Batteries and electrical cables in our modern world have become problematic.

Laptops

My friend’s laptop power-brick / charging-cable broke recently, and he had a hassle trying to find a new one. The first hurdle, is to find a power source of the correct voltage. Too low, and the device won’t turn on, and may get damaged. Too high, and the device will definitely get damaged. After that, you need to worry about the physical connector. Replacement “generic” laptop power adapters have half a dozen or more connectors of different sizes, shapes, and pin layouts. He eventually found a replacement on Amazon, and paid dearly for it.

Handheld Power Tools

My weed-whacker’s battery is completely different from my brother’s. I’m certain my uncles, cousins, and friends all have different batteries, depending on which manufacturer or year they happened to purchase. I guess we’ll just throw them all out when they die. The batteries for my mother’s hand-drill are a different voltage, size, and shape, than every single brand offered in the local Canadian Tire, Lowes, and Home Hardware. When the battery eventually dies, she’ll need to throw out the entire drill.

Recycle?

You might ask, “Why is this a problem - can’t we just recycle these batteries and cables when they break?” Yes, hypothetical person who is an amalgam of different conversations I’ve had over the years, you can recycle things. However, you forget that the Three Rs stand for Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. (Do younger people even get taught this anymore? I hope so.) A clever person would realize, that those options plus the final Rebuild, are increasing order of cost, effort, and materials! We all want these cool gadgets, and they do eventually break, so the “reduce” option isn’t really applicable here. However, we still have one more option before the expense of melting these things back down, or buying a newly-built one. Rather, we would have the re-use option, if these cables and batteries weren’t proprietary, non-standard things!

Why Care?

Proprietary cables and batteries are at best a nuisance, but often limit peoples’s choices, and add extra garbage in landfills. When your car needs a new battery, or your truck’s starter motor fails, you have options. You can go to the dealer if you’re still on warranty, or want to pay extra for parts that come straight from the manufacturer. Most people however, opt to go to a third-party repair shop, which then uses third-party components that meet the specs. Only the broken pieces are replaced; You don’t throw away the entire vehicle!

Besides just replacement and repair of devices, standard batteries allow more options on their use. Swapping a dead set of batteries for a set fresh out of the recharger is one. Another option which our modern devices do not allow, is hot-swapping of batteries. For those of you who’ve never used such a device, it would have either a smaller internal battery just big enough to power the device while you swap out the large primary battery, or it would have two equally sized batteries in parallel, so that your device can maintain operating voltage while one battery is swapped. (The operating amperage must be at most what is given by one battery.)

Fucking Cell-Phones

I forgot a category of examples - modern cell phones / smart phones! Smart-phones used to take proprietary batteries, which was a hassle; Last time I looked in The Source (formerly Radio Shack), they had about two dozen shapes and sizes of batteries for cell phones. Don’t worry, that hassle is now gone - with their integrated, non-removable batteries, now when your smartphone battery dies, you simply throw the entire thing into the recycle if your city has that option. If not, just toss it into the trash - don’t worry, there’s only seven billion of us, all trashing the one planet we live on!

We’ve Done It Before

We’ve solved these problems before.

Before the standardization of battery sizes like the D, C, AA, and AAA, batteries came in just as many sizes as the modern non-standardized ones. Those standard sizes have powered many different devices over the years, such as portable music players, cameras, remote-controls for televisions (you know, the device you watch Netflix on nowadays), and walkie-talkies. Those batteries were so prolific and easy to use, that the wireless keyboard I’m using to write this essay right now, literally has AAs inside of it, instead of a custom battery!

Cell-phone charging cables likewise used to be a mess. Just like laptop power-bricks and cables today, they had different voltages, maximum amperages, and plug shapes. New phones couldn’t use old cables, and you couldn’t borrow one from a friend if it was a different brand. A lot of these ended up in the garbage. However, enough people in Europe got sick of this nuisance and waste, that they started a campaign on Facebook to spread the word, and rally people to contact their political representatives. Because of their work, cell phones must now use standard USB cables to charge. That is, type of cable, which people already had on their desks!

It’s Still Possible

I’m not an electrical engineer, but as someone who’s built some hobby electrical projects, I know a few relevant things:

  1. voltage converters are readily available in many
    • input voltage ranges
    • maximum amperages
    • output voltages
  2. voltage converters can be very efficient for a reasonable cost
  3. all computers already have several voltage converters inside them
  4. the newest USB cable standard allows for 100W of power (20V, 5A)
  5. many laptops already use less than 100W of power to charge
  6. most motorized devices of similar size will have similar wattage requirements, since they use simple brushed DC motors

Time To Do It Again

Just like household electricity is standardized across nations (120V or 240V), and like the standard “old style” batteries which we all use and enjoy, we should have standard sizes of cable and battery, for all our other gadgets.

The easy problem to fix, is using USB cables for all laptops. Apple’s already using these with its newer laptops, and the specification was actually invented to be able to charge modern laptops. However, many laptop manufacturers are still selling laptops with proprietary power bricks. Eventually, they might catch up to Apple, but there’s no guarantee there, nor is there a guarantee that Apple will stick with this cable long-term. The fix is simple - just make it a regulation they must follow. Don’t worry, as noted earlier, they already need voltage converters of some kind inside their laptops, for the different components; They’d simply need to pick slightly different ones to convert from 20V.

The next harder problem, is getting rid of proprietary power bricks, on other electronic devices. Laptop manufacturers were already inclined to change to a standard cable, but other manufacturers have no such inclination. The power bricks they use are the last thing anyone thinks about, and are given away as part of the cost of selling the device that people do actually care about. Additionally, laptops already need complex circuitry to utilize USB cables for data-transfer; The power-charging negotiation protocol is a nice bonus, which dumber devices don’t need to worry about. As such, a standard for a simple barrel-connector power-brick would suffice, with a minimum efficiency of, let’s say 80%.

The hardest standard is batteries, because there must be some work deciding what sizes and shapes to standardize. Luckily, the laws of physics and chemistry dictate what voltage the batteries can be. NiMH batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.2V, and lithium batteries are around 3.6V. Really, batteries-packs are made with the same general chemistries, because that’s what’s readily available to manufacturers. To adhere to a standard, they’d have a small restriction on how many cells to put in series or parallel. If they wanted to get fancy, they could stick a voltage-converter in their packs to output an arbitrary voltage in a similar range (efficiency matters).

I won’t pretend to know the other limits for battery-packs, but I can see plainly with my own eyes, that batteries for most electronics are of similar sizes, shapes, etc. Usually, you find out that the battery you need has the connector on the left, and the one you have has the connector on the right, or that one is 32 mm wide, and the other is 36 mm. When the differences are that small, it’s obvious that it’s to effect vendor lock-in on the batteries. It would be relatively straightforward, to gather one or two engineers from every major electronics manufacturer into a hotel conference room, to hash out a standard. It would be even easier and cheaper, if they used this magical invention called email, to argue in an Request For Comment, and come to a standard. It could have simple sizes like, small medium, large, or skinny, square, cube, or maximum outputs of 10W, 50W, 100W, etc. This could cover all things from cameras to cell-phones, laptops to lawn mowers.

Closing Remarks

I’ve run out of things to say. If I’ve convinced you of how easy this could be, and the benefits it would bring to everyone, sign this petition.