Comment by diggan

1 year ago

I understood it as it'll use only one of the batteries, but you can swap between which is used. So initially, you have two charged batteries, while using only one. Once you run out of power in the first one, you'll switch to the second, and now the first one could be swapped to a fully charged one. Blue/green deployments, but for batteries basically.

It would be convenient if it worked that way, but since the batteries are connected across each other in parallel, they will both be discharged simultaneously. And as soon as you hot-swap one of the nearly-discharged batteries for a charged one, it'll be more-or-less short circuited across its discharged counterpart.

To do what you describe, you would need additional components to "switch" one battery at a time into the power path. (This can be done with a single transistor if you're only worried about current flowing in one direction, but I believe it's trickier if you want to support both charging and discharging in the same circuit.)

  • I asked the following above - does this work?

    >> A mid-stream capacitor is holding enough charge for 10 seconds to allow indivdual swapping out -- and also this is meant? to mean that you can swap TWO NEW batteries in without having to shutdown/sleep/power interrupt - thus the 10 seconds.... that dope

    EDIT: I was imagining the capacitor holds up the whole thing for ten seconds to swap out both bats...

    • In theory you could do that, but it has its own costs and complications. And if you're going to add a big enough capacitor to ride out a battery swap, why bother with two batteries instead of just one?

    • Hotswap of two parallel batteries must replace both with a matched pair. Otherwise the one at higher state of charge starts charging others without current limit.