Microsoft, Tesla, build battery that knows how much (energy) you suck Engineers from Microsoft, Tesla, and Columbia and Massachusetts universities have teamed up to develop what on paper looks like a revolution in consumer battery technology that meets demands for fast charge, long life, and the ability to bend. The "Software-Defined Battery" system allows different batteries with different …
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Being serious for a moment the comment might not be that far from reality given the level of feedback that Windows 10 OOTB sends to Uncle Sataya.
Then we might get Cortana saying
"I see that you have been using your Battery a lot recently. Could I interest you in a portable powerpack? Designed to go with your device. Only $59 and $10.99 a month."
Microsoft bring their patented estimation technology to mobile phone charge remaining indicators.
That was my first thought as well. If it's truly software defined then you run the risk of "thermal" issues. Granted this isn't really a windows only issue and it might be mitigated with some safety thresholds in the hardware. If this really is a patent laden solution that MS is trying to use for competitive advantage in the mobile arena it's going to have to overcome several hurdles (and offer some real world results of course).
Here's hoping someone is sane enough to start a patent/fee free industry standard/software stack. The later should really be open source to decrease the chance of thermal runaway, etc.
Though they say this will be cheap to implement I'm thinking you'll need to offload this to something other than the main CPU. Perhaps a FPGA? Otherwise power use will spike every time you power cycle a device and you have to wait for the OS to boot.
Batteries are already under software control, and you can already program charging currents and voltages. As for the usage current, you can't really alter that because that's just what your circuits are drawing. And there are plenty more parameters to play with if the controller isn't protected.
So nothing super new here, I'd think.
Well at the very least the current approach must be largely hardware agnostic at the OS level? Using very basic profiles/parameters that apply to any battery type I would assume. Also, this new approach does seem to allow indirect control of current/load as there will be multiple batteries in the system with the ability to switch between them. So without some hardware based safety thresholds a completely software driven solution could in theory overtax a single battery past it's specifications could it not?
This "software-defined" tech only works if there are multiple batteries.
I can see that working for cars. I'm sure there are lots of places to slot in a battery in a car, and the amount of space will likely define what tech can be used, so the system does need to be able to work with various battery types.
But frankly, I'm not convinced with wearables, and even less with computing in general. Extending a watches battery life ? Great. Instead of buying a battery every year, I'll buy it every other year. Big deal. And if I have to lug around anything with enough juice to power my laptop for six hours more, well it'll be another battery anyway, so what use is the software ? Smartphones have the same problem in worse : they're a lot lighter. Any additional battery worth a damn is going to weigh them down and make them awkward to use.
Oh well, we'll just have to wait 25 years and find out what they actually did with it.
Sounds awfully like "software and/or diversity makes everything better, just trust us!" except sorry, no, software cannot conjure a single milijoule of extra energy out of thin air once the battery is flat, and no matter how many different ones you bundle, none of them can last longer than the best of them which we already know to be woefully inadequate in most cases.
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