A Li-ion battery has more wear and tear if it is stored at 100% charge. So you only top it off if you expect the user to unplug it soon. (e.g when charging the phone in the night, you to it off an hour before wakeup).
If there are multiple batteries, with different parameters you can optimize for those parameters. And this is a "free"optimization. You get a few percentage extra capacity in the long run, just by exposing the batteries to the OS.
But you should not expect big leaps from this. Batteries are used in portable devices, which are weight and space contrained. with other words: they will have minimal specification.
(Overheard in the battery engineering department..)
"I just don't understand it. All of our lab tests prove the batteries last twice as long as consumers are claiming while worki...wait, they spent how long streaming Netflix video?!?!??"
If different batteries are used for different purposes, can I remove the one that plays ads?