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Sam Byford writes:
NEC has been developing its organic radical battery (ORB) technology for a while, and today it unveiled the latest iteration. The newest ORB is a 0.3mm (0.012 inch) flexible battery that’s designed to fit into integrated circuit (IC) cards, commonly used for public transport payment, credit cards, and suchlike. Standard IC cards are 0.73mm thick, meaning the addition of a battery shouldn’t prove too taxing on your wallet. Furthermore, the battery can be printed directly onto the IC card as part of the manufacturing process, and the surrounding 0.05mm polymer film can incorporate circuit boards with small components like antennas.
0.3mm thin ‘organic radical battery’ can be printed - [Link]
electronicsblog.net writes:
This is a very simple capacity tester. It consists of single resistor that discharges battery. Arduino measures the voltage drop across resistor. According to Ohm’s Law current = voltage/resistance. Every second value of current is divided by 3600 and summed up to get the capacity expressed in Ah (Amp per hour).
I have used two parallel connected resistors that total resistance is 6.9 ohm. Make sure that they have proper power rating, if you don’t want them to convert to smoke. If voltage across 6.9 ohm resistor is 3.7 V, then current – 0.54 A, power ~ 2W.
Arduino Lithium-ion battery capacity tester/discharge monitor - [Link]
Accutronics has launched two new lithium-ion batteries in its Intellion series of credit card sized batteries. Designed to provide a high level of functionality and safety the CC2300 and CC3800 batteries allow integration of smart lithium ion battery into handheld portable products with minimal effort and cost.
The batteries feature an active electronic protection system that prevents them from being overcharged, over discharged or short circuited and to ensure that the battery will remain safe if externally abused. In addition, they have an impedance tracking fuel gauge that constantly tracks battery status, providing information such as remaining battery capacity, state of charge, run time to empty, battery voltage and temperature. [via]
Smart Li-Ion Batteries the Size of a Credit Card - [Link]
Eric built himself a battery monitoring system based on the ATmega328 Development Kit. He drained a 9V battery with 100mA of current and monitored the voltage drop until total depletion. He used this data to estimate how much time is left until depletion – [via]
The 100mA constant load was chosen because my ProtoStack Arduino Clone with LCD draws about 92mA and I wanted to write a sketch to display a battery bar and the approximate hours battery life left. Since all batteries have an internal equivalent series resistance (ESR), it is important to take that into account when only using a battery’s voltage to monitor its state of charge. Since we discharged the battery through a load that is similar to the ProtoStack board with LCD, the ESR of the battery has automatically been accounted for in the voltage measurements.
Monitoring battery voltage to calculate capacity with an Arduino - [Link]
Here is an interesting project which uses capacitors to store energy instead of chemical,sit uses an different type of capacitors called Goldcap capacitors,GoldCap capacitors offer an interesting alternative power source when compared to conventional disposable or even rechargeable batteries. They can be charged very rapidly and can also deliver a high peak output current. Their voltage rating however is quite low so a little electronic assistance is necessary to raise the output voltage to a more useful level.PP3 (6F22) type 9 V batteries are often used in small portable equipment that require very little current and may only be used intermittently. Under these conditions its often the case that the battery is flat just when you urgently need to use the equipment. NiCd rechargeable cells are not a good choice in these applications because their self-discharge characteristics are much worse than dry cells and often there is no charge left after a long time in storage.
Superfast Rechargable Battery - [Link]
This is a tiny, easy to make USB Lithium-Polymer battery charger. It’s based on the MAX1555 charger IC.
Tiny USB Li-Po battery charger - [Link]
dangerousprototypes.com writes:
The circuit uses both op-amps of an LM358 to control the charging of a single cell lithium ion battery. Charging automatically stops when the battery is full, and it is possible to charge batteries that have gone below the undervoltage limit. Power is provided through USB or any other 5V source.
Simple USB DIY Li-ion battery charger - [Link]
If you design circuits powered by CR2032 batteries here’s an article located by Joe Desbonnet which you should consider: [via]
This is an interesting article on how the performance of a cell/battery under pulsed loads can vary dramatically depending on period, peak current, duty cycle and other factors. The article discusses the performance of a CR2032 button cell driving low power wireless protocols such as ANT+ and Bluetooth v4.0.
The impact of high pulse drain on CR2032 coin-cell battery capacity - [Link]
www.ti.com writes:
The Texas Instruments bq28550 battery gas gauge provides current and voltage protection, and secure, SHA-1/HMAC authentication for single-cell Li-Ion battery packs. Designed for battery-pack integration, the bq28550 requires host microcontroller firmware support for implementation. A system processor communicates with the bq28550 using one of the serial interface configurations to obtain remaining battery capacity, system run-time predictions, and other critical battery information.
The bq28550 uses an accurate gas gauging algorithm to report the status of the cell. The gauge provides information such as state-of-charge (%), run-time to empty (min.), charge-time to full (min.), battery voltage (V), and pack temperature (°C).
Single Cell Li-Ion Battery Gas Gauge and Protection - [Link]
dangerousprototypes.com writes:
Here is an app note from Microchip that describes how to built a single battery boost converter. It provides a way to power higher voltage circuits with a lower voltage battery.
The design is based around the MCP1640 IC. It is a 350mA 500Khz boost converter with an integrated switch. Due to it’s design the device requires very few external components to function. One Inductor, two capacitors, and two resistors are all that is needed.
The efficiency ranges from 60% to 90% depending on the load and input voltage.
Single battery boost converter - [Link]
