Programmable Charger

In many researches on battery life it is found that you must not fully discharge your battery and also must not fully charge it, doing both reduce battery life. Many devices like laptops and smartphones have batteries and require charging and most people plug their phones and laptops for charging at night and leave them to charge overnight. This causes the battery to lose charge holding capacity, and soon the battery becomes useless, often requiring charging again and again after a short period of time. With this project we solved this problem by inventing a programmable charger.

How current chargers work?

Current chargers are simple when you plug in an electricity socket they supply energy to your battery. There is a 'trickle charge' mechanism which, if you keep your phone plugged in overnight or after the charging is 100% it disconnects charging and once charging falls below a limit it again starts charging. This keeping of charging close to full is harmful for our battery as it has a fixed number of 'charge cycles'. Also internally some mechanisms are built in high quality phones which do not charge the battery completely, though they still charge the battery "nearly" full. Also with fast charging option the heating is an issue and with most high end phones it is a serious issue.

Our Device

I myself work in deep learning. There are many times when I am training a model and it takes days to train. If it would have been just for a couple of nights I would not pay much attention but since this is everyday stuff, I needed to create something that could prevent my laptop battery from getting Dead soon. After consulting from various literature sources I came to know the optimal charger and battery relation. According to this relation one must only charge the battery between 45-55% (which is best), expand this range a little bit to 40-70% when required but try to avoid doing it as much as possible. And never discharge below 30% and never charge above 80%. Also it is best when battery is going below 25% don't use phone on energy efficient mode it is better to switch it off. Also the best way of charging is not charging in one go. If possible, charge in steps.
Doing all of the above things is pretty hard for a working person. So why not use our device. It connects with our system (Laptop or smartphone) and can work in manual as well as in the way we tell it. We can plan when our battery should charge by giving time or remaining battery percentage as a threshold. So when let's say our model is training and we left our model train overnight we can set it to “on charger” when the battery goes below 46% and stop charging when the battery goes above 55%.
Not only Charging laptops and smartphones but also we can use this to on and off devices on previously planned times.

How would our new chargers be working?

It utilizes a microcontroller like an arduino and a wireless module to communicate with our computer. Using same connection we send instructions to microcontroller. Microcontroller breaks the circuit to our charger using a 220V to 5V Relay preventing electricity flow and connects it again when instruction for connecting is executed. Charger will be of phone or laptop that you already have and you will plug it into our device. So there is no problem of third party charger many people fear. Similarly other Electronic gadgets could be operated on planed time.

Usefulness

Though not much but still saves electricity.
It keeps the Li-ion battery in the best condition for the longest time possible.
Heating can also be prevented if planned to charge in steps and not at once.
Also students generally train bigger models which require overnight laptop usage, in all cases like this where we need laptop smartphone to operate for a long time without our supervision on its charging it can be used there.
Similarly when we sleep with fan/coolers or Air Conditioners on these devices can also be programmed to operate on previously planned time. This is useful and we won't get too cold or won't feel too hot at night. Or use to start and turn on the water motor to fill the water storage tank or to start the water heater before you wake up so you can have water heated already when you wake up.

Future Work

Reducing cost of production will be priority. Instead of a complete microcontroller, custom made IC could be used.
Machine learning could be used to obtain better predicting between manual and programed mode.