Jourdy288 said:Sorry to be n00bish, but why do the batteries need to be charged prior to shipping?
In the course of sitting around in Craig's garage for Two Months(tm), they may naturally lose their charge. Whether by active or passive discharge, once it drops below a certain point, the lithium begins to crystalize and that spells bad news for the battery. Hence why it should be reasonably charged by the factory.Etinin said:You can never fully drain the charge of those batteries because they have a circuit in order to prevent you from killing them.
Depends what you want to use it for. If you only want it for the occasional long trip, best practice suggests charging it to about 40%, sealing it in an airtight bag, and putting it in the fridge for storage. When you're about to go on your long trip, take it out, LET IT WARM UP NATURALLY, charge it and you're ready to go. That will allow it to still be charged to almost 100% even years later, so it can even serve as a replacement if your main battery eventually wears out. As you use the battery, it will slowly wear out. What starts off as 10 hours of usage might be only 9 hours after a year. Then 8, 7... after 5 years it might only hold half charge or less, while your fridge battery still has almost its full 10 hours.LastPucho said:So... the spare battery I ordered... should I charge it ocassionally and alternate it with the one that comes with the Pandora? What would be the best practice? :unsure:
Correct. As for full discharging, I've accidentally discharged some of my batteries over the years (not to the internal cut-off point, just normal "flat"). That has always turned out to damage the capacity of the battery, so I try to avoid full discharge at all costs.nikkopt said:"Preparing new lithium-ion for use
Unlike nickel and lead-based batteries, a new lithium-ion pack does not need cycling through charging and discharging. Priming will make little difference because the maximum capacity of lithium-ion is available right from the beginning. Neither does a full discharge improve the capacity of a faded pack.
Yep, but the Pandora battery (or any battery in phones or tablet-like devices like PDAs) are not of this type, as far as I know it applies to the kind of stacked cell batteries you can find in laptops. Some of them probably have some smart battery gauge circuitry built-in. The battery in my laptop has LEDs and buttons to press etc. and could possibly be a little smart.However, a full discharge/charge will reset the digital circuit of a 'smart' battery to improve the state-of-charge estimation"
Tor said:Yep, but the Pandora battery (or any battery in phones or tablet-like devices like PDAs) are not of this type, as far as I know it applies to the kind of stacked cell batteries you can find in laptops. Some of them probably have some smart battery gauge circuitry built-in. The battery in my laptop has LEDs and buttons to press etc. and could possibly be a little smart.
Monk said:The Pandora may have cleverer, more notebook-like battery charge circuitray than the average phone/PDA. IIRC MWeston or Craig was enthusing about it here quite recently.
The above is about the charging circuitry in the Pandora itself, which is interesting enough but it's not what we were talking about. The intelligent battery gauge that gets reset with a discharge is in the battery itself, and what I was saying is that you won't find those in batteries of the type found in phones/PDAs, and, almost certainly, Pandoras. Instead there's just the expected (but very important) protection circuit, which protects the battery against overcharging, undercharging, and temperature (which can also catch short-circuits).urjaman said:Monk said:The Pandora may have cleverer, more notebook-like battery charge circuitray than the average phone/PDA. IIRC MWeston or Craig was enthusing about it here quite recently.
If you want to know of the pandora's charger circuitry, go read on the TI TPS65950 - pandora's is not identical but pin-compatible:
http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tps65950.html
The most interesting bits are in the TRM:
http://www.ti.com/litv/pdf/swcu050d
I'm getting boored of the guesswork here.