Hacker News Reader

Comment by skywal_l | Hacker News Reader

Had to use my old TI 89 one day. Haven't used it in 10 years. Took it out of storage, put in 4 AAA usb-c rechargable batteries, worked like a charm. Could you do the same with your hard to replace custom battery?

Any consumer electronic using standard format batteries is superior by default. Because 10 or 20 years from now, it still have brand new full batteries lying around.

View on HN

I have an early digital video camera with a genius design. It came with a custom rechargeable cell in the battery compartment. But the compartment _also_ supports regular AA batteries.

Most petzl headlamps are setup this way for a small lipo pack or 3 aaa's. It's great

Brother label printers used to support this up until a couple of years ago at least but sadly the most recent models have stopped having the AA compatibility.

Absolutely the best of both worlds. You can find a shop selling AA everywhere in a pinch and keeping a few in the camera bag is easy too.

Point taken. What's your review of those batteries with a USB C port? I've always avoided them because of the reduced capacity, price (5 or so years ago) and that I assumed they would have a constant voltage output making it impossible for devices to give you an accurate battery level measurement.

I'm not magic; can't replace built-in batteries without a soldering iron (or at least, relatively uncommon replacement parts).

As always, engineering tradeoffs are involved. I was recently looking for a casual point-and-shoot camera from the ~2010s, but all the slimline ones used flat lithium removable batteries (as only the bulkier ones have space for AAs).

I‘ve done this with my HHKB. Great solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com