Smart battery charger

Many laptop computers have an internal smart battery charging system and use smart batteries.

A smart battery charger is a battery charger that has the ability to communicate with a smart battery pack's battery management system (BMS) in order to control and monitor the charging process.[1]

Besides the usual plus (positive) and minus (negative) terminals, a smart battery charger also has multiple terminals to connect to the smart battery pack's BMS. The Smart Battery System standard is commonly used to define this connection, which includes the data bus and the communications protocol between the charger and battery. There are other ad-hoc specifications also used.

Hardware

Smart battery controller integrated circuits are available. For example, Linear Technology manufactures the LTC4100[2] and the LTC4101[3] Smart Battery System-compatible products.

Microchip Technology provides an application note for a smart battery charger based on the PIC16C73.[4] The PIC16C73 source code is available for this application.

References

  1. ↑ "wisegeek.com: What Is a Smart Battery Charger? Quote: "...the smart batteries contain special microchips that are programmed to communicate with a smart battery charger of the same brand..."". Archived from wisegeek.com: What Is a Smart Battery Charger? the original on 2014-04-18.
  2. ↑ "linear.com: LTC4100 - Smart Battery Charger Controller]". Archived from the original on 2014-02-22.
  3. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20140222052810/http://www.linear.com/product/LTC4101. Archived from the original on 2014-02-22. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  4. ↑ direct link, "AN667, microchip.com: Smart Battery Charger with SMBus Interface". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01.