Battery Swelling Prevention Feature

[Horacio Ofman]

First, my apologies if I am posting this to the wrong group.

I want to try to reach the Chrome OS  developer with an idea for a feature that will probably prevent notebook batteries from swelling.

This is the brief of my idea:

Given than most of modern batteries hate to be charged to 100%, and it is reccomended to keep them at 50-60% when not in use, and also given that a lot of notebook computers spends most of their life plugged to the power source without ever moving... I would like to propose a "Battery life saving" mode and a "Battery Max Power" mode. So for those who do not travel around with their computer, they can safely switch to a mode where battery is mantained at a lower capacity preventing them from swelling. Then if the user wants to fully charge becouse he expects to move around, all they need to do is changing the charging mode to Max Power charge.
Ideally, user should be able to control this modes from the battery status icon in their computer.

Hope you can help me get this idea to the OS developers ears.

[david....@gmail.com]

A year or so ago, I went looking to see if it could be done with what is already available in the OS or what anyone else had found. I use my CB in developer mode so I have full access to the underlying OS, I went searching to see. I can't remember what pieces were missing but there was something. The charger  is smart and uses the Power Delivery mechanism to communicate with the Chromebook. You can plug your CB charger into your phone and the phone will get it's 5 volts and the CB will get it's 20 volts through that same charger. From memory, the OS can retrieve lots of information about the battery, including charge level and whether the battery was charging or not. In Linux, depending on hardware support, it is possible to throttle charging. What I remember with my Acer Spin 713 is that what I needed at the base OS level, was not available. It definitely requires hardware support. 

Since I was unable to find the OS support, I resorted to using a smart outlet and a Chrome Extension. The extension "Charge Controller" is in the Chrome webstore. It communicates with the smart outlet through IFTTT. This is not an ideal solution and I would love to see this added to the OS.

I think the accepted method for proposing an idea is to post it on crbug.com and hing people star the issue

[DennisLfromGA]

'Adaptive Charging' is in the works ...

• 'Adaptive charging' will extend your Chromebook's battery life - 9to5Google
  https://9to5google.com/2022/01/24/adaptive-charging-chromebook-long-term-battery-life/

~DennyL

[david....@gmail.com]

Denny

Many thanks for that pointer. Has me enthused!