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0 pointsrektide3y ago0 comments

I'd love for there to be some competition. Absolutely.

This submission is about cordless power tools batteries, so that somewhat affects the scope. In general, cords can be super dangerous & limiting for power tools, so battery based has naturally really taken the heck over, for all kinds of good reasons. Even still, I think the questioning is fine & good, could apply to this segment.

Bluetooth is a bit hard because of pairing. Where-as a physical connection is unmistakable & zero additional effort.

I'd also point out, we're still bloody fucking awful, just dogshit terrible, about using USB. USB-hid has really nice specs for batteries & chargers to offer telemetry. Our wall chargers could report tons of stats on what they think is happening. Our batteries could self report all kind of stats. There's no good reason we have simply ignored the longstanding spec for so long, made such & continue to make such poor use of USB, other than abysmal expectations & abysmal delivery. (well, for a while, usb charging's high power modes only worked if there wasnt any data, and that was a dumb if valid reason).

It would be great to see usb-pd batteries keep winning and wireless telemetry.

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maxerickson3y ago

Oh, the Bluetooth thing was just an aside about not caring about having communications on the same cable as power for higher power devices, I don't think it's very relevant to power tools.

My point was more about not having the higher power delivery implementation tied to a complicated, relatively expensive, high speed data bus.

The reason stuff doesn't do any reporting is that people mostly don't care and it would add some small incremental cost, it's not a big mystery.

WorldMaker3y ago

> My point was more about not having the higher power delivery implementation tied to a complicated, relatively expensive, high speed data bus.

The reason most DC power delivery systems failed to be general purpose was that unless you pick some not very useful lowest common denominator voltage you need some sort of data bus to request/negotiate/handshake voltage for each device. If you are already building in a data bus into your power delivery lines you might as well give it some speed so that you could run other communications over it, at which point you likely just wind-up reinventing something like USB if you are planning a "simple, dumb DC power delivery standard".

Tagbert3y ago

Bluetooth is much more complicated than the basic power negotiation on USB-PD.

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