When I put an AA cell in my voice recorder, the menu asks if it's NiMH or alkaline.
Could the recorder be working differently depending on what type of cell I am using?
Perhaps the type of cell affects the battery gauge, low voltage switch off, etc. Maybe there is even something in the functional electronics which can be made to work differently?
What did you tell it?
What's your guess?
Perhaps. Did you read the manual?
The voltages are different. So on something simple and/or old fashioned, NiMH may look a bit like a low battery (except that it obviously knows of the existence of NiMH).
"Voice recorder" is really not giving us much to go on.
It would certainly impact any battery level detection.
That's quite likely. Alkalines, NiMH, and lithium primary cells differ a lot in their initial voltages and in their discharge curves.
Alkalines start out at somewhat above 1.5 volts, and decrease in voltage gradually until fully discharged. Lithium primary AA cells start out at above 1.8 volts, and also drop gradually while discharging.
NiMH and NiCd start out at around 1.35 when fully charged, drop fairly quickly to around 1.2 or so, and stay there with little change until almost fully discharged... at which point they fall off the edge of a cliff.
So, a low-battery detector or charge-level indicator does need to adapt to the characteristics of the battery in question if it's going to give useful results.
I tell it alkaline when I use alkaline and NIMH when I use NIMH. Are you expecting something different?
In the past I would say not and I never saw the option presented but I'm not familiar with the latest developments in electonic components and wonder if this may have changed.
Based on your up to date knowledge of electronics, do you know anything about this?
There's honestly no need to provide an ambiguous answer to every question I ask if you have nothing to say.
I would guess this is now a feature of many voice recorders. Mine is a Sony and I imagine several models in the range will work the same way. This is the one I have:
Can anything fancy be done nowadays in the electronics (such as a changes in audio bias voltage) for the circuits to continue to work at lower voltages? I rather doubt it but who knows if there's some impressive new changes nowadays.
There are certainly tricks you can play with the electronics, depending on what you're willing to give up and how much you're willing to pay. There are some pretty hard stopping-points, though... if you want to use silicon bipolar transistors and diodes, for example, you're going to need more than .6 volts of headroom if you hope to get them to "turn on" with any useful amount of current.
Another approach is to incorporate a voltage booster circuit... for example, the popular "Joule thief" which lets you use a white LED (needing 5 volts or so) with a single alkaline battery as the power source.
Diminishing returns will still getcha, though. By the time an alkaline drops to 1.2 volts, or a NiCd/NiMH to 1 volt, it's got only a few percent of its original energy content left, and you won't get useful work out of it for very much longer even if your device has a splendid tolerance for low-voltage input. A Joule Thief might be able to eke out the last few percent from the battery... but then device goes dead rather abruptly when the battery is sucked dry.
Yes, the discharge profile and terminal voltage are different. It's interesting that they would ask, though.
Gas gauge. If you discharge an alkaline too far down it'll often leak. If you cut off at the alkaline's terminal voltage, the NiMH will still have a lot of juice left in it.
You don't want to discharge a battery below it's terminal voltage. There isn't a lot of energy down there and it can damage the battery (and the appliance).
Remember folks, that is the voltage between its terminals, irrespective of the state of charge!
ROFLMAO!
The point of teaching English and having dictionaries is to express things unambiguously.
Shame that government decided that clear communication was not something they wanted to have avaialble for mere citizens.
If it detects low battery it might be completely different, or if it has an insitu charger it may need to know to disable the charging for alkaline cells. Brian
I too find it surprising the device would ask. It's an annoyance to set each time you charge the cell outside the voice recorder.
I get the impression the purpose is mainly to help with the gauge although I'm not really sure why they bothered.
Many devices will have a circuit which raises the battery voltage to a regulated figure. To give consistent performance until it is so flat it can't deliver enough current.
I';ve noticed that computer memeory chips workign voltage has decreaced over the years was 12V with DTL then 5V was popular for a long time now most seems to be 3.3V and 2.5V although I;ve seen laptop memory go down as low as 1.8V
There are some pretty hard stopping-points,
LM2623 amonst others. It;s then importantn to not just know about the voltage but the actual power that will be needed (somethig our students don;t always get) if a white LED runs at 4.5V 20ma then running it from one AA batt will require at least 60ma so they shouldn't expect the batts to last too long doing something like this.
It's nice many electronic devices such as my recorder now run on
1.5 volts. I had a few 1.5 volt recorders years ago but they were never as nice sounding as my modern Sony and I wonder if that was down to the voltage provided for the mic.Back then I had to use a battery box to drive an external electret with a higher voltage than provided by on-board Plug In Power.
It's more likely that they actually run on a much higher voltage than 1.5
- making it easier to do the normal functions like amplifying, etc.
Maybe a step up DC converter isn't as inefficient as I thought. I figured it would be too inefficient to use with a small capacity cell but maybe it's more feasible than I realised.
No, moron. Terminal as in end point or "end of discharge".
It's a shame you'd already been expelled when they passed out brains.
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