On Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:46:23 +0200, imbsysop wrote:

I suppose that measuring current would be about as useful, but I
agree that the smart chargers probably do monitor the voltage. What
I meant though, was that smart chargers don't necessarily have to
use current pulses to charge batteries. I think a truly smart
charger would require smart batteries that have a very small amount
flash RAM. snip ..

:-) guess we are talking about a different type of technology now ?
maybe it will happen but maybe not with cheap AA NiMH's ?
It is my feeling that many people do not care too much about efficient
charging of their batteries and as such discard an astronomic lot of
"faulty" batteries that actually have no problem at all except bad
charging ?

Different technology for sure, but nothing that hasn't been done
at low cost for many years. Some backup tapes have had solid state
memory for many years. While that would have been too expensive for
use in batteries then, memory cost is a tiny fraction of what it was
then. The RayOVac 15-minute chargers rely on a different, simple
type of "smart" technology built into their batteries and they are
more expensive. But most of the expense was probably of the "what
the market will bear" variety than due to manufacturing costs.

You're right about bad charging being a major problem. But if the
chargers that store battery histories could have USB ports and
periodically (say every month or two) send their data to a PC, good
software on the PC could recognize bad charging habits and wag a
virtual finger at the user.