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Comment on I'm so sick of dinky shitty devices with garbage rechargeable batteries

I use lithium rechargeable AA and AAA batteries, and they are way better than NiMh or Alkaline. You can even charge them directly (literally plug a USB-C cable into the battery itself!

If those aren’t an option, 18650 or 21700 cells are perfectly fine many devices.

Manufacturers don’t go that route because of planned obsolescence. That’s it. That’s the only reason why.

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Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The advantage liion has with the AA size is that it maintains its voltage better than nimh as nimh can only supply 1.2V and some applications that use AA batteries start to not work when nimh have a lower charge because of the voltage drop being smaller than the required voltage.

The main con with liion is its a fire hazard and is fairly toxic

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yes, and yes.
  
  I do see that LiFePO4 AA batteries seem to be available, which could mitigate the safety concerns, but I still don’t think it would be as safe as alkaline or NiMh.
  
  You also need to consider that lithium batteries have a significantly longer shelf life vs Alkaline and can be safely operated well below freezing. They also weigh less, if that’s a concern.
  
  Pros and cons to both, but at least standard battery form factors have options! When a company decides to use some proprietary, hardwired battery pack in their device, they’ve basically given you a big FU!
  
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Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I looked it up and the only direct 1.5V compatible AAA battery tech I found (source for the curious) seems to use lithium iron disulfide and are not rechargeable.

The rechargeables I found in AA/AAA format use lithium iron phosphate which outputs 3.2V so they must have internal circuitry (and hence losses) to be drop-in compatible with other AA/AAA (batteries in a standard format with non-standard voltages are a great way to get non-expert users to blow up their electronics devices). The internal electronics probably explains why they’re so much more expensive than other rechargeables and, looking around, their capacity doesn’t seem to be much more than NiMh (about 10-20% more).

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- iwasgodonce@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  nickel zinc are 1.6v, which could be fine for many things, but could still blow up a few things.
  
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  - Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Well, battery voltage really changes a lot as the battery discharges (in that PDF I linked about non-rechargeable Lithium AA batteries there are some curves for Voltage based on charge which are pretty similar to other battery tech, except for the big drop at the very beginning) so battery devices are designed to be quite flexible with regards to the power input voltage and those which need very precise voltages include some form of DC voltage conversion that makes sure the rest of the electronics gets a precise voltage.
    
    Also circuits in Electronics are, as one of my EE teaches was fond to say, supposed to be designed with an “Oh, shit! margin”, which is at least 10%, plus the actually components in the circuit also tend to have that or more margin in the power supply voltage they can handle (in fact in my experience most voltage sensitive components have a lot more than just 10%) per their specification, and they seldom blow up even if you go out of spec a bit.
    
    So providing 1.6V when it’s supposed to be 1.5V should be fine unless that circuit is really badly designed.
    
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