I've been trying to find a way to improve on the battery life of the newer PDA's to make them a little more useful for industrial and business applications. Right now I'm using Tungsten T3's and the life of the battery on one charge seems to be about 4 hours. Having the people who are using the PDA change the rechargeable batteries is out of the question.
I tried connecting the power lines from the plug on a PDA to a portable battery pack made up of 4 AA batteries but it doesn't seem to extend the battery life more than a few minutes, if that. I think the problem is that the PDA can't draw enough current from the batteries. It does make the charging light come on though and I've noted that if I let a completely discharged PDA draw from the battery pack overnight the PDA will run a little while. I thought possibly I could take a rechargeable battery of the same type that are used in the Tungsten T3 and either rig it up so it is always charging the PDA or switch it into a circuit that would charge the battery in the PDA when the PDA battery starts to fail. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to make a holder for the extra rechargeable batteries that unskilled people could put fresh batteries in. That brings up the question of how to charge the spare batteries. My first thought would be to use a gang charger that would charge a whole bunch of batteries at once. A lot of devices that are made by the bar code industry have easily changed rechargeable batteries and ways to charge extra batteries. The Palm OS community doesn't seem to have addressed this need. Does anyone have any ideas about this? regards, Dave Mottorn -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
