Introduction
So why is it made to suit the student lifestyle?
I myself as a student take at least two tech devices for my studies at university; My phone and Most importantly my Laptop. And I’m sure most students would agree with these two as well. However, the issue is that on long 8+ hour days at uni, and days that have more than one laboratory session, laptops just don’t have enough juice to keep up. Then comes the long and annoying process of pulling out the power brick + cable and walking around looking for a power outlet next to a table so you can sit down and study-up while the laptop charges; but then its time for your next tutorial and you've got just 15% charge..sigh... it’s just annoying. Modern phones have quick charging mechanisms built in to them to combat these issues. However, Laptops don’t. But I’m not prepared to take apart my laptop and engineer a quick charge system in to it. But what I did do is develop an external battery pack enough to juice up my laptop that has a quick charge mech embedded to it. So now I don’t need to go around looking for a wall outlet and so on. The pack will charge my laptop at 19.1V at a cool 2.1A while it sits in my bag. And when the Battery Pack is out of juice, it charges up in a jiffy. And best of all. It’s safe...so far.. I have used it for just over a year now and it hasn’t blown up. :D |
1 year and 6 months of use later:
yes, charging the cells close to their max safe ratings did reduce the battery longevity . It used to get my laptop from 10% to 90% on average. However after a year and a half I'm seeing around 65% to 70% charges at most. But if i'm not mistaken that is expected of lithium batteries that are put through the Fast Charge treatment on a daily basis. This Pack goes through 2 full discharge cycles a day on most university days. So far, this system has shown great results. However with most projects of this nature safety is of utmost importance. Lithium batteries are not to be messed around with. So as much as i hate saying this, This project still requires extensive testing. And in the next testing stage i may have to sacrifice my highest quality cells to obtain some needed parameters :( while testing i have also noted down some mistakes i have made. Some are firmware related and those were changed.. (hence the v1.6) but i also have learned some very important qualities of lithium batteries. and i aim to take these in to consideration for the next iteration of HyperCharge. |
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