Are you fascinated with batteries?

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I am. I'm interested in Duracell, Energizer and DieHard batteries. I like battery commercials.

Generic LiPo batteries are awesome,

You should learn electronics enough to use them, they have a crap ton of current and you can just about power anything DC with a positive and a negative. Voltage ain't even an issue, get enough cells and a high quality voltage regulator and your enjoying a night of Internet when everyone else has no power. I buy these things by the barrel, get good at soldering and your in business.

Here is what your going to want to learn to use the power of LiPos

Battery Charger

Lipos

Okay check out the basics here,

1 Cell = 3.70 Volts
2 Cells = 7.40 Volts
3 Cells = 11.10 Volts
4 Cells = 16.8 Volts

And so on, never let a cell get above 4.20 volts and store the batteries at 3.80 volts, never let LiPos discharge completely. Plus use extreme caution when soldering on LiPos, they are highly explosive, never cut both lines at the same time, protect the exposed wire when soldering on the second wire and personally I always solder ground first. Never have a device power on that you are soldering on, always have some kinda of switch that blocks power to the entire circuit. Most electronics, even those that plug into 120 volts AC rarely use the power that it can draw. If you take stuff apart you can usually find the "true" voltage that it uses which is normally much less. Also never confuse DC with AC and if the voltage has a 0.25 volt difference then any of the above voltages then you need a voltage regulator.

Congrats your an electrician now, even professionals make mistakes, please keep a fire extinguisher close and a bucket of sand handy. If a LiPo become unstable drop it in the bucket of sand. The type of fire extinguisher you need for electronics is a C02 fire extinguisher. Electrical fires tend to re-ignite, please use common sense.

Also please pay attention to what you are powering, be aware of any resistance, current, voltage and use an appropriate source of power for devices. Normally less voltage won't hurt stuff but more will and you can have disastrous effects. I am not responsible for your house or your arm.

Enjoy!

One last thing,

You will owe the fire department money if you reverse positive and negative. Don't do it, pay very close attention to what you are doing. I have reversed polarity before and even so called experts make mistakes but you do not want to do that for more then a few seconds. The device is worm food either way but it is an extreme fire hazard and so is shorting positive and negative. You can use reverse protection diodes to give a device "lives" so to speak but once all the diodes are fried, your device is no more if it gets another dose of reverse current. Please use the appropriate reverse protection diodes and fuses to protect against mistakes as much as possible and for basic safety.

I put nine reverse protection diodes on every circuit I build as a joke about cats having nine lives and because I blew up an LCD once to find it actually had several reverse protection diodes.

No, but I think it's interesting that sometimes, if you take them out of a remote control and then try to use it to change the channel on the TV, it will still work without them for a few seconds.

I've always had this strange urge to eat them. Does that count?

I blow up a lot of stuff actually but the best way to learn something is trial and error I am pretty good at powering anything at this point. Generic electronics are cheap enough that you can get a computer for hardware hacking for around $20. I have blown up more then a few but who cares at that price? I have battery adapters I have built for pretty much everything in my apartment.

Also if you have a device that is powered from one power source that is trying to communicate with a device that is powered from another power source. You need to tie the grounds together between the power sources. I don't know if this is always best practice but I have never harmed anything by connecting ground to every other ground in the circuit, stuff seems to work better this way. Be aware though that ground doesn't have to be 0 volts, only Earth ground is 0 volts. All ground is, is a reference point.

Connecting Batteries in Series or Parallel

Also do not charge a battery more then 1 Amp per 1000 mAh, if a battery is 1800 mAh then you can't charge it faster then 1.8 Amps.

Plus don't use a solder sucker like this video, get some desolder braid.

No. I am bothered by their being expensive, wearing out too quickly and being bad for the environment. Several years ago I even decided to cut out and remove the things that hold the batteries in my talking plush toys. I think I was feeling very guilty after hearing owning such toys was "wrong", that it meant I had no imagination which is the only thing they should be running on. I had very bad anxiety and did some pretty weird things back then.

And the commercials are annoying. They're always tell you "don't buy the other popular brand because they suck". They don't just tell you the other batteries didn't last as long as theirs, but it's like they want you believe that only their brand should be used in an emergency situation like flashlights during a natural disaster. Commercials for everyday items have gotten as ugly as the attack ads politicians use.