#175 – Charge

Rechargeable batteries were a new exciting thing when I was a kid. I had a set of 8 AA batteries for a radio controlled car. The batteries took 8 hours to charge for 15 minutes of driving. If I timed it right I could play with it early in the morning and then charge them all day and play again after dinner. Sometimes I would for get to charge them overnight and my whole day would be sad.

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5 thoughts on “#175 – Charge”

  1. Azkyroth says:

    The sad thing is, the technology actually hasn’t improved that much since then. NiMH batteries (at least in small-cell sizes) are either a bad joke, or I’m biased because every piece of power electronics I own thinks their “normal” operating voltage is equivalent to a dead alkaline and shuts down; meanwhile, NiZn batteries, while comparatively wonderful (a set of them largely won my group’s robot project the class competition), are for some idiotic reason not made in any size other than AA and the main company that markets them is apparently pulling out of that market to focus on vehicle applications.

    1. Chris says:

      They have worked fine in devices I own and charge in 15 minutes. This is with a charger I bought in 2005.

  2. kingklash says:

    The devices I have with rechargables usually have them built-in, and only a couple of those are not user-replaceable. Otherwise, I haven’t bought regular rechargables in years.

  3. Pyro says:

    I think I spent more time taking apart remote controlled cars than I ever did racing them. I do remember one though, was one of those miniature race cars, that you recharge by attaching them to the controller every now and then. Well the controller took AAA batteries, and all I had was AA, so I opened it up, removed the battery pack, and replaced it with an AA battery pack I had laying around from something else I’d taken apart. It worked great after that.

  4. Enya W says:

    The charger that came with my batteries made me wrestle with it every time I tried to recharge my batteries, repeatedly rejecting them as “dead.” So I finally shelled out 60 bucks for a fancy, “smart charger.” It accepts the batteries (and resurrected some long-dead ones), but I soon realized how little I now use devices that take double- or triple-As. If not for my calculator, It would have been almost a total waste.

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