Why do some battery powered items need to be off when being charged, and other can be turned on while being charged?
In: Engineering
Its been a while since I’ve encountered a device that couldn’t charge while in use (mobile electronics anyway) – can you provide an example?
It would come down to the complexity of the device and its corresponding power monitoring chip. More expensive PM chips are capable of doing both. Since using your cell phone while charging is a critical feature, the additional cost and complexity is worth it.
In simpler devices it may not. On one hand, maybe because charge-while-use isn’t a typical use case. Back in the day of cordless vaccums and cordless phones, the use-while-charge use case wasn’t really possible, so they never designed for it; and now that it is the additional cost/complexity doesn’t jive with the low cost nature of the appliance.
From an engineering perspective charge-while-using requires some serious circuitry; keep in mind the operating current of the device will likely be an order of magnitude less than the charging current – battery usage draw is slow and continuous, but you want charging to be fast, ergo: high current. So the PM chip has to be able to either handle both current levels simultaneously ($$$) or isolate between them (and thus only handle one case at a time.) ( $)
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