How often do you change the batteries in your television remote control?  Yeah, basically never. But that’s a tribute to how efficient the device is and not a reason to overlook this development. NEC is showing off a remote control that uses no batteries. Power is generated using the piezo effect that occurs when a button is pushed. That is to say, when a crystal is compressed it emits a tiny bit of electricity which is harnessed and used to power this device. This is the same principle that is used in the electricity producing sidewalks tested in Japan.

It’s pretty phenomenal that they can run the device using this method. Right now there’s only a handful of buttons but we’re sure there’ll be advances in the technology. There’s a ton of use for this if it can be miniaturized. It is using radio frequency instead of infrared, making it a useful development in wireless doorbells, garage door openers, key-less entry fobs for your car, and many more applications.

[Thanks das_coach]

[Viktor's] laptop needed a new battery; he had the trade off between carrying around a cheap but heavy sealed lead acid (SLA) battery, or buying an expensive but light Li-Ion battery. Figuring his old laptop was pretty heavy already, and having an unused SLA available, re-purposing it for his laptop wouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Using a boost converter he built out of a custom dip MAX668, he is able to output the necessary 5 amps required. An MC 34161 voltage monitor chip is planned for future revisions, but he’s currently running it just fine. Check out some of his other cool hacks on Karosium.

Related: MSI Wind extended battery

Hack a Day favorite [Mikey Sklar] is back with a new project. Mini-D is a battery desulfator. If a 12V lead-acid battery sits with a voltage below 12.3V, sulfur crystals will begin to form on the lead plates. This crystal growth increases the internal resistance and eventually makes the battery unusable. A battery desulfator sends high frequency pulses through the battery to create a resonance that will break up the crystals. On a 60lb automotive battery, it will take approximately three weeks to completely desulfate. You can find schematics plus a dozen lines of code for the ATmega169 on his site. Embedded below is a video where he explains the device and other techniques like load testing.

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[moris_zen] found himself with a hand full of Li-Ion batteries and no good way to see what their capacities were. He built a this unique tester really quick to get the job done. He’s using off the shelf components and a cheap pocket watch which he bought in Taiwan for $1. You hook the circuit up to your battery, click the button and the watch starts working. When it stops, you multiply that number by .38 to get your amp/hour results. Sure, he could have just used a counter, but this is an interesting approach. All he needs to do now is make a nice container to hide all of the circuitry. How could he change the circuit to make the end multiplication unnecessary?

We’ve often wondered what kind of hardware the giant of the internet, Google, used to handle it’s data. They’ve recently revealed what their main workhorses are. It’s a custom motherboard made by Gigabyte with two processors, and eight RAM slots. The main point of interest on these is the fact that each server and piece of network equipment has it’s own battery backup. This may add a little money in the initial cost of the unit, but apparently it is a much more efficient way of handling power. Be sure to click over to the site and check out the shipping container setup that they use. Each container has 1,160 servers. They aren’t the only ones using this method. Microsoft has adopted it for their newer facilities and Sun has done some extensive testing on how these portable facilities handle earthquakes. You can see the quake test after the break.

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Now that the Nintendo DSi has been officially released in the US, the team at iFixit has worked their magic. That magic being: completely disassembling it. They found the new 840mAh battery to be much smaller than the DS Lite’s 1000mAh. The device features two cameras, but both are a paltry 0.3megapixels. They note that this is the first Nintendo device that they’ve taken apart that didn’t require a tri-wing screwdriver.

Many more DSi compatible flash carts are available now than our initial report in December, so you can pick up a Nintendo DSi for homebrew without worry.

[via iFixit blog]

[Knut Karlsen] put together a prototype set of solar rechargeable batteries. He always seemed to have batteries laying around on his worktable and figured they might as well be charging. The flexible solar cells were given to him by researchers at the IFE and are rated at 1.8V. He used superglue to secure them to the C cells. A silver conductive pen plus flat wires from a Canon lens connect the solar cells to the battery terminals. The batteries just trickle charge for now, but he’s going to try to build cells with built in charge controllers in the future.

If you’ve ever let a car sit for a period of time and returned to find that the battery was mysteriously “dead”, you were probably experiencing a sulfate crystal build up. Often, people just buy a new battery and plop it in, but that isn’t absolutely necessary. [Kmpres] takes us through the process of building a desulfator. A desulfator works by putting high voltage pulses into the battery forcing the sulfate crystals to dissolve back into the electrolyte. From what [Kmpres] says, you can find “bad” batteries in all kinds of places, use the desulfator on them and have perfectly fine batteries when you’re done. You may recall doing something similar with a disposable camera.

MIT researchers have used a viral assembly method to create a battery at half the size of a human cell. They’ve successfully developed the anode and electrolyte, leaving only the cathode unfinished. each electrode is only 4 micrometers in diameter.

The construction process involves taking a rubbery base and creating a pattern of tiny posts through lithography. Then they add different layers of polymers that act as an electrolyte. Finally the virus preferentially self-assembles on top of the polymer creating the anode. Pictured above is a test plate. The battery itself is too small to be seen.

[via BoingBoing]

[The Tech Guy] shows us how he added cells to an MSI Wind’s battery. This hack is extremely simple but it may be difficult to get the battery back into your laptop. Also, we’re not too sure how stable it is, and you can definitely forget about taking this thing through an airport. It would be really nice to start seeing people fabricate custom enclosures. Until then, this hack is best reserved for people completely desperate for extended battery life.

[via hypatiadotca]