115 V car outlets

Yes, it can.

Are you saying a 90 watt load on the power brick only uses 100 watts from the mains? I've never heard of one that efficient. The laptop itself will not draw 90 watts. It has to be doing max work and at the same time charging the battery.

tor in

are

hen try

eir supplies) have the "center" capacity pin. It is a 1-wire data pin that tells the laptop the power/current capacity of the supply. If you don't h ave the data pin, the laptop will say something like "plugged in, not charg ing.." So whether it is an AC-DC or DC-DC converter, it needs the capacity /data wire for full functionality.

he Dell supply? (Or "how do I make my own." lol)

your

hould get with the program and do like everyone else, ~19V and a regular ba rrel connector

My Dell, that comes with a 180 W supply will charge with lower wattage Dell supplies, it just takes longer, and the laptop will do some other power re duction things (apparently).

My beef is the cryptic 1-wire data pin. They could have just put a resisto r to ground in the supply, where the value "tells" the current capacity rat ing. (For example, 1e-3 mhos per 1 amp. Laptop then temporarily drives a current reference to the resistor, and measures the voltage.) They could p ublish this. Then we would not have to buy their overpriced power supplies . I guess that we would like this, and they would not. lol

I find this capacity wire smart in purpose, and dumb in implementation.

What's fun is, they can allege the memory device contains copywritten information, or code, or anything proprietary.

It would only take one court case to dismiss that (I would imagine, in much the same way that other interfacial standards have been ruled as duplicable), but I suppose the market for that type of product is too small to bother with. And anyway, Chinese producers will just churn out whatever, regardless of legality in the end user's country.

Tim

You're probably right. It would not surprise me. "IP" is a strange concept.

I forgot to mention that our publisher has made available Chapter 9, the power-control chapter,

Page 673 is page 97 in the 126-page Acrobat file. There's lots of interesting stuff in Chapter 9. We'll be offering up an advanced version in a few years, Chapter 9x in our x-Chapter book.

Say wha.. an advanced AoE?

wha.. what's that?

AoE, might be 'Art of Electronics'. what do you mean with 'advanced'?

who are you?

Nah, Age of Empires. ;)

Win mentioned the "X Files" book back in March.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes, AAoE :-) Anyway, we've named it, "Art of Electronics, the x-Chapters" and I generally simply refer to it as the x-Chapter book.

It's 1/2 to 2/3 written now and AoE-III is filled with cross references to various parts, e.g., section 2x.4, Figure 9x.32, etc., where the lower-case x means it's in the new x-Chapter book. All references to anything "x" in this book will be lower case, including titles, to establish brand and to help reduce confusion.

Thanks. Computer problems at the moment. No access to anything but Google search.... and thunderbird has started working for now.