New Microsoft Tech Makes Battery Changes a Breeze

It would elminate warranty returns by people who've put batteries in the wrong way. Equipment damaged that way wouldn't usually be covered by warranty, but just determining that that was the cause of the failure costs money.

Sylvia.

Just how many children do you know with preying fingers ?

Likely better than your proof reading.

It's stick they can beat smaller players with to get the smaller players to share patents, or profits, with Microsoft. It doesn't matter if the patent is invalid or not unless you have enough money to stand up to M$ in court.

It's not the first time they've been granted an invalid patent.

If someone had come to me and said "I want a battery holder that will accept an AA cell inserted in either direction and correct the polarity" I'd have designed something similar, but possibly in different materials.

One thing's I've seen before is they gave it a name that has very little to do with what the technology does. Was "Rightway" taken?

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do you think that anybody returns a 9.99 mouse under the warranty?

tim

Brilliant, just frigg'n brilliant! Surely someone has done it before, somewhere, in some obscure product?

Dave.

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Most battery compartments are constructed so that only the positive nipple can contact the positive terminal. The cost is a fractuion of a cent's worth of plastic to build hedges either side of the +ve contact.

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My 8 yo Canon camera have half of it implemented, if you put the battery wrong way around it doesn't make contact.

Where does it say that this is limited to use in mouses costing $9.99?

Sylvia.

G'day Rod. do you need a couple of whooooooshers to use?

I'm praying some of those prying fingers aren't preying on the unfortunate.

All of them...

Great another item to make items be REPLACED more often.

Considering the amount of battery operated equipment where I have had to clean or re-bend the contacts to make it work, this looks like a scheme with VERY flimsy mechanical mounting.

The actual forcing I have seen putting batteries in the RIGHT way round in many pieces of equipment, tends to distort the terminals.

I don't see these terminals lasting more than 2 insertions, and for quite a few pieces of equipment the extra tracks uses up space used by other tracks/components on the other side. Generally the battery compartment area is kept clear of tracks (possibly a ground plane) to avoid ingress of foreign objects or knives to extract batteries.

This as usual may well make more problems than it causes, for minimal benefit.

Oldus Fartus wrote

Microsoft is even bothering with a

Fraid not, Joyce.

Down, fart.

I think you need to look a bit closer. The contacts are mechanically one-piece with no tangs sticking out. The spring force is provided by the leads.

What isn't shown in the pictures - and I ASSUME this to be true - is that once the lead hits the PCB it goes through a right angle and is either soldered to a significant length of meaty PCB trace, or clamped to a contact area by the screws that keep the housing together. The Wii controller uses a very similar mechanism (among other devices of course), minus the polarity-agnosticism, and it seems very robust. Passes all our tests anyway.

Cheers Don...

Does this really arouse you guys? heh, I guess its a good idea, though I wonder about inline battery holders w/ 2 or more batteries inline..

DOS came from CPM Windows came from.. debatable XBox came from PlayStation Zune came from iPod Bing came from google, and so on..

but, for once microsoft research comes up with an original!! er, wait.. lets not forget 9V batteries have had this 'technology' from day 1.

No I can see why people never thought to do it - it depends on the batteries themselves having the proprietrary ends. If you were sat there considering a housign for a particular battery this would not occur to you since it is not applicable.

I suspect this is actually going to incovenience people in the long run. Instead of spending a few seconds getting the batteries the right way round they are goign to have to stock twice as many batteries - existing types and the ones with the new terminals. Most consumers have got it into their heads that the flat end of the battery goes to the spring so it is not that big a deal.

That leads me to a final observation - just how much play is permissable with those contacts? A sprung contact permits fairly wide tolerances in battery housings and still make a good connection. Less than perfect mouldings (or simply the battery not being full inserted) look like they could cause non-contact or worse, short the battery.

Don it was tested as well as ME, only I think if you apply that to a human. I am in worse shape.

From a brief read, this doesn't look like proprietary ends. It seems to just depend on the standard geometry of normal cylindrical batteries.

No, 9V batteries are designed so that can't be inserted backwards. This lets you insert either way and it still works.